Da Lat Cafe
624 Broadway Ave E, 323-2773

Mon-Fri 11:30-2:30 pm; 5 pm-10 pm, Sat-Sun 5 pm-10 pm.

Simply Thai
406 Broadway Ave E, 322-7600

Mon-Sun 11am-10 pm.

Hope springs eternal, especially on Broadway Avenue. Even as shops wither away and close up, a new apartment complex opens grandly and the Broadway Market guts itself to make room for a super-sized QFC. Amidst the tumult, a handful of new restaurants have opened, threatening to jolly up Broadway’s terminal blues.

With big windows and a buttercup-yellow paint job, Da Lat Cafe has been a sunny presence on the far end of Broadway for quite a few months now. Andrew and I recently sat down in its sweetly triangular dining room to see if its country-style menu could bridge the gap between upscale Vietnamese restaurants and bargain-basement pho and banh mi shops. Things started out pretty well with a green papaya salad ($7). It’s a big pile of palest green papaya matchsticks, garnished with pink curlicues of shrimp (squishy and bland, but cute!). Of course it was the dipping sauce (one of Vietnamese cuisine’s best features)–limey and fishy all at once–that made the salad come to life. I quickly gave up on dipping and brutishly dumped the whole dishlet of sauce over the salad. Da Lat’s chicken wings come to the table spiderlike, arranged in a circle with the elbow joints sticking up ($7). The crisp-skinned meat was absolutely neutral, if somewhat enlivened by a citrus black-pepper dip. In the end, though, chicken wings are too damn much work to eat if, as in this case, the sauce is not absolutely addictive.

Andrew took one glance at the eggplant ($9) and warned me that he can only handle the vegetable under certain discrete conditions (cut small, puréed, or crisply fried) and that this version was unlikely to work for him. Da Lat’s preparation is for harder-core eggplantistas–two-inch chunks cooked, with peanuts, scallions, and soy sauce, to a mushiness that some call silky and others call slimy. For a dish with no flavor fireworks (or dipping sauce!) it was an awful lot of eggplant skin to chew through. The banh xeo, a rice-and-coconut-milk pancake stuffed with shrimp, pork, and scallions, was thicker and chewier than the crisp, delicate kind I’ve grown to love, although its dipping sauce sparked up the chewy, slightly charred batter ($7).

A couple of days later, I stopped by for some banh mi, those brilliant baguette sandwiches that can cost as little as $1.50 a pop (at Da Lat, they are $3). Inside, the pork and chicken fillings were similar, each with a little barbecue flavoring and each with an unpleasant durability. Da Lat admirably piled on the fresh vegetable matter–scallions, carrots, jicama, and cilantro–but it was all so chunky as to make the sandwich nearly unnegotiable. (Granted, I ate mine in the car, so perhaps I’m valuing convenience a little too much.)

Down the street, another restaurant, Simply Thai, had caught my eye with its ultra chipper décor–swaths of colorful cloth and umbrellas hanging from the ceiling of a cognac-colored room. The restaurant turns out to be the third in a Tukwila-based chain, and it’s appealing to look at, right down to its blue-and-white patterned dinnerware. The menu, though, is completely standard-issue, timid Thai. It was a totally squid-free zone, so I had to order my standard prik king with prawns ($8.25) instead. The chili-ginger-basil standard is almost always good, as it is here, sweetened up with flower-shaped carrot slices. Chicken-coconut soup ($6.25) wasn’t very pretty–pale orange with hunks of tough chicken and raw button mushrooms–but the tom kha gai broth never fails to surprise me with its refreshing combination of chilis, lime leaf fish sauce, and coconut. Summer rolls were served with such a gloppy dipping sauce as to cancel out the freshness of the shrimpy, minty rolls. Tired of eating out with me, Andrew insisted on ordering chicken pad thai ($7.25)–which in all honesty is as good a barometer as any. The noodles were low on the tamarind sourness and dried-cabbage or radish funkiness that I crave, and a little high on the taste of burnt oil from a too-fiery pan, but not bad.

Still, I’m sorry that two visually charming restaurants are serving food, that’s, well, dull. It almost makes me look forward to the sushi bar that’s set to open in the new QFC….