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Vin Loi Tofu sells a lot more than just plain old tofu. The small humble-looking restaurant has some of the best veggie pho I’ve ever had and that’s saying a lot coming from someone who grew up on the pho in the SGV.

On the counter were some of these strange looking dumplings wrapped in plastic. When I asked Kevin, the owner, what they were he was enthusiastic about them and suggested we try them after he warmed some up in the microwave. They seem to be mock-meat dumplings wrapped with tapioca-starch wrappers. The wrappers made them extremely sticky and they tended to stick to each other, but they were pretty good. It even came with vegetarian ngoc mam (fish sauce) which was a pretty good imitation of the real stuff.

The BF ordered their House Special Noodles, which comes with round rice noodles and an assortment of fake meat. He ordered it spicy, but the broth didn’t seem that spicy to me. The main complaint I have about a lot of vegetarian pho-style soups is that they’re too sweet. Vin Loi Tofu’s broth is sweet, but there’re also enough other spices in the broth to add depth and keep my taste-buds happy.

I ordered the House Special Seafood soup and asked for it to be spicy. Some how, my spicy soup was a lot spicier than the boyfriend’s spicy soup, but I wasn’t complaining. Despite it being over 95 degrees outside, drinking hot spicy soup that made your eyes water felt good. My noodles were the typical flat rice noodles that you get with Pho and the mock meats in my broth included shrimp, fish cakes, and some other unidentifiable soy meat. The noodles were firm and not clumped together or soggy, which was important.

The noodle soups at Vin Loi Tofu will never be as good as the pho at places like Golden Deli or Pho 79, but the soups definitely have the best vegan broth I’ve tasted out of all the other vegan/vegetarian pho places around. And their soymilk and tofu aren’t too shabby either. It’s just a shame that they’re all the way in Reseda and not closer to where I live.

The only caveat is that their mock meats may not be entirely vegan. According to the BF, there may be whey in some of the meats and while the owner doesn’t make all of them, he doesn’t seem to give a concrete answer about their ingredients.

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Vin Loi Tofu
18625 Sherman Way
Reseda, CA 91335
(818) 996-9779

Louise absolutely LOVES filthy, cheap places! (See more of her posts). You can also find more of Louise's writing at her own website NakedSushi.