Restaurant review: Anchovies & Salt is good. But it aspires to be great

This story is part of this week’s Vietnamese Food Guide, a special edition dedicated to Seattle’s vibrant Vietnamese cuisine. Find more at seattletimes.com/life/food-drink and in Sunday’s edition of The Mix.

The best dish at Renton’s Anchovies & Salt doesn’t showcase much of the restaurant’s namesake ingredients, but the lemongrass chili chicken deserves top billing. Its memory has stayed with me — a simple classic that distinctively announces to diners, “This is Vietnam.”

Called gà xào sả ớt, the dark meat gets sauteed with chicken fat, coconut soda and turmeric until the broth is mustard-colored. Handfuls of heat-softened lemon grass rings bob in the broth like SpaghettiOs. Put your face into its steam: The smell of flowers, zest and vanilla rise from the bowl. Each bite offers a new pleasure — comforting and restorative at one moment, and in the next, roaring with fresh bird’s-eye chili and raw alliums.

I wolfed down the entire bowl in minutes. It’s the best chicken dish I’ve had this year — I just wish the rest of the menu was executed as flawlessly and with as much gusto.

Anchovies & Salt, which opened on the shores of Lake Washington in November, is the most talked-about Vietnamese restaurant to debut around the Sound in recent memory. From its size to its ambitions, it’s a grand restaurant.

Is it a good restaurant, though? The answer is more complicated.

Like many new restaurants, Anchovies & Salt is in its element when it runs a tightly focused menu with simple dishes. But it wants to be more of a destination dining hot spot to serve many demographics, which entails more moving parts and menus than the kitchen and waitstaff can handle.

At its best, the kitchen has some stellar takes on the classics and excellent riffs on them, too. But you have to hunt for them on a menu that runs a dozen dishes too long. Soup, a big part of Vietnamese cuisine, is showcased here in many manifestations, but not all are on point.

Anchovies & Salt certainly stands on a higher rung than most full-service Vietnamese restaurants in Western Washington. But a place that serves $24 wagyu pho clearly strives to compete with the likes of Seattle’s Monsoon and Ba Bar, the gold standard of elevated Vietnamese food.

It’s not there yet.

NOTHING ABOUT Anchovies & Salt is done halfway. The restaurant opened in a dramatic waterfront location on the south shore of Lake Washington last fall; Gene Coulon Memorial Beach Park lies to one side, and to the other, Boeing planes at their factory nose over the water.

Owner Quyen Phan boasts that the space is the largest Vietnamese restaurant outside Vietnam, an 11,000-square-foot whopper with five private dining rooms, including a VIP area with a separate entrance. Robots deliver food from the kitchen, and another set of robots trundle away with dirty plates. With the sun out, the restaurant will soon drag an additional 60 to 80 seats outside to bring diners a few steps closer to the lake.

For drinks, Phan hired Canlis alums to consult on his wine-and-cocktail program. For food, the menu encompasses cuisines from the three major regions of Vietnam: old Saigon, the central Hue and the trendy North.

Big plans drove big expectations for Anchovies & Salt. From Day One, the hype and social media buzz gave management no grace period. Every hiccup was magnified over Yelp and in the Vietnamese community.

The attention reveals just how far Vietnamese cuisine has come in capturing the appetites and minds of diners in the Northwest.

We are entering a new wave of Vietnamese dining, with many eateries now run by second-generation Vietnamese American restaurateurs who want to preserve lost recipes from their ancestors or who aspire to be the Canlis of Southeast Asian dining.

Seattle’s buzziest restaurateurs are Quynh-Vy and Yenvy Pham of Phở Bắc Súp Shop, Phởcific Standard Time and The Boat; the sisters are finalists for Outstanding Restaurateur in this year’s prestigious James Beard Awards.

And this spring, siblings Trinh and Thai Nguyen from the popular Ba Sa on Bainbridge Island will do craft cocktails and shared plates at Ramie on Capitol Hill. Tam Nguyen of Tamarind Tree in Little Saigon will open two gourmet banh mi cafes later this year — and Cuong and Sammy Nguyen, the couple who opened Seattle’s Ong Lam Bistro and Xóm last year, are planning three projects, including an upscale Vietnamese vegan restaurant.

But no one is being watched more closely than Anchovies & Salt owner Phan, who also owns the popular Vinason Phở Kitchen chain.

Unlike his fast-casual franchise, the family-style dinner menu at Anchovies & Salt tilts much more upscale, with high-end beef and local ingredients.

