Coconut Palms

Busy little Vietnamese on smith, nice and cheerful. Menu reads like a country RSL or bowls club Chinese — all the bases covered from mongolian beef to chicken and cashews to Thai dishes. Service was insistently annoying as if to prevent you from leaving. The food was worse.
Tom Yum soup with gross chunks of uncooked vegetable heaped into a tiny bowl. The soup itself tasted like an absurd combination of tetra juice and shrimp paste. The prawn pancake was fortunately passable by contrast… let’s say ⁴⁄₁₀. However for a dish the size of a dinner plate with ‘prawn’ in the title you’d expect more than 3. The steamed snapper with ginger looked great, yet lacked flavour outside of the sizeable sticks of near-​raw ginger scattered throughout. To make matters worse it was presented on its belly, making deboning the fish somewhat of a nightmare.
Perhaps this was a good thing. In summary this restaurant felt like a parallel universe filled with quite a crowd enjoying a truly revolting travesty of Vietnamese cuisine. The green tea was crap as well.

Coconut Palms is a really good Vietnamese restaurant on Smith St in Fitzroy where it’s worth checking out if you want a good phở soup.
People have raved about the soup there where it lives up to the hype and you will sure to be a regular if you live nearby. They are friendly and best of all its not expensive. All the food is fresh and feels like it is nicely spiced and lots of hints of lemon and lime with the seafood plates that tasted really nice.
Can’t go past it.

I don’t really remember much of my dinner at Coconut Palm, but I do remember how much I ate. It may have been a personal best.
I’d been out having a few (read: many) drinks with a group of friends when people started saying they were hungry, so we headed to Coconut Palm as it was the nearest place still open.
There were several more drinks with the meal, so I couldn’t be 100% what we ordered, but our table was bursting with dishes and they all tasted fantastic. And the best bit was the bill — we really had a feast, yet it came to under $ 30 per person. Yay. I’m totally going back, sober next time.

The chilli and lemon grass fried bean curd here is excellent, as is the eggplant and bean curd dish. Those two are the staples when my friends and I go to Coco Palms, which is fairly often. Not as often as we used to go when the prices were so low it was almost cheaper than buying groceries and making your own dinner — but the quality of the food has kept us going back, and it’s still not a bank-​breaker by any means.
A pretty basic little restaurant with minimal decoration, it’s always busy, usually noisy and a lot of fun. The food is definitely the focus: sit down, crack your bottle of BYO wine and order up some grub to share around. Can’t go past the spring rolls to start, served with Vietnamese mint, lettuce and chilli sauce.
And check the signs on the walls for specials, although the menu is large enough to make choosing difficult.