Oc & Lau Restaurant

Very few Orange County restaurants are so perfect (or close) that they needn’t change anything. Apart from their confusing branding, two Garden Grove Vietnamese seafood restaurants – Oc & Lau and Oc & Lau 2 – fall into this ultra-rare category. If you didn’t already know that the Vietnamese phrase Oc & Lau means “snails and hotpot,” it’s time to stop in and learn why that matters.

(Apart from their different sizes and locations – the original restaurant is smaller and in a plaza, while #2 is larger, facing the back side of a mini-mall – their menus are essentially the same. One might have inventory of something the other is out of, but seating capacity and environments are more important differentiators.)

At either location, you’ll find an incredible collection of Vietnamese seafood dishes spanning familiar and unfamiliar shellfish: start easy with the crab egg rolls, then dive into some grilled whole squids, garlic butter clams, steamed ginger conch, sizzling skilleted scallops and roe, sweet citrusy tamarind soft shell crab, and if they’re available – they often aren’t – try the finger-sized, rubbery razor clams. You can have an entire meal here with nothing but fascinating and awesome seafood, priced reasonably by the plate.

Or go in a totally different direction. Get a fresh salad like shrimp and squid in spicy sauce served inside a hollowed-out pineapple, a separate green mango and squid salad, something that looks like pizza but is actually Vietnamese crispy rice with pork floss and Chinese sausage (Com Chay Cha Bong Lop Xuong), and finish it off with a pitcher of passion fruit soda and some coconut taro sticky rice.

Those suggestions leave out two things: Vietnamese classics and the restaurant’s namesakes. Oc & Lau’s rare beef salad is, despite its common availability elsewhere, so phenomenally citrusy and meaty here that we sometimes skip the perfectly great seafood to order it. Similarly common crispy egg noodle birds nests with meat or seafood aren’t as artfully executed, but still satisfy.