Flavor Boulevard

Yet another sticky rice snack that I vaguely remember eating one or twice during the early childhood, and found again in a San Jose sandwich shop more than ten years later. I was excited when I saw these green balls covered in coconut bits.

We Vietnamese call them bánh bao chỉ to distinguish from the meat-filled steamed bun made from wheat flour known to us as bánh bao. Just as bánh bao comes from China, so does bánh bao chỉ. Just as bánh bao are baozi and mantou in Mandarin, mandu in Korean, manju in Japanese, manti in Turkish, and many more, bánh bao chỉ too has its share of names.

The most-result-yielding Google search belongs to loh mai chi, commonly shown as little sticky rice flour dumplings with sweet ground peanut filling. Other variations in Malaysian and Chinese food blogs are snowball, loh mi chi, chi fa bun, muah chee (yeah, these are really cute you’d want to kiss them too)*, noh mi chi, and ma zi. Once again, I feel the need to learn Mandarin. Some say “noh mi” means “sticky rice” in Cantonese, but what does “chi” mean? Others, including the Vietnamese sites, insist that “chỉ” in bánh bao chỉ comes from “mà chỉ”, which is “ma zi”, which is “sesame seed” in Mandarin, which means “mi chi” is “sesame” (recall mi lao – sesame fluff) and we’re left with “noh” being “sticky rice”. It is reasonable enough if we consider that there are four types of fillings for bánh bao chỉ: black sesame, coconut, mung bean, and peanut. But the taste I had from childhood was the salty and sweet ground peanut in a gummy, springy thin layer of white dough coated with flour. Sesame filling must be a new twist.

And so are the vibrant green color and the coconut bits. And the size. Cheap bánh bao chỉ used to be sold on wheels: an old Chinese man peddled around the neighborhood with a glass tank on the back of his worn bicycle, the tank half filled with soft white balls as big as tangerines. Now these balls are about an apricot each, fit snugly in a plastic box and sold for $2 at Kim’s Sandwiches. Not only do they lose the romantic authenticity of a street food, they also taste like soap. The green dough, instead of having pandan flavor, reeks of artificial chemicals. The mung bean paste is sickeningly sweet.

I’ve never been so disappointed with a snack food. Do NOT buy these green balls, no matter how good looking they are. Search online for loh mai chi recipes, or search the streets for old Chinese vendors.

(*) It’s hard to refrain from making the connection between muah chee and the Japanese mochi (daifuku).

The exact origin of mochi is unknown, though it is said to have come from China. The cakes of pounded glutinous rice appear to have become a New Year’s treat during Japan’s Heian period (794-1185). As early as the tenth century, various kinds of mochi were used as imperial offerings at religious ceremonies. A dictionary dating from before 1070 calls the rice cake “mochii.” Around the eighteenth century, people began to call it “mochi.” Various theories explain the name. One is that “mochi” came from the verb “motsu,” “to hold or to have,” signifying that mochi is food given by God. The word “mochizuki” means “full moon.” People of the west and southwest islands called it “muchimi,” meaning “stickiness.”

– from New World Encyclopedia

So I know everybody thinks the entire Far East gets its stuff from China (yeah… no.), but here’s a crazy idea: what if this sticky rice ball with sweet fillings actually originated from Japan, then the Chinese got hold of some, and later passed it down South?

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bắp hầm (Vietnamese whole kernel grits)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh bò bông (steamed sponge muffin)

The most irresistible American meal is the full country breakfast. I know it’s derived from the full English breakfast and all, and it’s probably so irresistible just because who in their right mind would refuse food after a long night with an empty stomach (hence the word “fast” – not eating, in “breakfast”). And yes, there’s nothing speedy about the old country breakfast. Making pancakes, scrambling eggs, frying sausages takes a good hour off your morning, not to mention scrubbing the skillets afterwards. I probably will never make a full country breakfast at home until I have nothing better to do, but thank God for blessing America with countless roadside brick houses opened up just to serve breakfast. And may those like Millbrae Pancake House flourish despite the swamping force of IHOP and the likes, because they serve freaking good breakfast.

