We've been visiting family and friends in Alabama this Christmas season, and we've been eating like it's the holidays. My problem is that I spent most of 2009 eating like it was the holidays. I tried two new restaurants yesterday--I met fellow DOLer Mike DeBow at The Baskits in Homewood for lunch, and Shannon and I went to Saigon Noodle House near 280 and 459 for dinner. The chicken tenders at The Baskits have won awards and the staff is great. I had a fried chocolate pie as a mid-morning snack (it was the only thing I could see there that would go well with coffee, and they'd stopped serving breakfast, and I was there working on a book review for a few hours). This was truly amazing: imagine your standard Southern fried pie, but with a crust made out of a funnel cake.

We went to Saigon Noodle House for dinner, and it was some of the best Vietnamese food I've ever had. I don't say that lightly: there's a good Vietnamese place in Memphis (Pho Saigon), and there are a lot of them in St. Louis. We shared spring rolls to start, Shannon got a curry chicken noodle soup, and I got M3, which was a seafood-and-beef soup with clear glass noodles and vermicelli. The Spring rolls were especially good for a couple of reasons. First, the wrapper wasn't gummy and chewy like they are on a lot of other Spring rolls. Second, they had a fried wrapper in the middle of each spring roll. This helped the rolls stay together and added an interesting texture and flavor. As for the soups, I'm so woefully ignorant of the fine points of Asian cuisine that I can't say much more than "they were really, really good." We didn't get any bubble tea, but they have that too. We'll be visiting Saigon Noodle House again the next time we're in Birmingham. HT: www.bhamdining.com.