Buenos Aires – If you’ve never seen the movie The Scent of Green Papaya, it could be summed up in a nutshell as beautifully presented, and somehow engaging despite it’s lackluster acting and complete lack of plot. In many ways that parallels my thoughts about our visit last evening to Green Bamboo, Costa Rica 5802, in Palermo Viejo. We were originally headed for El Manto, an Armenian restaurant directly across the street at 5801, but Vietnamese food sounded more interesting by the time we arrived. I’ve heard mixed reviews of Green Bamboo, and I’m going to just add to that mix. The venue is a small, L-shaped dining room, dimly lit, with walls painted a deep crimson red slashed with metallic gold paint. The tables are decent sized, covered in black cloth and then garishly topped with metallic gold vinyl runners that drape off either side (and make for really bad reflections when attempting to take flash photos). There is a high central bar with not so high barstools (though still high enough that I had to climb up onto it), resulting in a sort of peering over the top to see the bartender, and vice-versa. The waitstaff are friendly, and reasonably efficient, though the kitchen was not particularly swift in the world of preparation, our appetizers took an easy half hour to arrive, and another half hour before we saw our entrees, then, inexplicably, our dessert arrived within a couple of minutes of ordering.
In one of those moments where I feel vindicated as an American, given all the criticism we take for our manners and behavior when we travel, I have to admire our waitress’s patience in dealing with the table next to us. A party of four, with a British, but very difficult to understand accent for me (possibly somewhere up in the north country, near to Scotland?), was trying to order their food. In English (which, by the way, Green Bamboo offers menus in). When the waitress had trouble understanding them, their procedure was to repeat back their order, louder and slower, and for a couple of items, doing it repeatedly. The waitress’s attempts to get them to just point to the items on the menu were useless, and after she left, the man at the table commented, “why don’t these people bloody well learn English?” Can we add a tourist category of The Ugly Brit?
We were served a small cabbage and peanut salad right off the bat, it was fresh and tasty, and possibly the best of our savory dishes. The menu is one of those affairs that lists the Vietnamese name for something, and then launches into a paragraph long listing of every ingredient that has found its way into the dish. These two appetizers are the Nem Saigon and the Sui Cao. I honestly don’t remember much about their descriptions, and since the flavors were, shall we say, muted, there’s not a lot to offer in regard to these. The former was a fried croquette that I vaguely remember contained shrimp and bean sprouts amongst its dozen ingredients. 
It was served with lettuce leaves, mint, and basil for wrapping, but not one of the lettuce leaves offered was large enough to actually wrap around one of the croquettes. The dipping sauce was a basic soy with some chopped green onion in it. To her credit, our waitress offered to bring a dish of hot sauce, which wasn’t particularly hot, but at least added some semblance of flavor. The second dish is basically fried wontons, filled with pork and an array of other things, the dipping sauce a mix of soy and fish sauces with a little coriander. These were actually pretty good, the pork having a nice smoky flavor. We also sampled a supposedly spicy chicken soup, once again lacking in spice.
On to the main dishes, and this delightfully presented coconut green curry. Neither of us could remember what it was supposed to contain, and Michael described it well as a “mashup of competing flavors.” It was also a bit on the skimpy side, although the coconut is a decent size, half of it was filled with rice. The most interesting part of the dish were the shavings of toasted coconut strewn across the top. My duck dish was slightly more successful, but that came more from the fact that they left the individual components separate. 
The duck itself was braised in a more or less caramel sauce with a mix of different flavors that were vague and unidentifiable, though definitely sweet. The rice was gluey and tasteless. The pile of stewed turnip shavings was just plain odd (what is it with turnips in this country, they’re really not that hard to cook…). A basket of plantain chips was served on the side, tasty though slightly over-salted, and I’m not clear what they were supposed to add to the dish – I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to mix them in with anything else on the plate.
Dessert was thankfully far more interesting, and certainly the best thing we were served during the course of the meal. It was a marquise of dulce de leche, chocolate, and caramelized banana. A marquise is more or less a chilled or frozen whipped egg dessert, somewhere between a mousse and a parfait. The different flavors and textures complimented each other perfectly and the dessert was beautifully plated. All around, a winning way to end up the evening.
We had a bottle of Finca La Anita Semillon 2001, a bit over the top version of this grape, which isn’t a common find as a solo varietal in Argentina, generally being used as a blending grape. The wine was rich, spicy, yeasty, with very intense flavors of underripe pineapple and a sort of toffee-ish flavor. The wine also has a fair amount of toasty oak notes, and having checked the winery’s website, it spends a full year in oak barrels, so not surprising.
All around assessment, Green Bamboo is fine, and an okay place to get a fix here when you want something more or less resembling Vietnamese food. I’ve heard that Sudestada, another nearby location, is better, and that’s on my list to checkout as well. I think the creative pan-asian creations at either Buddha BA or Osaka, while not specifically Vietnamese, are far more interesting, as are the venues.
I like the looks and sounds of your dessert.
