Lau Tom 5 Ri

Orange County is lucky enough to have a fairly wide and increasing range of Vietnamese seafood specialists, some focused on hot pots and shellfish, others on spring rolls and vermicelli dishes. As the only U.S. location of a restaurant from Bien Hoa, Vietnam, Lau Tom 5 Ri is all about seafood from appetizers to entrees: You’ll find scallops, snails, razor clams, oysters, squid, prawns, tiger prawns, blood cockles, and dungeness crabs either on their own, deep fried, added to salads and hot pots, or mixed in with rice. The only non-seafood items on the menu are beverages.

We tried some of their more famous dishes, including salted yolk tiger shrimp, tamarind snails, sugarcane shrimp, hot pot, and garlic butter scallops. On a very positive note, we were impressed by the size and juiciness of all of the seafood items, but especially the shrimp, which range from merely really nice to memory-making giant-sized. The flavors and textures were also spot-on across the dishes, though we continue to think that hot pots (now $35 to $59, depending on size and ingredients) represent poor value at places like this.