Restaurant Review: Ha Long Bay

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Kelly

Full Disclosure: I paid for this meal with my own money and I was in no way reimbursed for this blog post. The opinions are completely my own.

Oh Madison, you have so much delicious food! There are a few places that I’ve seen mentioned on other blogs and in local articles many times that I’ve been wanting to go. Since there is so many food choices in Madison though, we often stick to places within a few miles of our house. However, my parents live on the other side of town so when we eat with them we tend to meet in the somewhere in the middle. Ha Long Bay is located on Williamson Street, which is pretty close to the middle of the city and it is somewhere that I’ve been wanting to go for a long time. (It is located very close to another one of my favorites, Lazy Janes.) It is a Vietnamese and Laotian restaurant, they have a wide variety of different Asian foods.

I started my meal off with some tea, which is one of the things that I love about going to Asian restaurants, they always have good tea. I had ginger tea this time, which was good but had a pretty strong ginger flavor.

The husband had a mango curry – mango, pineapple, potato, squash, and onion with red curry and peanut sauce. It smelled very good, and he definitely liked it!

For my entree I had (can you guess?) Pad Thai with tofu. (Some day I will try something different) This Pad Thai was a bit sweeter and saucier than the place I normally go to, but it was delicious! The portion was quite large too so I had plenty left over to take some home.

My parents enjoyed their entrees very much as well.

Oh, and at the end of the meal they give you little candies. I’m not a fan of them, but the husband and my dad like them a lot.

We went for lunch on a Saturday, so it wasn’t too crowded, but I’ve heard that they can get very crowded during peak times. While we didn’t have to wait for a seat, it did take a while for our food to get there. Other than that though, the service was good and the waitstaff was very friendly and accommodating.

Taste: A+, really delicious.
Cost: A, considering the portion size and flavorful food, the prices were great. I only can’t give it an A+ because we had to wait so long for our food, so that took a little bit of the value off the meal.

Would I go there again? Absolutely. I wish they would open one on the west side of town that is more convenient for me though.