Lac Viet Bistro offers their patrons authentic & distinctive Vietnamese cuisine, featuring specialties that hail back to the old traditions of Vietnam, in addition to many popular Vietnamese dishes.
Come experience these Vietnamese delicacies in a warm and inviting atmosphere amidst beautiful surrounding.
Enjoy either indoor or outdoor seating.
Lac Viet Bistro is available for parties, weddings and offers catering services.
Orlando Sentinel
Pho isn't the only way to go at Lac Viet
With a meal at Lac Viet Bistro, a new Vietnamese restaurant on East Colonial Drive, you get something you don't get at most other area restaurants. You might be given a short cultural lesson, or, if you request, a primer on assembling the ingredients that are presented as separate components for most of the dishes. But you also have an opportunity to sample some items you might not be able to find on other Vietnamese menus in the area. Most of the Vietnamese restaurants in Central Florida feature the foods of south Vietnam. Lac Viet has some of those, and you're likely to find your favorites among the multiple pages of the lengthy menu. But it also has a variety of dishes from north Vietnam. Sample some of these, and you're as likely to find a new favorite.One specialty of Lac Viet is the northern Vietnamese dish of banh cuon, glutinous crepes made with rice flour and steamed on cloth. These crepes are served with a variety of meats or vegetables depending on your preference, but they're always accompanied by bean sprouts, fresh basil leaves and a sweet fish sauce. During a lunch visit, my guests and I shared the banh cuon Lac Viet ($7.95), which had the white crepes stacked in the center of a round platter topped with bean sprouts and surrounded by slices of pork loaf. As with any crepe, the flavor of the banh depends on what is served with it, but unlike thinner crepes, it provides a pleasantly firm texture with a little bit of chew to it.
The ledger
Lac viet
In this spot from time to time, Shelley Preston will take you to an out-of-county restaurant with an ethnic cuisine not offered in Polk. The restaurants will all be within an hour's drive. Your suggestions are welcome.Good Vietnamese food abounds in the clusters of restaurants tucked into strip malls along East Colonial Drive in Orlando. A diner can find many tempting dishes, such as beef noodle soup (Pho), crispy fried spring rolls filled with rice vermicelli and thin slices of grilled pork, but the atmosphere in most of these places is hurried and doesn't offer much in terms of ambience.Good Vietnamese food abounds in the clusters of restaurants tucked into strip malls along East Colonial Drive in Orlando. A diner can find many tempting dishes, such as beef noodle soup (Pho), crispy fried spring rolls filled with rice vermicelli and thin slices of grilled pork, but the atmosphere in most of these places is hurried and doesn't offer much in terms of ambience.What also sets Lac Viet apart from its cousins down the road is it leans toward northern Vietnamese cooking rather than southern, offering dishes you may not find elsewhere, such as rice crepes -- the house specialty -- with sauteed slices of onion or bits of pork, mushroom and shrimp folded inside ($7.95).
Orlando Weekly
Vietnamese Rep Grows Stronger
For the last 10 years, I have been conducting a secret experiment: When traveling to other cities, I seek out Vietnamese restaurants to compare with the ones in Orlando. Unwittingly, restaurants in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York and Washington, D.C., have been put to the test, and not one of those exalted cities had anything – be it summer rolls, pho or syrupy-sweet coffee – as good as the eateries back home. And now there's a new contender in the Vietnamese paradise on that wonderful stretch of Colonial Drive near Mills Avenue: Lac-Viêt. It was hard not to be a bit skeptical about Lac-Viêt, because I wasn't fond of Lemongrass Bistro, the last establishment to occupy the space that for years housed La Normandie. When we walked up to the door just after dusk and crossed under a welcoming gate with a cheerful entrance, I saw that the new occupants have more design sense than any of the previous ones.The dining room has been opened up and made brighter, and it smelled like fresh bamboo and steeping lemongrass. I breathed a sigh of relief. The whole room felt altogether more pleasant than it ever had in the past. With sleek wooden chairs, a traditional Vietnamese instrument motif and depictions of Vietnamese scenery adorning the walls, a sense of style has taken the place of what is usually referred to as "character."
