Vietnamese restaurants - part 4

This time we went to Pho 2000 (198 Adams St) for Vietnamese crepes. These are savory crepes made of rice batter with a filling of bean spouts, little shrimp, thin pork strips, and some other stuff I'm forgetting. They're cooked so that the shell is crispy. These are an old favorite of mine; I was introduced to them by a co-worker at Cigna *mumble* years ago. Vi Do's family ran a restaurant and our department would go there for lunch sometimes. I'll be eternally grateful to Vi for introducing me to the Vietnamese crepe, but he neglected to show us the proper way to eat them.

John was happy, as always, to set me straight on how to properly eat Vietnamese food. The crepe should come with a pile of lettuce leaves, carrot and cucumber slices, and a few other leafy things. You take a lettuce leaf, break off a piece of the crepe, add carrot/cucumber/leafy stuff as desired, and then dip the whole package into the fish sauce*. Repeat until crepe is gone or the fragments are too inconvenient to pick up in this way. Can be somewhat messy. John thought the crepes at Pho 2000 were more crunchy than his mom's and that (obviously) his mom's version was better. There's no counter to that criticism, but I will say that the crepes were delicious all the same.

This time we decided to try one of the desserts. John suggested one that turned out to be a goblet with layers of red beans, mung bean paste, green jello. Coconut milk was poured over all this and there was a big pile of crushed ice on top. Step one is to mix the crushed ice into all the other ingredients. I'm generally dubious about desserts containing beans, but this one was actually pretty good. I'm not sure why, but it's much better when the crushed ice is mixed in.

*to which you can optionally add chili sauce.