If you read several reviews praising a restaurant to the skies and you visit the homepage of the restaurant and you find a list disclosing all suppliers and those supplying meat offer organic or Demeter quality, you start to have great expectations. In hindsight, I believe this was the moment when my visit to the restaurant Coming Soon went downhill.
I had lunch there with a friend on a quiet Monday. The restaurant’s design is very trendy and hipster like (where was my inner warning bell?). Chairs are functional, but not that comfy. They have an extensive menu of Vietnamese dishes and during weekdays they offer one daily menu, usually with a summer roll and fruit. When ordering, I had assumed that the lunch menu included a water as it read “….mit Zvieri und Eptinger Still 75cl.” Thus, I was a bit confused when the waitress asked me what I wanted to drink. Turns out the 75cl still water is part of a take away offering, consisting of the aforementioned water and a cereal bar. My suggestion for the restaurant is to change the wording in the menu and just add a “zum mitnehmen” (“to take away”) to the lunch menu. The neighboring table experienced the same confusion, so it is not attributable to me being a blonde. 🙂
The menu was served fast, which is highly appreciated for lunch. It was served on a tray that looks like an American highschool cafeteria tray (I guess something like this is a must for a hipster restaurant):
This lunch menu consisted of a Pho soup with chicken, a vegetarian summer roll and mango cubes as dessert. The quintessential part of the Pho is the broth. The rice noodles do not make a different and the meat can be chewy or tender, but the flavor mainly comes from the broth. And this broth was… bland; it was more like lightly salted hot water. The intense flavors that you usually get by cooking bones for hours (umami bomb!) and that is then skillfully seasoned by the Vietnamese with all the great spices they have (ginger, cilantro, star anise to name a few) were just absent. When mentioned this upon paying, the waiter (or manager?) replied that they do not use glutamate. Well, most restaurants I have visited in Zurich that offer Pho soup do not use glutamate neither and yet they manage to cook a Pho soup that is rich in taste. So, this is not an excuse. We needed a lot of soy sauce, chili sauce and Hoisin sauce to get some flavor at all. Still, it was a very disappointing experience. I do not consider myself an expert for Vietnamese food. After all, I haven’t been to Vietnam yet. Still, I believe that I recognize a lack of taste when I eat something. Which makes me wonder about the taste buds of the journalists from the SonntagsZeitung, ZüriTipp, Harry’s Ding and the like. While I am already in criticizing mode, let’s not forget about the summer roll. Unfortunately it was not rolled tightly enough, so a sloppy experience and it also lacked flavor (see, we have a pattern). A vegetarian summer roll only filled with lettuce and tofu desperately needs some herbs like cilantro and mint to add taste. The mango cubes were alright.
A nice treat is the “Zvieri” (this is a Swiss expression for a snack that is usually eaten at 4pm and is a combination from “zum”/at and “vier”/four) that you get as a take away. The vegan cereal bar was not bad, unfortunately it wasn’t really good neither (quoting my friend). It was chewy and taste was okay. Although I wonder why they need to use cranberries instead of locally available raisins. Some nuts or roasted seeds could have made this bar crunchier.
The water bottle just doesn’t make sense. All offices that I have come across supply their employees with water and if not, in Switzerland you can drink the tab water just fine.
In sum, I’d say this restaurant is a role model when it comes to disclose their suppliers. And cooking with organic meat is great. However, organic meat is apparently not enough for a tasty Pho soup. If you are looking for a good Pho in Zurich, please look here: Pho Is All Around Me (the restaurants mentioned in this post all use at least mainly Swiss meat, as far as I know).
Coming Soon
Rolandstrasse 9, 8004 Zurich
Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 11am-11pm, Sat 5pm-11pm, Sundays closed.
Reservations not accepted.
