Restaurant Review: Goulash Place, Danbury, CT

This past week, my son, Ian, my "meta-daughter", Devin, and I went out to Goulash Place, at 42 Highland Avenue in Danbury, for lunch after church.  This restaurant, opened in1977 by John Aczel and his late wife Magda, is perhaps the only Hungarian restaurant in Connecticut and has some very good (though not universally so) reviews online.  We arrived promptly at noon, parking in the small lot behind the restaurant, and were greeted by the restaurant's owner, John Aczel, coming out of his back door and informing us that the restaurant wouldn't be open until 1:00, so the three of us piled back in the car and went off to kill some time.

Upon our return, we parked and walked around to the front of the building, where we entered from the left-side door, set back from the street.  I was surprised by how small the dining room is, with only room for a bar in one corner, a small salad bar, and a half dozen or so tables.  Hungarian tchotchkes covered the walls.  John invited us to sit wherever we liked and gave us a couple minutes to look over the menu.

Having read several reviews of the restaurant, I already knew that I wanted to try the Transylvanian goulash but, as Ian ordered that, I selected the combination plate, featuring beef, pork, and veal.  Devin, since she's a vegetarian, had fewer options and ordered pea soup and palascinta (Hungarian crepe) with mushrooms.  I also ordered stuffed cabbage as an appetizer.  The youthful members of the party got rootbeer and I ordered a dark Czech beer, then John directed us toward the very small salad bar, featuring iceberg lettuce, sliced cucumbers, pickled beets, and just a few other items.

Stuffed Cabbage

When the drinks and the stuffed cabbage arrived, I poured the .5 liter beer, pausing to photograph it, as I knew that I'd never remember the name of the beer, which featured all sorts of accents, tildes, umlauts, and other diacritical marks that I didn't even recognize.  (Unfortunately, my cell phone was stolen the next day, before I could download the pictures from it, which also serves as explanation for why all of the photographs in this blog post are ripped off from other locations on the internet.)  The beer was quite good, dark brown like a stout, but with a lighter body and a bit more nuttiness.  The cabbage was astonishingly good, made with ground pork on the inside, but with bits of briskety beef in the sauce that covered it, and a nice dollop of sour cream to give it some tartness.

The Sampler Plate

When the entrees arrived, Devin asked me to taste test her mushroom palascinta to make sure there was no meat in it.  There wasn't, and the mushrooms were fantastic, particularly with a bit of cheese melted over the top of the crepe, and her soup was quite nice.  Ian and I traded bites of food, with him falling in love with with the wiener schnitzel (Hungarian: Bécsi szelet) and me deciding that he had gotten the better deal with his plate full of pork goulash and dumplings (essentially spaetzle).  My roast pork and beef were good enough, but were a bit overdone and, rather than being just "tender" had moved on towards "soggy.".  The dumplings were very good, especially with the meat juices.  The red cabbage added a lot to the flavor palette, but the green beans were canned and soggy and the carrots were indifferent.

John Aczel with his kolbasz.

I had noticed a sign over the bar advertising homemade sausages for $7.99/lb and, before leaving, I asked John for one.  Later in the evening, when I sampled some, I found that the smoked sausage was semi-dry, garlicky with just a bit of sweetness.  While I don't know anything about Hungarian sausage styles, I do know that I like what John made.

As Ian, Devin and I drove back to church after lunch, we discussed the restaurant and how we might review it.  Ian and Devin were both very happy with their food, but I was less so.  The salad bar was minimal, feeling like a throwback to the 1970s, back when "lettuce" meant "iceberg" and the beans and carrots were better forgotten.  We all agreed that the service was a bit on the slow side, but that it was very friendly.  The small dining room meant that the smoky-smelling drinkers at the bar were a pungent presence as we ate.  Would we go back?  Probably, but I'd definitely stick with the goulash rather than the sampler plate.

Restaurant Review: Royal Guard Fish N' Chips, Danbury, CT

As part of our mission of eating at a different restaurant each week that I'm preaching in Bethel, my son and I decided to try Royal Guard Fish N' Chips/Royal Curry Corner this past Sunday.  Ian had noticed a listing for the restaurant on Yelp! and we decided to give it a try, knowing as we drove there that we'd both be eating from the Pakistani lunch buffet, yet also wanting to try their fish and chips, which gets good reviews across the interwebs.

The restaurant, at 389 Main Street in Danbury, is directly across the street from the Danbury Masjid and has a neon sign in the front window announcing "Halal Food."  When Ian and I walked in, we noticed that the restaurant was rather spartan, with a counter for placing orders in one corner and a buffet along the back wall.  The tables were bare, with yellowed newspaper designs on them, befitting a chips shop.  The other customers were largely Pakistani and wearing traditional clothing, which I took as a positive sign for the quality of the buffet.

Ian and I made our way to the buffet, lifting the lids off of the steam trays and helping ourselves to the wide variety of food.  The chicken biryani was very flavorful,.  I was reminded that this was Pakistani (Muslim) and not Indian (Hindu) as I helped myself to some well-seasoned beef curry.  Ian really enjoyed the pakoras, though I didn't sample any.  Tandoori chicken always makes me happy and Royal's tandoori chicken was better than most, moist and flavorful and fall-off-the-bone tender.  The palak paneer (spinach with fresh cheese) was quite good, as was the chana masala (curried chickpeas).

Poori, as God intended them to be but not, unfortunately,
as they appear on the buffet at Royal Fish N' Chips.