Paz
[…] Buenos Aires – So opens the menu at El Manto, Costa Rica 5801, in Palermo Viejo. And there is a slightly pervading air of secret fantasy in dining here. Not that the place is shrouded in the mists, in fact it sits prominently on a street corner, directly across the street from Green Bamboo, a popular Vietnamese restaurant. No, it’s the feel of the place – high concrete and brick walls and ceilings, dark colors of burgundy and black, mystical music playing softly in the background, and friendly but very silent waiters who move quietly amongst the tables. On Mondays and Wednesdays at both lunch and dinner they offer traditional fortune telling off the pattern of grounds from your cup of rich Armenian coffee. The menu is simply arranged, and is available in both Spanish and English. The prices are typical of the Palermo Viejo neighborhood in which it is located, though pricier than other Armenian restaurants in town, and smaller, if more artfully arranged, plates of food. […]
[…] Buenos Aires – I finally found my way to Sudestada, Guatemala 5602, in Palermo Viejo, the much touted “Vietnamese” place that I mentioned back in my review of Green Bamboo. Once again, I have mixed feelings about this place. First, it’s a completely different style of restaurant. One reviewer referred to it as swish, and that’s not bad – it’s all hard square surfaces in grey, white, and silver. Waiters are dressed in matching black t-shirts with red plastic rectangles in the middle of their chests, and each wearing tan or beige pants and black tennis shoes. There’s a visible kitchen – not exactly open, as it’s behind a large glass window, with lots of gleaming stainless steel – actually pretty impressive for as clean as they keep it during the middle of service. Menus are large plastic laminated sheets with lettering in a font style that’s vaguely techno. […]
Well, it’s a shame I didn’t have my camera with me to show pictures from last night’s venture. I’d been asked to re-check-out Green Bamboo for Time Out, along with having gotten lots of e-mail over hte last year and a half that we’d really just had to have hit Green Bamboo on a strangely off night. It’s possible that that may be true, as last night we had an absolutely delightful meal there – at least in terms of the food.
In terms of my criticisms above – the kitchen was definitely more efficient early on when we first arrived, though we were one of the first tables in for the evening. By later on when they were full, dessert took well over half an hour after we ordered it to arrive. The waitresses are as friendly and helpful as they were on our previous visit. The room is as garish as it was, possibly more so – my companion described it as “looking like the inside of an Indian taxi cab”. We could have done without the blaring hip-hop music that played throughout the evening, but that’s us, most of the crowd seemed to be into it.
The food – leaps and bounds better. We tried all different dishes – I’m not sure if any of the same dishes were still on the menu (I think we saw the coconut filled with curry pass by at one point). And, most items on the menu can now be ordered “as is” or at three different levels of picante. We ordered both of our main courses at level three, just to see. According to our waitress, those were always available, it just used to be printed only down in the corner of the menu rather than having a symbol next to each dish that could be altered to suit tastes, which have now been added. Menu descriptions also seem to be shorter than I remember them, a good thing.
We started off with a tom ca cua – shrimp, fish, and shiitake mushroom soup that was rich and tasty, and served with a side of freshly ground chilies to spice it up to order; and muc chien bo – fried calamari, but not the usual squid rings, in this case, sections of thick tentacles marinated in ginger and curry, in a crisp batter, with three different dipping sauces – a mildly spicy tomato, a sour lime, and an apple based sauce – delicious!
For main courses, we had an order of thit lon nam, a five-spice, lemongrass and garlic marinated pork saute served in a pineapple shell with a side of sticky rice (the rice was okay, but could have been a bit more flavored, and/or a bit more “sticky”) – at level three on the picante scale it was noticeably spiced with chilies, though not what I’d call hot, but enough to provide a balance to the sweet and salty flavors of the dish that had been unbalanced in the dishes we’d tried the previous time. The other dish, mien thit ga, a chicken breast in an oyster and orange sauce, for which the level three picante seemed to be non-existent, but it was still very good. These were definitely far better than anything we had last year, and a much prettier presentation of each.
Desserts, on top of being slow, were disappointing, especially given how good the rest of the meal had been. The “highly recommended” banana dessert turned out to be a sort of mushy banana wrapped in something vaguely coconut-y, and then in a sort of baked crepe, cut in half, and topped with a huge wheel of spun caramel sugar that served no purpose other than being in the way; and a dome shaped ice-cold ginger flavored marshmallow topped with dark chocolate sauce that was about as interesting as that sounds. We should have gone across the street for coffee and excellent bakhlava at El Manto…
On the whole, definitely a step up from our previous visit, and Green Bamboo is back on our radar for further visits.
[…] Green Bamboo – Our only real Vietnamese option here, and once I discovered the fine print that says they’ll make stuff spicy on request, I really like the food. I like the room too. I like the service. I don’t like the noise level, which is primarily the result of the blaring hip-hop music that seems to be the regular listening fare. Again, it’s a place that the atmosphere, for me, makes it hard to go back, much as I like the food. […]
Lucky you. I went there 3 times and all of them, awful. This place is very overrated.
Sarah, the question might be “when?” you went – based on your own blog, I’m guessing it was sometime from December of last year on since that seems to be when you started writing about places in BA. This review is from six years ago, with a followup from five years ago. I haven’t been back since, so who knows? At the time, it was better than our first visit which was mediocre, but it’s not like we were blown away. As to over-rated – who’s rating it highly? Our local online food guide Guia Oleo certainly doesn’t; and it gets mixed reviews from the various tourism guides, some like it, others don’t, but no one that I’ve seen is wowed by it – again, that could depend on when they last visited it and rated it. I have to ask – if you went once and it was awful, why go back, and if it was awful the second time, why go a third?
[…] might have been wondering (probably not, but might) how I happened to know Green Bamboo‘s price for summer rolls. It was because I gave a shot at a delivery order from them […]
[…] food stand along the pedestrian food-way in Barrio Chino. Now, I could just refer you back to my original 2006 review of the place, or my re-review ten years ago, because nothing much has changed. Maybe the food is a […]