One of the downsides of living in SE Asia is that if you are a beef lover.... well, good luck. There just aren't many good cows natively speaking and the imported beef carries with it an increased cost that will make you rethink your dedication towards steak pretty rapidly. All "good" beef in this country is imported from New Zealand, Australia, the USA, and if you want to go seriously crazy with your wallet, Japan.
There are other options though and it is with mostly local beef, which can be very hit or miss. I'm not going to lie, it is mostly "miss" and a chewy mess that makes you wish you had just ordered a pizza instead.
I took a gamble on something that popped up on my Grab food delivery app the other night and I had my apprehension because it sounded like it was too much stuff to be possible for $4.
It was advertised as being 200 grams of sirloin, a side salad, home made bread, and potatoes. I was initially annoyed that the potatoes in question was actually about 12 french fries but I guess those technically are potatoes. It was too late to send it back and the rest of it looked ok, so we dove in.
I was surprised and delighted to find that the steak that was included actually was quite tender and wasn't filled with the usual chewy sinewy crap that is so common all over the place in Vietnam as well as anywhere else I have been other than Singapore in this region. You didn't even need a knife but that didn't stop the shop from giving me two of them, made of plastic of course even though I specifically requested that they NOT give me any cutlery because I don't live on the street and I have an apartment here that believe it or not, has cutlery in it.
Didn't need it anyway though and the BBQ sauce that is in the little container was actually very very good. The salad was.... a salad. There's not much more to be said about that other than I was a bit turned off by the dressing being purple. It was just the usual mayonnaise crap they put on everything but this time with purple food coloring!
You can see that my little friend there was just as interested in what was going on upon the table top, perhaps even more than I was. She doesn't get much in the way of "people food" handouts from me, but I did give her a few tiny bites. When you consider that she weighs 6kg and is about 9 inches tall, I gave her the equivalent of giving you an entire steak so yeah, she was satisfied.
I will order this again. The bread was what you would expect from the picture as were the fries. But the real reason for ordering it was the beef and I had prepared myself for it to be garbage but it was actually pretty tasty and I might be feeling that way because I had my expectations set really low since the price was so low.
Let's look at it this way though, not long ago I went to a "fancy" steakhouse owned by westerners about a month ago and paid western prices for 200 grams of imported beef. It was 5 times as expensive as this per person. It was not 5 times better. Since I am quite price-sensitive in the future I will be ordering this and not the overpriced tourist stuff. I should have suspected that the fancy place was a ripoff when I went inside and there were no Vietnamese people there at all.
The name of this restaurant is simply "Bo"... which means "beef" in Vietnamese. It's easy enough to find online if you want it and for $4, why not?