In fairly short order, The Vox Kitchen has become one of the hottest restaurants in Little Saigon. And it is not a Vietnamese restaurant. It’s a fusion kitchen that serves just about anything but Vietnamese food, which is apparently the kind of food the neighborhood’s millennial generation is clambering for. Even when I arrive on a Tuesday night, expecting a slow, quiet dinner, there’s a 30 minute wait for a table.
The Vox Kitchen is the total reboot of a restaurant I previously wrote about called Pango, which attempted to sell fusion tacos and frozen corn. I felt the kitchen crew was selling itself short. And they must have come to the same conclusion because they rebooted the entire concept, transforming the restaurant from a quick-serve fusion taco joint to a smart chef-driven, full-service cafe. (The team here is connected to Súp Noodle Bar in Brea.)
Vox fondly reminds me of the original iteration of Tra House, which was a fantastic restaurant when it opened (but soon after deteriorated rather dramatically when the chef left). And when I say The Vox Kitchen is full-service, I mean simply that they offer waiter service. The staff is as charming as can be and eager to please, but this is not by any stretch fine dining. Don’t be shocked if you see a waiter drag a trashcan to a nearby table and start scraping the dirty plates and cups into the garbage directly in front of you, as if that’s a technique they’re proud of.
The menu is short but tightly edited. The best thing on the menu is the bone-in short-rib soup, the kitchen’s riff on Korean galbitang. The broth is warm and soothing, with the sophistication of a good French consommé. The bowl is filled with glass noodles, boiled potatoes, a soft-poached egg and a couple of beef ribs, from which the meat simply melts away.
Also great is the Peruvian-inspired lomo saltado, which is a big plate of french fries (very good on their own) that have been tossed with stir-fried beef, onions and tomatoes, served with rice and a fried egg.
They still serve Mexican-style street corn, but now it’s fresh and still on the cob. And they make their own burrata cheese, which they serve in a salad with pears and spinach.
The one vaguely Vietnamese dish is the French-Vietnamese-inspired garlic noodle. The simply adorned noodles are fiercely garlicky and available to be topped with shrimp, steak, mushrooms or salmon. I got the shrimp, were vastly overcooked, almost to the point of being dry and crumbly, but the flavors were exactly right. If the kitchen can get a handle on the cooking times for the shrimp, this could be a fantastic dish.
They also serve a USDA prime steak, which is cooked in a sous vide bath for hours until just medium rare. The steaks are finished with a blow torch that looks like something that a Marvel Comics villain would own. The steaks are good, I guess, but certainly not better than similar steaks that are traditionally grilled elsewhere. Sous vide has never been my favorite way to cook an expensive steak. It’s possible that my lack of enthusiasm for the steak has something to do with wine. It’s hard for me to even think of eating an expensive steak without pairing it with a big, tannic cabernet.
The restaurant doesn’t have a liquor license. And they don’t let you bring wine in, either. So instead of drinking wine with that steak, I’m reduced to drinking lychee lemonade.
They don’t serve dessert, either. But if you want something sweet, that lychee lemonade is very sweet. And pretty darned good.
The Vox Kitchen
Where: 16161 Brookhurst St., Fountain Valley
When: Lunch and dinner daily
Phone: 714-418-9729
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified lomo saltado as a Filipino dish. It is Peruvian.