The only real disappointment of the meal was the poori (deep fried whole-wheat flatbread), which is usually a real treat.  Poori, however, doesn't belong on a buffet.  It needs to be served hot and fresh.  Unfortunately, on the steam table, the poori, which was puffed up when it comes out of the oil, collapsed into depressing soggy flatness and lost all of its light and airy goodness.   The naan (tandoori bread) was delicious, though, with a nice, nutty flavor from the sesame seeds that covered the top of the bread.

Despite the tragic poori, the meal was quite good and was also quite affordable.  Next time I go back, I'll have to make the difficult decision about whether to get more of the Pakistani fare or to get the fish and chips for which the restaurant is named.  It'll be a tough call.

Restaurant Review: Pho Vietnam, Danbury, CT

I love pho, the wonderful Vietnamese beef soup that, in recent years, has become one of my food cravings.  There are several  pho-only restaurants in Beltsville, MD, where my family likes to stop when we drive home to Virginia.  When we lived in New Jersey, we'd often go to a Vietnamese restaurant in Tenafly.  For a while, there was a pho restarurant in Westport that served "adequate"  pho , but it has recently closed, no doubt due to the marginal quality of its food.  Kimberly and I went to Pho Saigon in Bridgeport a while back and the pho was very good, but the restaurant itself was dirty, with a layer of grease on the tables, and the service was nonexistant and, while I might go back, It was definitely not the kind of place to take a Kimberly.

Today, we were going to have Greek food for lunch, but the plan changed when I received an offer for a foosball table for the youth room we're putting together at church.  The only catch was that it was in Ridgefield, about a half hour's drive from home.  For some time, though, I'd been plotting a trip to Pho Vietnam in Danbury, only an extra 20 minutes or so further along than the foosball table, so when Ian finished his finals at school today, he, Kimberly, and I took a road trip for lunch, figuring to kill two birds with one stone.

Pho Vietnam restaurant in Danbury

We found Pho Vietnam in a small strip mall on Padanaram Ave. and were pleased to see how full it was when we entered.  We were shown to the one available table and given our menus, which proved to be delightful, as we enjoyed the puns that were incorporated into the names of a couple of the dishes: the seafood pho called "Pho Shore" and the pho served with steak on top called "Pho Sizzle."  Clearly, there was a native English speaker with a sense of humor involved!

A moment later, our server arrived and she began telling us about the day's specials, including a dish billed as "Pho King," which included a poached egg which, she told us, should be eaten as the last bite.  She chuckled about how her Vietnamese grandmother would think that putting an egg in pho was a crime and would ask, "What are you?  American?"  Something tells me that we found the menu's chief author.

Sampler Platter, missing two pieces of spring roll.

Why is it so hard to remember to take pictures BEFORE eating the food?

As we got ready to order egg rolls, our waitress suggested that, since there were three of us, we should consider getting the sampler platter, with spring rolls, egg rolls (with ground pork, crabmeat, and woodear mushrooms), and fried wontons stuffed with pork, rather than just getting  the Vietnamese egg rolls that had planned on.  It was, of course, a stellar suggestion.   Kimberly and I enjoyed the spring rolls (since Ian doesn't like shrimp) and everyone liked the egg rolls, but the real surprise was how good the fried wontons (which I've never much liked other places) were.  These were filled with ground pork, carrots, scallions, woodear mushrooms and sesame and tasted like heaven with any of the three sauces provided (peanut sauce, nuoc cham, and a sweet, spicy sauce that I don't believe I've had elsewhere.)

It didn't take long for the entrees to arrive.  As it was a warm day, Kimberly didn't feel like ordering pho, so she got bun, grilled pork with shredded lettuce, bean sprouts, cilantro, mints, carrots, cucumber, pickled leeks, shallots, and peanuts, served with nuoc mam.  This is one of the dishes I make at home, and one that I prefer to serve as do-it-yourself spring rolls, served with rice paper noodles, which changes the character of the dish slightly and makes it a fun finger food for serving at parties.  Kimberly's bun - she gave me exactly one bite - was very good, with nicely seared pork that had obviously had a very productive relationship with some hoisin sauce, onions, and fish sauce in the marinade.

Ian and I both opted for the pho.  He got a "large" (which is the smaller size) pho tai, that has rare beef slices added to the broth, where they finish cooking.  (Notice how pink the beef is, as this photo was taken seconds after the pho arrived.)  Ian is a bit of a purist when it comes to pho in that he doesn't like to make use of any of the wonderful garnishes that the rest of the world puts in their pho: bean sprouts, lime, hoisin sauce and pepper sauce.  Instead, he prefers the simplicity of the broth, rich with bone marrow and traditionally flavored with cinnamon, cardamom, star anise, cloves, coriander, and fennel.

I opted for the "extra large" combination pho, which included not only rare beef slices, and well-done brisket, but also beef tripe and beef tendon.  It was a festival of beefy goodness, with the tripe's chewy texture and the unctuousness of the tendon adding a lot to the dish.  [Really, if you get a chance, you need to set your squeamishness and cultural biases aside and try some of these less-than-common-in-the-United-States animal parts.  They're quite good.]  I rounded out the dish with all of the garnishes that Ian had opted against and enjoyed the pho thoroughly.

The only drawback to the restaurant is its location, which I'm sure is fine for people in Danbury, but it is just a bit too far for us to make this a regular place to eat.  Even so, we have the location stored in our GPS, and I'm sure that we'll create a new tradition of stopping here on the way either to or from Silver Lake Conference Center -- or whenever we can create an important reason to drive through Danbury.