The wife and I ended up here after looking for a place to eat a late-ish dinner. Darwin's oldest serving Vietnamese restaurant, Vietnamese Saigon Star has been providing relatively cheap meals for as long as I can remember. You'll find them a few doors down from McDonalds, just look for the super cool glass box building sitting on the sidewalk. Apple probably stole the idea of a glass box building when they were designing their Apple Store (and improved upon it), just like all their other products.

It's a fairly casual place, not too fancy but not too scrubby either. The food reflects this too. The menu is mostly stir-fried meat with sauce X, which is how they manage to fit 126 items on there. My favourites are the traditional Vietnamese street food staples - rice noodle salads, noodle soups and my personal top pick of marinated pork meat with rice and a fried egg. The only difference between this and the stuff you get street-side in Vietnam is that it costs about 50 cents there as opposed to $12 here. Everything else on the menu has a bit too much over the China border influence going on with a big coating of "Darwin styles brus" thrown in. You know the drill - black bean sauce, sweet and sour sauce, Mongolian sauce – totally unoriginal.

But that's ok, because my super tender lemongrass infused chunks of pork are smashing and the flooding of fish sauce dressing that goes over the top seals the deal. And the entree spring rolls are a winner, despite being a little thin. Vietnamese spring rolls are the bomb, with plenty of meat inside and when you wrap them up in some fresh lettuce and herbs it takes it too a whole 'nother level of awesomeness.

The noodle salads are proper good too. Healthy crunchy meaty veggie noodleiciousness. Well I'm not sure how healthy it is after all that dressing gets applied, but it's gotta be better than Nandos next door. I just formed and made myself president of the work fitness club, so I'm on a bit of a health kick at the moment. Not sure how long that will last but I'll roll with it for as long as I can. Anyways, back to the food. It's a cool place to eat if you're after something casual, cheap and with a great street view. We saw plenty of action through the glass walls. Like the lady who had a hard time reverse parallel parking, and the mounted police picking up a hobo who then needed an ambulance. Food and live entertainment all in the one venue.