I sometimes struggle with what it is that I am going to eat on a daily basis. Although there are a ton of restaurants here in Da Nang, for the most part they are all just carbon copies of one another and no matter where you go you end up having the same things being offered. So when I was looking online at a kebab shop, I noticed they had a "French Taco" and it looked good in the pictures so I thought I would give it a go.
I've never heard of such a thing and when I looked it up online it says that it has "little in common with Mexican tacos" and the name is likely just a catchy thing so that people would get interested in it. It is similar to other street food that has some sort of Mediterranean influence... I think. To me, it seemed quite similar to a gyro.
one of the biggest pros of this food item is that it was quite cheap and it was enormous. It is definitely a lot larger than any taco I have ever seen and I would equate it to being more like a burrito or panini. It also had zero Mexican spice to it although it did contain a rather absurd amount of sauce that to me tasted a lot like thousand island salad dressing, which is fine but there was so much of it on this that it was kind of overload and therefore a bit gross.
As you can tell by her very watchful face, my dog Nadi didn't mind when some of the insides ended up falling on the ground and even though I'm not really a fan of thousand island or as my British friends call it "cocktail sauce," Nadi was a big fan of it and encouraged me to drop as much of it on the floor as possible.
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Here is an image from a website and I have to hand it to this restaurant, which is called Kebab Ngon, they did a good job of delivering what the international notion of this food actually is.
One thing I didn't care for was the massive amount of french fries that were contained inside of it. I dislike this part of Greek restaurants that do the same thing. I always kind of feel like they put this in there because potatoes are cheap and they can make the thing a lot bigger and more filling without really giving you very much meat. The french fries kind of overpowered the flavor so basically I felt like I was eating a large tortilla that was filled with salad dressing and fries. When you break it down thousand island is basically just ketchup and mayonnaise so I was mostly just eating a overly saucy order of french fries loaded into a tortilla.
So this will end up being a one off for me. I can't speak for all French Tacos out there because they do appear to be quite popular in Europe, but if you are here in Vietnam I would say that you can skip this one. Even though it is cheap, I would rather pay more for something and actually enjoy it.
It can be frustrating ordering food delivery here in Da Nang because unless you are ordering from international chain restaurants, you never really know what you are going to get. This will not be something that I would ever order again and I imagine that would make Nadi quite sad since she basically had a saucy french fry buffet that particular night.
If you have had this food item somewhere else, particularly if you had it in France, I would be interested to know what your experience with it was like.