I said freaking good because I happened to order the one dish that, it turns out for the first time, everyone on Yelp seems to agree to be MPH’s best. The Swedish pancake with lingonberry butter. Have no idea how Swedish this really is, but the pancake is not the fluffy butter kind IHOP is known for, instead it’s a small flat crepe. It’s dense and has a slight sweet chew. And the lingonberry butter is butter mixed with lingonberry bits. And I spread a ton of it on my pancake. And I ate it by itself, like eating chocolate. Americans, maybe it’s time to mix raspberry, blueberry, strawberry, gooseberry, and maybe other fruits too into your butter. It kills. Just sayin’.

The rest of the breakfast was really just so so. Hash brown, two runny eggs, and four sausage links were as good as they could(should) be, but nothing unexpected. That’s ok, the Swedish deal wowed me enough.

MPH is cheap too. All that was for $7.95. The thing is, it was too much. I couldn’t finish everything, had to lean against the wall for 10 minutes in the restaurant, and almost needed a walker to get to the car. Maybe I’d be in better shape if I gorge up on these more often.

Address: Millbrae Pancake House
1301 El Camino Real
Millbrae, CA 94030-1410
(650) 589-2080‎

Don’t know about you, but after I empty out my bank shopping in Union Square, it doesn’t sound right to pick up an $80 tab at one of those restaurants with a uniformed man at the door greeting every passerby and making us feel bad for not dining with them. So as much as I wanted to have frog legs and duck tongues or something not-so-homey of sort, we ducked into this rabbit hole in the wall called Bangkok Noodles & Thai BBQ, under Hotel Union Square and next to some equally tiny sport clothing shop.

It is truly, truly, a hole in the wall. But nobody seemed to mind. We had to walk sideway to weave pass the single line of sitting and standing people from the door through a short hall (if the thing between the wall and the divider to the kitchen can be called a hall) to get a table for two. This cookery is the epitome of land conservation. There’s just enough space for one foot at a time between the rows of tables. When the place is packed, like the time I was there, strangers practically sit together, conversations are separated only by the soy sauce and Sriracha bottles.

We just needed a good fill. Mudpie went with khao pad sapparod, fried rice with chicken, shrimp, cashew, raisin, tomato, and a few toothsome wedges of pineapple, a rather reliable combination that’s not so different from Danang Krungthep‘s kao pad namh, just a whole lot milder. I chowed down three sweetly marinated and juicy grilled pork chops with white rice, a very simple salad, and a tangy sauce.  Not much is new with Thai barbecued pork, besides it really resembles Vietnamese com suon nuong. Lip smacking good meat fo sho, tho. I even gnawed the bones.

All the while, it was some frenzy time. The cooks and the waitresses shouted to each other across the room in ear blasting Thai, hurried feet scampered all over, people slurping and chatting and toothpicking and flirting, and you’re constantly alert that a bowl of soup or fish sauce could fly down your shoulder with a slip of the tray. But there’s absolutely nothing to complain about the food. In fact, I was grateful to find this livelihood in the wall.

Address: Bangkok Noodles & Thai BBQ
110 Powell St (At the corner with Ellis St)
San Francisco 94102
(415) 397-2199

Take a look at the complete menu, the priciest plates are just $8.25.

Corn must be my favorite grain. Growing up with very limited access to street food, I used to fix my eyes on the corn carts and baskets of market women near home, secretly drooling. They had a big steamer packed with corn ears still wrapped in their wilted yellow husks and brown silk, sometimes a glass shelf with peeled ones, white and shiny and plump. I was always so happy when Dad bought xôi bắp, sweet corn and sticky rice, for breakfast. Then at night there was corn-on-the-cobs grilled by coal fire and smothered with lard and green onions. It’s better than butter, no doubt. At che stalls there was corn pudding with coconut milk, which I like when it’s warm and gooey. And that was all the Vietnamese corn stuff I knew.

Not until recently that I came across another corn thing, a midfielder between chè bắp (corn pudding) and xôi bắp, and porridge too. I hate porridge, but I love this stuff.

Some people just call it “bắp nấu”, “cooked corn”, either to make sure that we know we’re not eating raw ones or to confuse questioners with the boiled whole ears, also known as bắp nấu. The more careful gourmands label it “bắp hầm“, literally “simmered corn”, since the hulled kernels are slow cooked until saturated with water and soft like a canned sweet pea. But it’s not mush, the corn still retains a tiny bit of chewiness that entertains the gums.

The classic vendor look is a ladle of hot white bubbly goo half wrapped in banana leaf, a few spoons of SSS (sugar-salt-sesame) mix huskily dumped on top, a tuft of coconut shreds on top of all, and a finger-long piece of banana leaf stem to scoop.

