Here's the only reason to dine out in Tenafly

At Simply Vietnamese in Tenafly, complimentary shrimp chips and hot sauce will awaken your taste buds for the bright flavors of appetizers, soups and entrees.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

As an Englewood resident for decades, I had little reason to drive to the neighboring town of Tenafly for something to eat.

Tenafly is a wealthier town, but in the past, its lack of diversity made for a lackluster restaurant scene.

I did have a couple of wonderful meals at the Green Door Cafe, which served organic and naturally raised or grown food before it was closed by a fire.

Then, in 2010, Chef K.T. Tran moved her popular restaurant from its cramped quarters on Palisade Avenue in Englewood to Highwood Avenue in Tenafly, and renamed it Simply Vietnamese.

It has proven such a big hit, she expanded and closed Mo' Pho, her soup-focused restaurant in Fort Lee, to devote full time to the venture.

Now, we drive to Tenafly from Hackensack for a regular fix of this delicious, reasonably priced food.

My favorite entree is basa fillet in a spicy curry coconut-milk sauce.

Appetizers include New Zealand Mussels; Vietnamese Salad, right; and a Summer Roll.

A bowl of Pho noodle soup with pork and a plate of garnishes.

Chef/Owner K.T. Tran taking a break from cooking.

  

On May 1, we had another terrific meal at Simply Vietnamese, where great service is provided by waiters Joe and Peter, and the rest of the staff.

I started with those green-lip mussels from New Zealand in a wasabi-ginger sauce, and had some Vietnamese Salad, chopped vegetables and mango dressed in fish sauce ($8.95 each).

The rest of my family shared a special, a Summer Roll with Chicken and Asian Pear with dipping sauces ($8.95).

My entree of basa, a farmed catfish from Vietnam, was served over a bed of bok choy in a spicy coconut-milk sauce, with a side of brown rice ($19). 

I took more than a third of the generous portion home, and ate it for breakfast the next day.

For meat eaters

My wife had Pho, an anise-flavored noodle soup that is the specialty of the house; my son chose the House Noodle Soup with Ribs, which has thicker noodles ($12 each); and my mother-in-law-enjoyed Garlic Beef ($17).

The two simply decorated dining rooms have walls painted a deep red. 

Unfortunately, like too many restaurants in North Jersey, the menu doesn't tell you much about the origin of the poultry, meat and seafood served here.

Still, once you've eaten at the Vietnamese BYO, it likely will be the only reason to dine out in Tenafly.

Korean restaurants

Down the street from Simply Vietnamese is a Korean-style Chinese restaurant with an unusually large, fish-shaped window, and on Washington Street, you'll find a Korean fried-chicken restaurant, Unidentified Flying Chicken.

Washington Street also has a kosher deli, a pizzeria; Chez Cheese, a gourmet shop with homemade soups for takeout, and other food businesses.

Simply Vietnamese, 1 Highwood Ave., Tenafly; 201-568-7770. BYO, free street parking. 

Hong Bo Suk is a Korean-Chinese restaurant in Tenafly.

Changes in the Asian food scene in Fort Lee

Image by dougtone via Flickr

Visitors to Fort Lee will find Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Asian Indian restaurants. Mo' Pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup restaurant, closed.

Editor's note: Since I wrote this in December 2011, there has been a resurgence of Japanese restaurants in Fort Lee, but Korean place still dominate the dining scene.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Fort Lee has long been the place to go for the widest range of Asian food in North Jersey, and it continues to evolve.

Some of the changes have been in response to an influx of Korean-Americans in a community that many Japanese immigrants had called home for decades.

Now, the Korean supermarket chain Han Ah Reum has opened a small market in a neighborhood of high-rises and garden apartments, and dubbed it H Mart Fresh.

The market on 16th Street, across the street from the Fort Lee Community Center, replaced another Korean market, Good Nature Supermarket, and has been open about eight months. 

Nippon Daido, a small Japanese market on the same block, is now a laundromat.

H Mart Fresh is an abbreviated version of the full-size H Mart supermarket a couple of miles away in Fort Lee's Linwood Plaza shopping center. One woman said she shopped at H Mart Fresh because she lives in the neighborhood. 

On Tuesday, I picked up two prepared items at H Mart Fresh: a trio of sleek, 10-inch-long mackerel pike for $3.99 and a Korean pan-fried omelet stuffed with seaweed for $4.99. But I couldn't find any kimbap, those addictive seaweed, vegetable and rice rolls.

The small market had a beautiful, though limited, selection of fresh whole, wild-caught fish on a bed of ice, including red snapper and croaker, and I saw a solitary eel in a seafood tank.

A Korean restaurant, New Bang's Kitchen, is down the block, at 1355 16th St. 

History of Hiura

In the 1980s, on the same block and possibly in the same space as New Bang's Kitchen, the Hiura family operated a BYO Japanese-Chinese restaurant that kept customers' sake bottles. 

A fire in an adjacent business closed the restaurant, and sushi Chef Noboru Hiura eventually relocated to Main Street in Fort Lee, where the family now has a high-end Japanese sushi restaurant called Hiura.

