Urban Bowl

Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time to grab lunch and fast, tasty and ideally healthy are fairly key search criteria. Such was my mission recently and I found myself at Exchange Plaza, so I wandered into Urban Bowl. I hadn’t heard too much about Urban Bowl other than that they were dishing up quality, fresh Vietnamese fare. On a hot Summer day that sounded good to me, so I decided to give it a go. They offer a range of different Vietnamese style salads but it was the rice paper rolls that grabbed my attention. They offered chicken, pork belly, salmon or a vegetarian option of mushroom and tofu. I ordered one of the pork belly and one of the chicken. I thought $3 each was actually quite reasonable given their generous size and they came boxed up with your choice of hoisin or peanut sauce. I went with hoisin and then skipped my way back down the Terrace to my office.

It was like a picnic at my desk as I eagerly bit into the chicken rice paper roll, clearly I was ravenous! It was really tasty. Everything was so fresh and as a Summer lunch option I can see this as a very popular one. Plus I really enjoyed the sweet hoisin sauce and fairly liberally double and triple dipped into my dish of sauce til my heart was content. Happy days. It was a similar story with the pork belly. Cut thinly, the fatty meat had a lovely flavour and it was another winner, with a similary pairing of noodles and crunchy veg.

It had ticked all the boxes with the added bonus of being reasonably priced. I’m keen to head back and try one of their salads next time…..but it will be hard to go past such delicious rice paper rolls. Perhaps a few return visits are on the cards.

I’m getting the hang of this lunching in the city caper!