The sandwich store look has the SSS mix and coconut in tiny Ziploc pouches, a half pound of corn in banana leaves, all cling wrapped on a styrofoam plate and sent home with a plastic spoon.  It’s sleek alright.

Makes awesome meals on vegetarian days!

The white easy package sells for two bucks at Huong Lan Sandwich #4 in Milpitas (41 Serra Way, Suite 108, CA 95035). My guess would be 2000VND (~11 cents) if you buy it in Vietnam, anyone knows?

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh dừa (coconut sticky rice stick)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh bao chỉ (loh mai chi – Chinese sticky rice flour ball with sweet fillings)

How do you write about a place you haven’t been to for ages?

The consensus is that fresh memories, like fresh ingredients, are best for blogging. I often find myself writing effortlessly about a meal I just finish or an event from which I just depart, when the details have yet to sneak out the back door. If I wait two weeks, the tastes are still there, the ambiance is still there, but the minute corner-of-the-eye observations are gone. If I wait a month, expectations creep in to fill the fuzzy spots: I write what I think should be true as pictures trigger the taste buds, but reality can certainly outplay expectation anytime. When I wait a year, even the ambiance is nothing but a flimsy strain of smoke. Notes may take care of facts, but when memory fades, so does the flow to glue the facts together into a comprehensible piece. I’m now in such affair with Cenare.

I remember Cenare as the cozy white-table-clothed Italian restaurant with affordable under-fifteen-dollar plates where I had my twenty-first birthday dinner. I remember that they didn’t mind pulling together extra chairs when we had more guests than we reserved. There were salads for my vegetarian friends, pizzas and calzones for those who don’t mind getting their hands oily, chickens for my Hindu friends, red meats for those like me, all in portions big enough for twenty-year-old boys.

I also remember Cenare as the crowded yet orderly place where I had my graduation dinner. With plenty of parking, less than ten minutes away from campus and no turns, Cenare offers nothing but convenience for the non-locals visiting their kids in caps and gowns. They had a special graduation menu condensed with the best pastas, meat and seafood for the occasion. There were plenty of fresh crisp bread to appease the hunger, wine and coffee to keep the conversations warm, crème caramel, triple chocolate silk cake, and tiramisu to reward us after the long drive and many hours of sitting.

So even if I can’t remember the exact tastes of the tortellini, the lobster ravioli, the fish, the chicken, the lasagna, the decor on a quiet late winter evening and a hectic early summer afternoon, it doesn’t really matter as long as I remember my friends and families who dined there and enjoyed it with me. It was a good restaurant because I was in good company.

Address: Cenare Italian Cuisine
404 University Drive East
College Station, TX 77840
(979) 696-7311

Every morning at six, sometimes five thirty, my dad went to the market with my mom’s grocery list, and on the way back picked up something fresh for my breakfast. He had to be extra early if we wanted xôi that day, because the warm morsels folded up in banana leaves wouldn’t last past six thirty. Sweet xôi was a popular morning food, until they started putting in lap xuong and pork floss and turned it too close to a lunch thing. But our xôi lady, and later her daughter, never made anything but sweet sticky rice in their loyal steamers. Every morning, sitting on a plastic stool and head half-covered by the cone hat, they surrounded themselves with three or four shining aluminum wok-like basins on the low table, neatly cut squares of banana leaves, old newspaper and rubber band in the side basket. Those aluminum basins often had peanut xôi, black xôi (which actually looked purple), and one other speciaux du jour. My mom was so concerned with my health that she would pick off all the peanuts if my dad got the peanut xôi, and I got really bored with black sticky rice and sweetened bean paste, so there was no telling what I would get for breakfast. On rare occasions it was corn. My favorite.

Without the seed coat and the yellow tip, each kernel was all soft, white and plump, must be twice its natural size. The sticky rice too was gummy, hardly discernible from the corn. I’d try to eat all the sticky rice first and save my precious puffs for last. Our xôi lady always covered the white palmful with mash mung bean, a big spoon of sugar, and a pinch of fried shallot. Arguably the fried shallot tempered the “sweetness” of this xôi, but it’s not as crucial as sugar and sweetened mash bean. Something I didn’t realize until years later.