Several blocks away on Main Street, a pizzeria replaced a Vietnamese restaurant, Mo' Pho, which specialized in steaming bowls of anise-flavored noodle soup.

Japanese pub closes

Meanwhile, in neighboring Cliffside Park, the opening of a new Japanese restaurant, Bushido, has been delayed. The address is 671 Palisade Ave.

Bushido is replacing an authentic Japanese pub, Izakaya Don, which replaced another Japanese pub in July 2004. The pubs served food and overflowing glasses of sake.

Bushido is the latest venture of Lebanese restaurateur Charles Hamade and Chef Yoshiharu Suzuki, who operated Wild Ginger, a BYO on Englewood's Palisade Avenue, for more than 16 years.

The high-end Japanese restaurant was renamed Wild Nigiri before it closed this year, replaced by Hamade's Papa Mole Mexican restaurant.

Hamade and Suzuki likely paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Izakaya Don's liquor license.

Details

H Mart Fresh, 1379 16th St., Fort Lee; 201-944-9009.
Parking on street or in difficult, sloping lot.

Simply Vietnamese in Tenafly

Image via Wikipedia

On Saturday night, we got a refresher course in the wonderful pho soup and other dishes from the kitchen of K.T. Tran by visiting her new restaurant, Simply Vietnamese, in Tenafly.

The restaurant, a former pizzeria, opened one week before and has been greeted enthusiastically by residents of Tenafly, said Joe The Waiter, who followed Tran from Saigon R, the Englewood restaurant she closed this summer. 


Simply Vietnamese is a welcome addition to Tenafly, which isn't much of a restaurant town despite all of its wealthy residents. For example, I can't imagine how Mr. Wok, a mediocre Chinese restaurant, has survived all these years.


We shared two appetizers, miniature spring rolls ($5), served with lettuce for wrapping and fish sauce for dipping; and broiled New Zealand mussels (photo) in a wasabi-ginger sauce ($8.50).


Each of us ordered a bowl of pho -- garnishing the anise-flavored broth with herbs, bean sprouts, hoisin sauce and hot peppers. My son chose soup with spicy jerk beef, I had tofu and vegetables and my wife ordered shrimp ($12 and $14 each).


When my bowl was set down before me, I breathed deeply to capture that distinctive anise flavor. There's nothing else like it in the world of Asian soup noodles.


Joe The Waiter said Tran was going to raise prices after holding the line for three years in Englewood, and she has done so in Tenafly. 

Why did she move? She had only six tables in Englewood and the parking was impossible, the chef-owner said. In the window of the Tenafly restaurant, look for the neon "Saigon" from the old place, which she opened in 2001.

Tran also is the chef/owner of Mo' Pho on Main Street in Fort Lee. 

Simply Vietnamese, 1 Highwood Plaza, Tenafly;
201-568-7770. BYO. Free street parking.

Just smell that wonderful broth

Image by Hanoi Mark via Flickr

We moved out of Englewood in the summer of 2007 and stopped going to Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant where we first encountered pho when the place opened about nine years ago.


I remember how I met owner K.T. Tran in the checkout line at the ShopRite and she showed me the lease she had just signed on a Palisade Avenue storefront. 


Yesterday, we returned for an early dinner after deciding against fighting traffic to eat at Aleppo Restaurant in Paterson -- the fourth postponed meal there since it was reviewed Feb. 17 in The New York Times.


When Joe the waiter set down my bowl of pho with shrimp, I leaned close to the anise-scented beef broth and breathed deeply. Wonderful. You'd be hard put to find a broth that matches the aroma of this one. 


The rice-noodle soup and fried vegetable dumplings made a satisfying meal, even though we knew the broth violated the spirit of our meatless pledge.


And we really enjoyed catching up with Joe and K.T.


Saigon R, 58 W. Palisade Ave.,
Englewood; 201-871-4777. Closed Mondays.
www.saigonmopho.com

More Korean restaurants pop up

We have dozens of Korean restaurants in North Jersey, but more seem to open all the time. Yesterday, I had lunch at Haha Donkatsu, 1630 Lemoine Ave., Fort Lee, which took over the space once occupied by a Korean baby octopus restaurant.

Across the street from Haha Donkatsu is Pho 32, a Korean-owned place specializing in the Vietnamese soup called pho and shabu-shabu, where you cook meat, seafood and vegetables in hot broth on your table. It is around the corner from a Vietnamese-owned pho restaurant called Mo' Pho. Haha Donkatsu specializes in breaded pork cutlets, and I had mine diced and added to a bowl of Korean bibimbap -- steamed rice and julienned vegetables ($8.99 with several side dishes). The sauce you add is truly spicy.

Today, as I returned from ShopRite, I saw what looks like Hackensack's first Korean restaurant (the city already has a Shilla Korean bakery on Main Street, near the Sears parking lots). I didn't catch the name, but signs offer barbecue and shabu-shabu. This is a small place that has housed a number of unsuccessful restaurants, between The Record and Pep Boys.