Vifon Mi Bo Beef Flavor Noodles

Country of Origin: Vietnam
Bought at: Super Oriental Market in Homewood, AL
Price: 49¢

I have eaten some Vietnamese food before but I've never had Pho, or Mi Bo, or most other Vietnamese cuisine. Usually when we go to our local Vietnamese restaurant we stick with basics like curry chicken with rice noodles or chicken or beef with rice or something similar. I'd love to expand my experience with the stuff though, cause a lot of it looks pretty dang good.
So here we have some instant Mi Bo noodles. According to Wikipedia Mi Bo is a beef and noodle soup, usually made with egg noodles and raw steak or something similar (kind of like what is on the package, which would be some pretty jazzed up ramen). Let's take a look inside.

What? No carrots cut into the shape of a four leaf clover? No raw meat? No cabbage even! The packaging on this one definitely stretches the limits of the legal phrase "Serving Suggestion" found on most food nowadays. So anyways, you get a standard if not kinda funky colored noodle block, soup base which smells very strongly of beef bullion and garlic, and seasoning oil which is a sickly kind of yellow color. Let's cook it up!

So here's what I ended up with. Pretty standard bowl of ramen from the looks of things. You can definitely tell it's beef flavor from the smell. When I ate these I immediately noticed a very strange if not unique sweet taste to the noodles and the overall soup. I looked at the ingredients and noticed that sugar is an ingredient in the noodles as well as the soup base. Kind of odd... I don't think most ramen has sugar in it, at least not this much. These noodles aren't bad, though. They are very thin and vermicelli-like and have a good consistency. The flavor is strange to me because of the sweetness but it still tastes better than beef Top Ramen to me. The strong garlic flavor helps cancel out some of the sweetness and me being a huge garlic fan is what keeps this soup from getting a bad score. I'm giving this one a generous 7/10 because of the garlic flavor canceling out some of the sweet flavor. I probably wouldn't get them again just because there are so many better beef ramens out there, but this one is worth a try for something unique.