About 10 of the small and large plates are seafood-focused. The best is the salmon mango, a midsection slab of king salmon dropped into a deep-fryer just long enough to form a light crust, leaving the remaining flesh incarnadine and fresh. It’s served over a julienned mango salad with a citrusy fish sauce.

But the deconstructed pho dishes are what draw diners. The restaurant’s dino-sized signature braised beef rib arrives with a crust of caramelized pho seasoning that gives way to a juicy interior that tastes as if the meat was injected with pho broth. It’s exquisite, with the beef dripping of star anise and fall spices, soaking over a mound of steamed rice.

For the cool kids, there’s a secret menu item: the signature beef rib served in a garlic fried rice. It’s gluttonous and satisfying, if you get the munchies. In a sober state, you want that tender rib to taste purely of itself, uncluttered by all the fried-rice seasonings.

There are also Golden Pho Pillows, deep-fried rice noodles shaped like beignets with hollow interiors. Stuff them with the fried flat iron steak, mustard greens and onions. The dish is a clever mashup of chow fun, pho and rice balls, and it’s one of the restaurant’s best shared plates.

WHEN IT COMES to making pho itself, though, the kitchen fumbles.

The broth in its salty Northern-style pho was excellent at one lunch but so muted the next that not even the mound of wagyu tri-tips could coax enough fat or flavor to redeem it.

On another visit, a bowl of the sweeter, Southern-style pho was served lukewarm, and with mushy noodles that disintegrated when I tried to pick them up with chopsticks.

The kitchen’s bun bo hue, the beef noodle often branded as the pho of the country’s Central region, lacks the spiciness, the funk of fermented shrimp, the pig knuckles and the blood cake. I can picture all the Viet grandmas wagging their fingers in disapproval.

Besides soups, noodle dishes from the trendy North region are featured during lunch and brunch.

The chả cá lã vọng, fish redolent with turmeric and herbs, is served sizzling on a hot platter with charred bundles of dill. But it doesn’t come with the usual soft or flaky fillet; rather, it’s made with thick chunks of sturgeon that require more oil and seasoning than this rendition imparted.

Better is the bún chả Hanoi, pork vermicelli noodles. Here, the sausage patties and pork belly strips are blackened from the grill and served with a smoky fish sauce. It’s the glorious taste of charred pork fat in both solid and liquid form, the hallmarks of Hanoi’s most famous street food.

A good companion to the bun are the nem cua bể crab rolls. The thin rice papers wrap Dungeness crab, pork and two types of mushrooms — wood ear and shiitake — before they are fried until the exteriors crackle like old paper. They’re as good as any that I’ve eaten in the coastal city Hai Phong, where this dish originated.

Most nonalcoholic and boozy drinks go down easy, from iced teas that function like mocktails, amped up with lychee and other tropical flavors, to an unexpectedly good rye old fashioned with pho seasonings that lent a creaminess to the drink and smoothed out its usual sharp finish.

There’s also a smart java program, highlighted by a Fish Sauce Caramel Coffee that’s a ringer for a salted caramel punched-up with umami. It’s a great iced coffee. Now it needs a better name.

A RESTAURANT WITH BIG ASPIRATIONS needs a staff to match. The Anchovies & Salt staff, while always friendly, wasn’t always up to the task. On one visit, my flan never arrived for dessert. Another time, my oxidized wine should never have been served.

Some servers weren’t well versed in the restaurant’s wine program, failing to suggest some great values by the glass: a $13 rosé from Dossier, one of the best new wineries in Washington, or an acidic but fruity $12 sauvignon blanc from Top Source that pairs well with many dishes.

And while robots take the dishes from the kitchen to the main dining room, to the waiting servers, service can still be slow on busy weekends. Five months into the restaurant’s run, it’s perplexing the service kinks still haven’t improved. After all, robots!

Now, much has been made of the $24 wagyu pho. But criticism of the menu’s prices is largely unfair. You can order an appetizer, the salmon mango as a salad, a couple of shared entrees and rice for about $100 — and eat better than you would expect. Your dollar stretches further here than at just about any upscale restaurant around the Sound. And there’s always that great lemon grass chili chicken, which costs only $18.

Anchovies & Salt isn’t perfect, obviously, but it’s still a good restaurant. That’s not the takeaway this ambitious restaurant had in mind, though. It aims for a more rarefied air, but the inconsistencies in service and in the kitchen haven’t been resolved.

Until they’re resolved, Anchovies & Salt is just that: a good restaurant.