Photograph by Matthew Worden

Congee, the hot rice porridge popular at breakfast in Southeast Asia, also makes for a soothing lunch or dinner at Tay Do. A version with shrimp and ginger is very good.

Most nightclubs aren’t meant to be seen through daylight eyes, and Tay Do is no exception—the erotic video games on the bar, the sloppily handwritten signs reading vip bottle service $200. Even the air, dank with cigarette smoke, seems to have a hangover.

And yet not many nightclubs serve a bowl of congee this good.

That’s because until this summer, Tay Do was simply a restaurant. Owned by Jennyfer Nguyen, who grew up around her parents’ Fairfax restaurant, the place had a prime spot in the Eden Center’s maze of shops. Serving bowls of heady pho and fresh vermicelli bun prepared by her mother, Xuan, it landed a place on The Washingtonian’s most recent list of 100 Best Bargain Restaurants.

In July, Nguyen, 24, transformed the dining room into a nightclub—go-go nights, lingerie fashion shows, and all. But from 11 am to 7 pm every day, while klatches of men linger over packs of Marlboro Lights, you still can get her mother’s cooking.

What makes the sausage rolls at Tay Do so good? The kitchen wraps them while the spicy meat is still warm.

The menu lists nearly 175 items, some of which require a server’s help to sort out. What’s the difference between “shredded pork and grilled pork on broken rice” (number 19) and “grilled pork and shredded pork on broken rice” (number 21)? Jennyfer, in tight Seven jeans and a Louis Vuitton belt, explains that the former has slices of pork loin while the latter comes with a lightly sweet, charred, bone-in chop.

Many Vietnamese restaurants serve seven-course meals built around beef. Here you’d do well to give pork the same attention. Nem nuong, a coarse, well-spiced pork sausage, is terrific. It’s wrapped, still warm, with mint and spring onions into a rice-paper roll or served over a pile of cool herbs and vermicelli in the noodle bowl known as bun. A steamed rice crepe is barely visible under heaps of shredded pork and a few slabs of the rich, smooth terrine called “pork delicacy.”

Congee, a hot rice porridge that’s a popular breakfast in China and Southeast Asia, is excellent for lunch or dinner, too. The wide bowls aren’t for delicate appetites; they come with chicken, pork blood, or, in one satisfying version, plump shrimp with a handful of fresh ginger. There’s cilantro and lime juice to stir in, and a bowl of crullers—savory Chinese-style doughnuts—for dipping.

On a menu this large, there are bound to be disappointments. Shrimp toasts—heels of baguette slathered with shrimp paste and lightly fried—were brought down by what tasted like fishy frozen crab. Far better were airy banh cuon cakes, each stuffed with a whole shrimp.

The Nguyen family’s previous restaurant, Hau Giang, was known for its pho, another breakfast staple. And although Tay Do’s broth used to be oily and rich, the soup has been surprisingly uneven lately—on one visit it was glorious; on another it tasted more of salt than of oxtail bones.

Looking behind the bar, you might think that Hpnotiq and Red Bull are the only things to drink. But there are fruit shakes, sparkling lemonade, and young-coconut juice with swirls of shaved coconut. And there’s always the dense, strong Vietnamese coffee. It’s delicious—and it pairs well with all that cigarette smoke.

This review appeared in the November, 2007 issue of the magazine.