Noodle House 79 offers some of Merivale’s best dishes

• Name + address: Noodle House 79, 1600 Merivale Rd., Unit 5

• Diet: meat, seafood, vegetarian

• Appetizers: $8-$17

• Mains: $17-$21

• Wheelchair accessibility: Yes

• Website: www.noodlehouse79.com

It’s difficult to think of a dish bigger in flavour and yet modest in calories than Vietnam’s national dish: Pho. In this wide world, there will be people who don’t like it, but I’ve yet to meet one.

For historic reasons  (a continued thank you to former mayor Marion Dewar) Ottawa has a rich selection of good Vietnamese restaurants. Apart from its obvious deliciousness, you can eat like royalty for relatively little money.

I’ve extensively traveled the city and it still amazes me how little I know. This Vietnamese restaurant has been operating for two years and unless you’ve been told specifically, you wouldn’t know that one of Ottawa’s best Vietnamese eateries is hidden in a strip mall along Merivale Road.

I arrived at Noodle House 79 on Canada Day only to find a packed house. There was a family of four ahead of me and they were promptly seated. The next thing I knew someone had pulled a two-top table from somewhere and placed it in the middle of the room for me. I appreciated the efficiency.

I got down to business with the usual intro of pork spring rolls, although for those looking to change things up, you’ll be happy to know that this restaurant is one of the few Vietnamese restaurants that offers chicken spring rolls.

I assess a spring roll based on meat-to-vegetable ratio, how well it’s been rolled, seasoning and cleanliness of the oil used for frying. It was full on in most departments and had just a tad too much taro (cassava) in the filling. Tasty though.

How much water are you guzzling after a bowl of Pho? It’s one way of assessing how long a broth has been cooked and consequently how much MSG has been used in the making.

MSG is a standard additive to Pho and much of Asian cuisine. It is a naturally occurring substance and many reports suggest that its harms have been vastly exaggerated. Still, there are some of us who react negatively to excess amounts being added to our food. An insane thirst is one consequence.

At Noodle House 79 the Pho broth has been nicely extracted with a rich beef character pushing through the seasonings of cinnamon and star anise, cloves, coriander, and other spices. The use of MSG was not excessive.

The rice noodles were of superior quality meaning they didn’t leach their starch into the broth, always a sure sign that this is a business to avoid.

I tend to order mine as Pho Tai Bo Vien which is a rare tenderloin beef along with homemade beef meatballs made with beef tendon. It was one of the more memorable Phos on the Ottawa landscape.

I love crispy noodles with beef and veg. Too many shops however skimp on both the toppings and sauce leaving dry noodles and an imbalance to the dish.

This was a textbook version with cleanly fried noodles and an abundance of beef and sauce that softened the noodles sufficiently to provide the desired contrast of crisp and tender. The sauce was delicious with a foundation of oyster sauce that came through on the finish.

A more singular Vietnamese soup experience, and seldom seen in Ottawa, is their crab ball soup.

It comes loaded with cubes of airy deep fried tofu, cubes of congealed pig's blood, lime leaf seasoned chicken meatballs and actual crab meatballs.

The broth was an intoxicatingly delicious combination of aromatics, shrimp shells and chicken stock. The crab balls were not fishy but very fresh and the chicken meatballs, well I could have used more of them. Even I have my boundaries and so I removed the congealed pig’s blood cubes.

What remained was a noodle soup I would have again and again. If you are looking for those Vietnamese dishes that are a little off the beaten path, Noodle House 79 is a choice destination.

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