We moved sometimes at the end of sixth grade, then again, this time across the Pacific, at the end of eleventh grade. My chance of eating corn xôi dropped like the housing market in Detroit. Partly because the cling wrapped stuff on styrofoam plates doesn’t at all look like Ms. Điệp’s warm morsels. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw it at Kim’s Sandwiches, not wrapped up but in aluminum trays behind the counter. Sure, they put it in styrofoam boxes when you order, but that’s still better. I got two for five dollars.

It might have been bad timing. I blamed it on our late morning arrival: xôi is best when it’s just thirty minutes out of the steamer, cool enough not to burn yet warm enough to keep the sticky rice gummy and moist. Our xôi was cold and dried up. But it was also bland. Lack of sugar in corn xôi made it un-corn-xôi-like. The grains and kernels were coated with mung bean powder, not mash, hence we got a heap of powder-coated grains and kernels instead of corn xôi. This is the Northern Vietnamese style, but frankly it’s incomparable with the Southerners’ sweet twist.

On a brighter note, Kim’s Sandwiches’ savory xôi, with roasted chicken and green onions, proved worthy of toothwork. Although the sticky rice was also cold and dried up, the meat was plenty and flavorful to boost.

On an even brighter note, the corn xôi was well-salvaged by a sugar dispenser and a microwave.

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Xôi bắp and xôi gà ($2.50 each) from Kim’s Sandwiches
(in the Lion Supermarket area)
1816 Tully Rd 182, San Jose, CA 95111
(408) 270-8903

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh ú tro
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh khảo/bánh in

The yellow-and-green parrots ain’t seein’ da Cup this year. I was overjoyed. Seriously, best news to start the day since summer began. To celebrate I walked half a mile down Shattuck and hit Brazil Cafe for the first time (my students strongly recommend their tritip sandwiches). You know, kinda like warriors in the old day eating their defeated enemy’s liver or sum’. It’s supposedly opened today 11am – 9pm. I got there at 11:45, but they were closed, grief-stricken perhaps?

Feeling pretty defeated myself, I swung by Bongo Burger on Center St. and scored a bacon bun in revenge. They say they’re proud to serve Niman Ranch, and I say I’m proud to refuse the alluring offer of Miss Cashier to pay extra for fries. $6.04 for a third pound burger and water only, please.

The problem with big burgers like these is that they don’t fit in my mouth. I nibbled around like a squirrel on a tough nut,with melting cheese stringing from side to side and lettuce shreds falling like autumn leaves. Part of the problem is with the bun. So freaking puffy! When you go to McDonald’s and Burger King they give you these tired soft breads that stick flat to the patty like white on rice, and nothing falls off as long as you got a good grip on the bun. Here it’s like fresh-out-of-the-oven bread. Warm and crusty and pillowy and bready.

The bacon was the opposite. Thick and chewy like spiral ham. Nothing like the smoking crispy strips sizzled in lard they show on ads. All good though. Even better, they didn’t sneak in any pickles, so I didn’t have to pick any out.

Now I’m full for the rest of the day.

In the orange spirit, it’s time for a clementine.

It’s been two weeks, but better late than never. After I read Jessica’s zong zi post on Food Mayhem, images of amber tedrahedra just wouldn’t leave me alone. I talked to my mom about them, and I could hear her voice crackle with sweet memories over the phone. We haven’t had these sweet little things for years. We used to eat them by the dozens every lunar May. Like most Saigonese, we didn’t do anything huge to celebrate Tet Doan Ngo, but bánh ú tro was too scrumptious a tradition to pass.

Each pyramid is just a little over an inch tall, whichever way you roll it. It’s unclear whether the traditional zongzi grew smaller when Chinese immigrants share the recipe with their Vietnamese neighbors, or only the dessert zongzi (jianshui zong) is favored by the locals over savory types. Most Vietnamese have also long dissociated this sticky rice snack with the Chinese reason behind Duanwu festival, if not to assign the Fifth of Lunar May to commemorate the death anniversary of Vietnam’s legendary Mother Âu Cơ, kill off bad bugs, make ceremonial offerings to family ancestors, or simply bathe in the summer solstice’s endless sunlight. Whatever meaning someone chooses to celebrate (or not celebrate) Duanwu (Đoan Ngọ in the Vietnamese language), he can enjoy bánh ú tro all the same. And if he lives in Hội An, there’s a big chance he actually participates in making them too.

