great dining at the cungdinh

fresh and spicy was the order of the day at a friend's birthday dinner this week. so off we went to explore and discover the best that kuala lumpur could offer.
and weeks after grousing about bad thai food, we ended up at its neighbour in one bangsar - cungdinh vietnam restaurant. funnily enough, both cuisines are geographical neighbours too.
one bangsar - located along jalan ara in bangsar - comprises a variety of restaurants with bangsar seafood garden as its anchor tenant. cungdinh vietnam would be the fourth outlet i had eaten in that row of restaurants.
the menu at cungdinh vietnam was pretty comprehensive and after some recommendations, we ordered some starters, a main meal and some noodles to share.
the first dish, rice cakes with prawn floss in special vietnam sauce, was a cracker. six saucers of steamed thin rice cakes with spicy prawn floss and some croutons were soaked with sauce and cut chillies for an astounding sensation.
it was a deft and simple sauce, slice, spoon and slurp experience. absolutely extremely and highly recommended
we then tried some spring rolls which somehow didn't really do the trick though it came stuck on a hollowed-out pinenapple with a tea candle inside.
nice to look and nice to eat but not exceptional.
still, the experience spiked to a new high with the tiger prawns grilled in chilli salt with special sauce arrived at our table.
well, first off - all the sauces were pretty special, i can attest to that. and quite spicy too.
the prawns were an absolute treat as we licked the chilli salt and crunched and munched the grilled shell and meat with occasional dips in the sauce.
wonderful would be the only way of describing the dish. the prawns were just right, spicy and salty and absolutely heavenly.
and then, fresh and spicy took a delicious twist with the hue pho - pho is vietnamese for beef noodles - that we shared as a finale.
rice noodles, slices of beef with sprigs of mint and some bean sprouts with a dash of lime juice in a spicy soup helped to assuage our hunger and clear our nostrils.
another special sauce added the extra spiciness that only some wasabi could match.
some vietnamese drip coffee with milk ended the wonderful dinner for me, complementing the slices of sugar-frosted ginger that came at the end of dinner.
the coffee was quite nice but i had had better coffee in vietnam and also in another vietnamese restaurant - saonam in tengkat tongshin. now that is one fine restaurant with a branch opening soon in the hartamas shopping centre.
but that is a report for another day.