House of Ho
Elia Zammit Street
Paceville
Tel: 9962 9871
Food: 8/10
Service: 8/10
Ambience: 8/10
Value: 8/10
Overall: 8/10
My horoscope for the week said that I would find pleasure in unexpected places. This makes me a little nervous. What if every other person who shares my birthday is there, in an unexpected place, anxious to share or steal whatever pleasure has been planned for me by celestial bodies?
I jest, and I mean little offence to those whose lives are guided by the prophesies of planets and stars and their positions in space. I just prefer to think of those balls of frozen rock or burning gas as largely indifferent to my antics.
Yet there is something to be said about the act of reading one’s horoscope. Having read that I’m to find pleasure somewhere or other, it’s likely that I’m more mindful of a prospect that I’d otherwise have shrugged off or completely ignored.
So when, for instance, someone told me that there’s a new place in Paceville and that it is called House of Ho, I could possibly have dismissed it as a form of entertainment that I can live without. But what if there is pleasure waiting there, lurking until I walk in and surprising me with a thrill I haven’t previously experienced?
Most of the bars and clubs that soaked me with alcohol as a teenager have been transformed into clubs that deal in a service we can call negotiable affection. The more one is prepared to pay, the more attractive he or she will be made to feel. It’s a fair trade, really.
If you want to dismiss the place, you’ll stand on a moral high ground and call it a strip club. If you own the place, on the other hand, you’ll call it a gentleman’s club or some other equally optimistic euphemism. Well, House of Ho isn’t exactly beating around the bush, so to speak.
It turns out, however, that it has nothing to do with what I thought it was. It is the second incarnation of the London-based Vietnamese restaurant of the same name. The location was just a coincidence and I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on them.
There’s a mastery to the way spices are blended so, while every dish has a life of its own, there’s a pleasant harmony to the flow of food
Talking of location, Paceville is an odd one. Many people of my generation and older balk at the prospect of going there. Maybe we don’t want to compete with teenagers for parking, maybe we don’t want to be reminded of our age, or perhaps we just don’t want to remember our time spent there at all. But there are pockets of seriously good food in the area and they are worth elbowing your way through throngs of drunken teenagers for. Here’s a spoiler. House of Ho is one of them.
I think I was a little too eager to visit. I asked and they’d only been open for a week. This was not stopping them. The man who greeted us and welcomed us made it a point to reassure us that they were ready to feed us.
He was one of those people who has the ability to dial up any dining experience. He’s patient, knowledgeable, and knows the boundaries between friendly and familiar, so it felt like we were treated to fine dining service within what is a relatively casual context.
The restaurant itself is quite pretty. They’ve used bamboo steamers and lanterns to theme the place without overdoing it, so you’ve got just enough to remind you, while the rest is neat and functional. The way the restaurant seems to burrow into the block and turn left makes it possible for one to find a table all the way inside and, for a short while, forget the mayhem outside.
The menus are loosely divided into small dishes and larger ones. Starters, sushi, and the like offer a mix of flavour and texture and temperature in portions that seem to be designed for sharing while the Pho, Ho, and salads are more of a main course in portion size.
We listened carefully to the recommendation of our host and promptly violated it. He suggested we share some of the small dishes and then have a large dish each. We ordered enough small dishes to feed eight, even if there were only four of us at table, and added a Pho dish to share. It would get messy but we were all fine with that.
Our host had told us that food would be served as it was prepared rather than as a starter course and a main course. This works perfectly with dining styles that involve a number of small dishes with different flavours, temperatures and textures. As soon as a dish is ready, it’s delivered to your table and I love the pace that this provides. It’s also a very convivial way of eating, particularly for the four of us gluttons. We all had a say when placing our order so we got to taste most of the areas on the menu with the exception of the salads.
The first dishes to arrive were the crispy squid and popcorn shrimp. The crispy squid is served with finely chopped chilli and coarse salt and the popcorn shrimp, also crisp and light, comes with a creamy, spicy sauce and a ponzu orange dipping sauce. Both are fragrant, perfumed almost, with a beautiful blend of herbs and spices so that nothing particular jumps out and takes over.
This was a theme for the entire meal. There’s a mastery to the way spices are blended so, while every dish has a life of its own, there’s a pleasant harmony to the flow of food.
Seared salmon tataki is served wrapped around a vegetable I couldn’t for the life of me place. It is one of those flavours that eluded and frustrated me and made for a wonderful take on what is essentially a lightly seared sashimi dish.
Cha Gio crispy Imperial rolls, with a crisp exterior and a lively crisp, sweet, and sour filling, are a dish that’s considered quite celebratory and, in some ways, divisive. Should you use rice paper or wheat batter for the shell? We weren’t about to ask so we just celebrated the dish itself, making room for the chicken gyoza that followed it.
At around this point, a steaming bowl of beef Pho took up the centre of our table. This is normally served as a main course for one but we had more food on its way so we shared one to try it. The hard work has been done in the kitchen. Tender slices of beef swim in a bowl of broth and noodles. Then there’s veg and sauces you can add to the bowl to make it hotter, more savoury, more crisp, or whatever combination of these flavours you prefer.
We’d taken our time over lunch, happy to sit and eat and chat about food and other wonderful things. If I were on the clock, however, I’d stick to the Pho. It is a complete meal and it’s beautifully seasoned. It’s so close to eating this style of dish in the Far East that one could easily require a visa to order it. Just don’t do as we did. Don’t share it.
Onwards we soared, tackling Mr Chang’s roll, a sushi roll with exquisite prawn tempura inside, and that’s up there with some of the best sushi I’ve tasted.
And to end on a more intense note, we wrapped up with two pork dishes. The Vietnamese pork belly bun, which in my opinion was the weakest link but found much favour with the rest of the party, really wins on flavour but loses on texture. I found the steamed bun more sticky than fluffy and the pork slightly too crisped.
The Jasmine smoked baby back ribs, on the other hand, are a remarkable concoction. They’re aromatic and intensely smoked, cooked slowly so they part with the bone without much fuss, and in general make for a wickedly enjoyable dish.
Even if it sounds like we ate our way through the menu, we didn’t quite manage that. Somehow we escaped with a bill of just €25 each – a figure we could easily have halved or doubled. Eating a Pho would be more than enough and that would cost just over a tenner. Had we not been out the night before we’d have hit the cocktails and there’s no telling where that could take us. And this flexibility makes for remarkable value for food of this quality.
There’s plenty more to the menu at the House of Ho and I intend to systematically eat my way through it. No need to consult the stars this time. Pleasure is to be found in unexpected places. Only this time I know exactly where that place is.