A little more than two months ago I suggested in a blog post that the recent opening of a Lawrence Avenue storefront restaurant called L.D. Pho might signal a demographic swing toward the Vietnamese taking place on the far-west end of Lincoln Square. What I didn’t realize was that for three years prior a Vietnamese restaurant had already existed in the same space, a place I’d passed hundreds of times but dismissed because its name—New Asia—suggested the sort of pan-Asian dilettantism that makes the eyes glaze over.
New Asia goes through about 30 chickens every day, but when it opened for business Tiffany Nguyen wasn’t necessarily looking for meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law. The butcher shop was convenient, and the siblings were aiming to do something that set them apart. True, the birds sold at Aden aren’t free-range farm chickens (“They’re pretty free, though,” an employee told me hopefully). But they’re about as fresh as you can get, and the unusual taste and texture of their meat—starkly different from that of the usual battery bird—is undeniably a hit in the Vietnamese community.
Speaking of beer, New Asia is BYO, and if you do, you’ll likely be asked if you want your brew iced, a practical and refreshing necessity in steamy Vietnam, where refrigeration isn’t ubiquitous. Here, with the appropriate cheap lager, the open-minded will find it deliciously sacrilegious. Barring that, the glasses of pale-green, mildly flavored tea that everybody drinks are just as refreshing. It’s brewed from pandanus, a tropical leaf that smells and tastes of jasmine.
2705 W. Lawrence 773-728-2406
