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Best Bargain Restaurants: Little Viet Garden

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Little Viet Garden
Arlington

Goi cuôn, that wonderful vietnamese appetizer of shrimp, pork, aromatic herbs, and noodles wrapped in rice paper and served with peanut sauce, is sometimes translated as garden rolls and sometimes as fresh spring rolls. It may be the freshness of the ingredients, the proportions in which they are combined, or the texture of the roll, but the ones at Little Viet Garden are the best in town.

This fine Vietnamese restaurant, good when it opened five years ago, just keeps getting better. Other recommended appetizers include the roast quail, mahogany colored and beautifully moist, the grilled lemongrass chicken, and the papaya salad with beef jerky.

Caramel fish, a frequent special, is a wonderful dish, but less successful with salmon than with any one of several white-fleshed fish. Try as well the Viet Garden steak marinated in a rich sauce of garlic, butter, and red wine, and the deep-fried flounder with ginger sauce. Golden pancake, often soggy elsewhere, is fried quite crisp and filled with bean sprouts, chicken, and fresh shrimp.

Little Viet Garden's version of grilled shrimp on sugar cane is definitive. Shrimp paste is wrapped around a piece of sugar cane, which imparts a delicate sweetness to the shrimp, then grilled and served with greens for wrapping and peanut sauce for dipping.

The thing to drink is "33" beer; the best dessert is iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

Little Viet Garden , 3012 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington; 703/522-9686. Open Monday through Friday 11 am to 2:30 pm and 5 to 10 pm, Saturday and Sunday noon to 10 pm. AE, D, DC, MC, V. MapIt!

QUALITY: ****Excellent; *** Superior; **Very Good; * Good
PRICE RANGE: $$$= Very Expensive; $$ Expensive; $=Moderate; ¢=Inexpensive

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