Linda M.
Yelp
This used to be my favorite restaurant in Wilmington but something has changed. The food has gone downhill either because they have different chefs or they are trying to cut corners or both. Either way, this restaurant is nothing like it used to be. So when you read other reviews of Indochine, you may want to go by only the reviews made in the last 12 months.
I was there for lunch on the last Friday in August of 2024. I ordered the Bun Thit Nuong with pork, which is exactly what I've ordered for years. The menu says that dish contains cold rice noodles, shredded lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, basil, pickled vegetables, cilantro with a 'traditional' dressing
and topped with crushed peanuts. For some reason, the lunch portion of this dish is slightly different than the description on the dinner menu. But it was my understanding the only difference was the portion size.
I ordered the lunch portion of Bun Thit Nuong with pork. What I got was a dish piled high with Romaine lettuce, roughly torn into large chunks. On top of this was a small amount of noodles and a small amount of pork with about 2-3 tiny slivers of carrots. No basil, no cucumbers, no pickled vegetables in sight. Not a single piece of any of those.
The lettuce was piled up underneath the Bun Thit Nuong as a filler to make the portion look bigger than it was. And there was none of the shredded vegetables that I used to get in the past. Just a bunch of giant lettuce that looked like the chef had grabbed from a salad bar. The attached picture shows the remaining lettuce after I had already eaten the rest of the lettuce and the noodles and pork.
I ordered two spring rolls to go with the dish. Instead of bringing out two normal spring rolls on the side, they served me a bunch of chopped up, Tater-Tot looking things sitting right on top of my Bun Thit Nuong.
These so-called spring rolls were terrible. They neither tasted nor looked like spring rolls. They seemed like some dried out frozen food item that I could not even identify. They had a thick, egg roll type wrapper instead of a thin spring roll rapper, and I could not even identify what was in the middle of them. Whatever it was it was bland and tasteless; just some cheap filler. They were also cold. I picked them off and couldn't even eat them.
When I left the restaurant I asked the hostess if Indochine was under different management. She said it was not, and she seemed very annoyed that I asked. Which made me think I was not the only person who had asked this question.
If they have not changed management, then maybe they just have a swinging door of new chefs or maybe they are cutting corners. I just know that the one dish I went there for is no longer any good. And sadly, Indochine is no longer anything special.