The people of Hoi An don’t make a living with bánh ú tro year round, but they keep the tradition with earnest. Within four days, 1st-4th of lunar May, everybody makes bánh ú tro. The fifth day, everybody eats bánh ú tro. The sixth day, things get back to normal. In Saigon’s markets, bánh ú tro start showing up a week or two before the Fifth, and disappear right after, my mom recalled. So when I told her that I was going to search for them after I read Jessica’s post, she said “fat chance”.

Why such rarity? After all, bánh bía, also adapted from the Chinese and also originally made just for one specific festival, shines its face all year long in every bakery and sandwich shop these days. Well, the recipe for bánh ú tro turns out to be real hard, and it’s not just the wrapping stage. The best bánh ú tro, according to Hoi An banh makers, must be wrapped with “kè” leaves from the mountains of Huế. The cleanly washed sticky rice is soaked in sesame ash water overnight (sesame plant burnt into ashes, mixed with water and sifted through sand). The ash water turns sticky rice grains into semi-powder form, giving bánh ú tro a clear amber look and a strangely light texture, unlike any other sticky rice concoctions. No wonder “ash” (tro) is part of the banh’s definitive name. (If you look at jianshui zong recipes, you’ll find lye water or alkaline water listed. More correct terms perhaps, but the horrid image on Wikipedia’s page on lye takes away my appetite. “Ash” even has a romantic ring to it, and this banh is made for a poet after all.) A bit of alum is put in the ash water to somehow keep each banh from falling apart.

Now of course sesame plants aren’t growing in everyone’s backyard to burn, so just any coal ash would do, as long as you sift the ash water carefully to avoid big pieces of charcoal in your sticky rice. Some different source suggests ash from mangrove firewood, dissolved in water for a month, but it seems to be just another grandmother’s special recipe varying by the regions. After soaking the rice for 1-3 nights, take it out and wash with cold water again.

The wrapping leaves, too, vary from place to place. Kè leaf is obviously not the most popular, as bamboo leaf and reed leaf, in their slender shape and earthy fragrance, do the job just as well. Banana leaves can be cut into wide strips to imitate bamboo leaves. Skilled banh makers can also control the colors: older leaves give darker hues,  substituting ash with white lime paste(*) lets bánh ú tro have the natural green shades from the leaves, while red lime paste causes a reddish amber shine.

Nonetheless, there exists a common wisdom regardless of ingredients: burn an incense stick when you drop the banh into water for boiling, when the incense burns out, the banh is done. Usually that takes four hours.

Let cool, bánh ú tro is more firm than chewy. There you can still see silhouettes of individual grains on the outside, but each banh is a solid tedrahedron of defined edges and uniform texture. It unwraps easily, parallel thread marks of bamboo leaf veins imprint on the smooth and fulfilling surfaces. It’s hardly sticky, unlike bánh ít and bánh dầy (also made from sticky rice). And it’s light. The banh’s are tied together in bundles of ten, and I can eat all ten in one sitting. (I can hardly finish one bánh ít in one sitting.) Funny, “ít” means “small in quantity”, and “ú” means “chubby”.

The traditional bánh ú tro of the North and Central Vietnam is just that, a plain chunk, good by itself to some and must be accompanied by honey or sugar to others. Then with time it got a sweetened red bean paste filling. Then a sweetened mung bean paste filling. Then a sweetened grated coconut filling. I grew up eating the red bean kind every year and thought it was the only kind. So I jumped at the first bunch I saw at Kim’s Sandwiches last Sunday, twelve days after the Fifth of Lunar May. The bunch was tied together by green nylon strings. I hurried home, unwrapped, took a bite. My mom called.
– Mom, I found them!
– Really?!?! How are they?
– Good, but why’s there no bean paste?!

Should’ve gotten the red string bunch instead.

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Bánh ú tro ($3.75/10 pieces) from Kim’s Sandwiches
(in the Lion Supermarket area)
1816 Tully Rd 182, San Jose, CA 95111
(408) 270-8903

(*) Lime paste is used to eat with betel leaves and areca nuts.

Click here for a recipe of bánh ú tro (Vietnamese zong zi)

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Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh bía (Vietnamese adapted Suzhou mooncake)

Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: corn xôi

The literal translation is “highland”, but for most Vietnamese the word Cao Nguyên brings to mind images of eye-soothing green terraces, people of ethnic minorities in colorful traditional dresses and hoop and ring jewelries, dancing around the fire, drinking rice wine with a meter-long straw out of a communal urn, and simple but sturdy stilt houses above ground. In San Jose, Cao Nguyên restaurant has the decor up to theme with an urn and straws in the corner, and a painting of a highlander couple dressed in their most comfortable attire, a wrap from the waist down, by the fire. (This blog is rated G so I’m not gonna upload a picture of the painting.)

