Food, booze and shoes: Smells like... <b>Asian food</b>: Huong Huong

I normally steer clear of places that do all sorts of cuisines as I struggle to think how they can perfect one cuisine, let alone three. In Marrickville Huong Huong was doing a brisk lunch trade the Saturday I visited – in, it appears, its Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai cuisine offerings.

Inside Huong Huong, Marrickville Road, MarrickvilleHaving stumbled in from the outside humidity, I was getting even more flustered flipping through the pages of the menu of 400+ items, starting with a page of Thai options followed by the rest in protein and carbohydrate categories.

Iced lemon tea (left) and iced sweet coffee (right) With drinks first, an iced sweet coffee and a lemon iced tea, I was looking for the Vietnamese section, which oddly didn’t really eventuate, though Vietnamese dishes dominated the noodles section.

It was too hot for pho, though I’m sure that’s not how the Vietnamese might see it, and the scarily large bowl size would be too much as it was supposed to be a light lunch.

Crispy skin chicken with tomato rice Seeing a neighbouring table’s delightful meal, I followed suit and ordered the crispy skin chicken with tomato rice. It was a beautiful dish that arrived with a reddened and chopped chicken maryland showing obvious signs of crispness.

There was also an abundance of tomato rice, in a pile that covered the entire plate, and garnish of a tomato wedge, some cucumber slices and a leaf of iceberg lettuce.

The chicken skin was faultless, thin, crunchy and flavoursome, but the flesh was a little less tasty and desperately needed the dipping sauce to lift it. Once dipped, the perfectly cooked chicken reached a level of deliciousness that warranted picking up with fingers.

The tomato rice, while red, was a little less tomatoe-y than I’d expected, and a little on the oily side too. It made for a filling dish with the leftovers for the next day just as good.

For the something light, the salads section proffered many delectable combinations, and the grilled pork version arrived looking fabulous, served with perfectly round prawn crackers.

The grilled pork was fairly lean and tender, while the mint leaves, Spanish onion and crunchy, shredded raw cabbage made for great partners in the salty, sweet and sour dressing topped with a tumble of crushed peanuts.

Prawn crackers that come with the salad Though not a fan of raw onion, I had no problems with the Spanish onion here nor the plentiful chopped peanuts. I preferred eating the salad on its own then crunching into the crackers, rather than putting the salad on the cracker, for fear of soggy prawn crackers.

With leftovers to go as well, Huong Huong’s quick pan-Asian tour proved that perhaps three cuisines in one isn’t all that unusual after all.

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