Hoa Bien

A few months ago, Hoa Bien reopened after receiving the Mai Village treatment, transformed from a humble little University Avenue soup house into a high-style restaurant. Hoa Bien doesn’t have miles of carved woodwork or a bridged Koi pond, but to say this is a new experience for regulars would be an understatement. This clean, inviting, and well-run restaurant is eager to please and provides a safe entry point to the world of Vietnamese food, University Avenue–style.

Once a small, dark, and grimy little hole, the new space is bright and airy, with tablecloths and preset silverware rolled in napkins, a nice improvement on the communal bowls of flatware from which we picked our spoons in the old days. There are new banquet facilities, and the service has taken a pleasing step forward by any measurable standard. Prices remain rock-bottom low.

I have been eating at Hoa Bien for eight years, mostly for hot and sour seafood soup. The pho (beef noodle soups) are all wonderful. Hoa Bien’s broths and stocks are deeply satisfying and superbly flavorful, as are its killer egg noodle soups. If pho isn’t your bag, try the Cantonese-style soup with pork and shrimp.

Banh hoi chao tom, ground shrimp grilled on sugar cane, is superb, fresh, salty-sweet, and fun to roll into lettuce leaves and dunk in fish sauce. Stir-fried dishes such as mi xao don are served over crisp fried egg noodles. They’re Vietnam’s salute to chow mein, and a nice way to get your Swedish grandmother into ethnic eating. The hot-and-spicy chicken here reminds me of the thit kho dishes I fell in love with in Hue, Vietnam.

Steamed buns filled with Vietnamese sausage and ground pork sit at the register, available for a few dollars each. An odd place to vend snacks, but it got me hooked. After eating one at lunch, I bought three as I headed out the door.

1105 University Ave. W., St. Paul, 651-647-1011