Minh Hai Vietnamese Restaurant

Authentic, pure Vietnamese cuisine. Vibrant flavors, the freshest ingredients. Offering many varieties of PHO, a wide variety of beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, seafood, tofu, vegetable, rice and noodle dishes.

Minh Hai Restaurant
Real Deal
By Lisa. E. Harrison
There’s more to Vietnamese food than noodles, fish sauce and protein. A lot more. Which is why we needed help navigating Minh Hai’s menu. (We’ll be honest: many of the sixty-plus dishes sound the same, give or take an ingredient.) If you ask a bunch of questions, as we did, you may get lucky and get Minh himself to appear tableside (he mans the small, clean, very well-lit storefront, while brother Hai’s in the kitchen). Minh chose goi bo ($8.50), a spicy grilled beef salad tossed with pickled carrots, daikon, mint, jalapeno peppers and a like-nothing-we’d-ever-tasted, smoky-flavored dressing. And then steered us toward chicken bun cha gio ($7.95), a slurp-worthy traditional vermicelli bowl with bean sprouts, iceberg lettuce and, of course, fish sauce.
This article appears in the October 2007 issue of Rhode Island Monthly.