Thursday, August 4, 2011.
Three Happiness.
The thunderstorms of the latter half of July seem to have moved on, making way for 100-degree temperatures. August is here.
Those who disdain suburban blight often point an accusing finger at the unattractive boxes left behind Wal-Mart and its like, especially when they move and leave empty boxes behind. The West Bank is riddled with such places. But even worse than the boxes are the gigantic parking lots in front of them. If only parking were a movable resource! Some of them could be transplanted to, say, the neighborhood of Drago's.
Such a parking lot spreads well to the horizon in front of the Three Happiness restaurant in Gretna. I don't know what originally was in the strip mall they now occupy, but it must have been very large. The current occupants need only a small percentage of their adjacent asphalt park. There's enough extra open space here for a very nice playground.
I came to the Three Happiness because a) people have told me good things about it for a couple of years and 2) today on the radio, I asked for suggestions as to where to go for Chinese food this evening. The Three Happiness was mentioned (coincidentally) three times. (By the way, I'd better say here and now that this place has no connection with the better-known Five Happiness on Carrollton Avenue.)
I was misled. The Three Happiness is not really a Chinese restaurant. They do have a page or so of Chinese food, but the menu includes three times as many Vietnamese dishes as Chinese. That's a common gambit, especially on the West Bank. The earliest Vietnamese restaurants like Kim Son found, when they first opened, that there wasn't much interest among the round-eyed people in Vietnamese food. But those same customers did go for Chinese. And business is business.
Well, I like Vietnamese food well enough, so I stayed and started with an order of Vietnamese spring rolls--the cool kind with the boiled shrimp, pork, noodles, and lettuce inside, and spicy peanut sauce on the side. Four of them. This is almost a meal.
Before I could finish that, here came the entree: vermicelli with sauteed beef, carrots, Chinese broccoli (a lot like broccoli raab--more stem than anything), and a great deal of an overly salty brown sauce. Not terrible, but not something I'd order again.
Reasonably nice-looking place, friendly people, gigantic portions, low prices.
On the way home, a vibration in my steering wheel--one I've noticed since I had that work done last week--became more insistent. At one point, I thought I might have had a flat tire, and I pulled over into the Causeway's crossover. No visible problem. One of the tires is brand-new. Probably a wheel-balancing problem.
Three Happiness. Gretna: 1900 Lafayette St. 504-368-1355.