The menu, though, isn’t particularly highlandish. At first glance it is similar to most other Vietnamese restaurants, and diners here also order the similar things they always order: hot pots and noodle soups. But if we’re to say that Lemon Grass has more single-portion dishes (the way we always do at American restaurants) and Thảo Tiên‘s focus is Mekong Delta noodle soups, then Cao Nguyên is the place to go for family meals. Most dishes are for sharing among 4-6 people, and to eat with rice.

So share we did. It’s really quite cheap this way. An order of sườn nướng sả (lemongrass grilled pork chop) costs a slim $8.25, and is indeed enough for four even as the chops too are slim like Wasa knäckebröd. It’s not fatty, perhaps a tad dry, and there was no scent of lemongrass, but grilled pork is grilled pork, it’s just never bad.

An order of cá chim chiên comes with nước mắm gừng in a wholesome bowl and some pickled vegetables for colors. The menu reads “pan fried Chinese pompano“, but not only the ca chim I know is pomfret, I’ve never seen ca chim split in half and flattened out on the plate like this, as it is already wide and flat by nature. What we had might not be ca chim after all. However, its extra crispy skin dipped in nước mắm gừng is more than enough to let the zoological tidbit slide. I even got to nibble the eyes. It was $8.95 well spent.

Just a few dimes down are the single-portion rice plates, such as this broken rice for $7.50. There’s that grilled pork chop again, sided by a heap of shredded pork skin (bì), whose chewy and grainy texture contrasts the spongy softness of ground pork and chopped cellophane vermicelli in a slice of golden yellow egg casserole (chả trứng). Somehow this combination is standard for broken rice, with sweet and savory nước chấm enhancing every grain.

Although what we got were not excellent, the restaurant’s popularity speaks differently, and we too enjoyed our meal enough to consider a takeout next time we’re in the area. Just like the highlands and their inhabitants’ cultures, Cao Nguyen isn’t the best, but it has its values.

Address: Cao Nguyên Restaurant
2549 S King Road
San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 270-9610

Lunch for two and lotsa leftovers: $29.17

Other Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose:
– Lemon Grass Vietnamese & French Cuisine
– Thảo Tiên

Chain means reliability. Berkeley’s snobbish take against big franchise and corporations plays to my blogging advantage, but there always lies the uncertainty. It could be a very good looking, cozy little restaurant with quaint menus, and mediocre food. They could have a long line of people waiting in the cold to be seated, and mediocre food. Somehow people sitting about you are all hyped up by the new raw or vegan order, but you just can’t enjoy yours because it’s mediocre food. When a business is the only of its name, there’s just no guarantee that it’s palatable to everyone, no matter how many stars it gets on Yelp or votes by the locals. Franchise takes care of that. I don’t know how. But I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t objectively like Burger King, Subway, Yogurt Land, KFC, et cetera (I say “objectively” because taste buds can be clouded by health conscience, religious reasons and who knows what). Some Vietnamese businesses, though still in much smaller scale, have also established their chain names. For banh mi, we almost always go to Lee’s Sandwiches or Huong Lan. For cha lua, we trust Gio Cha Duc Huong. When we’re in Houston, we go to Phở Danh to slurp noodle soups.

All three locations in Houston have the same silvery ambiance: white walls, glass door, formica tables, simple chairs, bright lights, white melamine dishware. We always get the same things here: pho bo tai for Dad, pho bo chin for Mom and me.

Mom always asks for extra giá trụng, blanched bean sprouts. And Dad always asks for hành dấm, pickled onion. Both are free.

He never asks for hành dấm anywhere else, making me wonder if it’s some special thing of Pho Danh. Vinegar and sugar soften the onion’s pungent flares, but keep it crisp and clean. I submerge it into the steaming broth. Dad savors it alone, one ring at a time.

Pho Danh in Texas

3 locations in Houston:
– 11209 Bellaire Blvd – (281) 879-9940
– 13480 Veterans Memorial Drive‎ – (832) 484-9449
– 11049 FM 1960 Rd‎ – (281) 890-4011

1 location in Austin:
– 11220 North Lamar Boulevard, Austin, TX‎ – (512) 837-7800‎