Xinh, and blasts from the past

Please note that since writing this blog post, Xinh has closed down

Back in 2008 I wrote about a ‘last date’ I had at Waldorf. I guess I hadn’t really noticed it had shut down until I turned up at the address of Vietnamese restaurant Xinh and realised it was in the place where Waldorf used to be. I’d been weirdly scarred by that last date, and by the five dates that came before it, since all of them fell within the magic two-month obsessional period. When it ended – much like when a celebrity dies young and in the height of their fame – the person with whom I was obsessed had never had the opportunity to fall off his pedestal. And because of this (god I sound ridiculous – why am I even admitting to this?) I hadn’t even attempted to go back to any of the places we’d been for dinner. Yet there I was, over three years later, standing outside no-longer-Waldorf, telling myself to just get over it and go inside.

So I did.

Fortunately, they seem to have changed the décor quite a bit – it has a minimal, slate-grey appeal to it – but the narrow, intimate layout of the place is just as I recalled. The menus were fairly minimal too, which pleased me because I can’t stand those 12-page menus Asian restaurants seem so often to favour. My fellow food-blogging friend and I both went for the set three-course menu, which offered a medley of three mains – tempting, if you’re culi-curious, like we are.

The first course was a take on a prawn cocktail, which I thought was a much better idea than it sounds. In a cocktail glass: slivers of barely cooked prawns, flecks of pork, thinly sliced cucumber, radish and runner beans. Served on the side was a sweet carrot-chilli dipping sauce and a small bowl of prawn crackers. It was light, fresh and immensely enjoyable.

The three mains were all meaty: simply fried beef with lightly aromatic five spice; pork with a caramel and pepper sauce; and chicken with lemongrass and something similarly sweet and caramel-based. As my chopsticks flitted from dish to dish, I kept changing my mind about which I liked best.

Dessert was the only part of the meal that left me disappointed, but that’s possibly because desserts are not really big business in Vietnam. We had something that tasted like a cross between frog spawn, banana-flavoured medicine and peanut butter. Apparently it was tapioca. I won’t be doing it again.

The menu cost €26 each, which was decent value for what we ate. Amsterdam is not exactly awash with Vietnamese restaurants, so Xinh’s offering is a welcome addition to the Asian food scene. I’d venture to say it’s significantly better than Waldorf, but given the circumstances under which I dined there before I may well be biased… Still, if there’s one thing I learnt from the experience, it’s that re-visiting old haunts isn’t nearly so hard as I thought. You never know, I might even make it back through the doors of first-date Festina Lente one of these days…