Flavor Boulevard

Instead of choosing among a few dozen types and brands of cereal, the traditional Vietnamese children choose among a few dozen kinds of stuff made of rice flour and often containing meat for the morning energizer. Meat and rice in the morning, what? You must be be kidding… Well… we have breakfast croissant, breakfast burrito, breakfast sausage and cheese biscuit, sausage and cheese kolache, pancake with sausage and/or bacon and definitely butter, and probably more things out there with meat and dairy. The only difference is rice and wheat, but unless you count your calorie intakes and all, grain is grain.

Banh cuon certainly doesn’t have any cheese or butter in it. I’m still waiting for the day McDonald comes up with MacBanhCuon (MaCuon, maybe?), then banh cuon will have cheese, egg, sausage, and bacon, probably pickles too, but I think the flour sheet is too delicate to be mass produced like the buns. Anyway, I digress. My schooldays back then often started with pho, hu tiu (a noodle soup with pork instead of beef and slightly sweet broth), banh cuon, and occasionally when I was young we had banh gio. There’s not much I could remember about it because it was rare to find a street vendor with trustworthy cleanliness, and it was rare, if ever, to find a store selling banh gio. Yes, it is almost exclusively street food, until it gets to America.

We got our banh gio from a small food shop in Bellaire, downtown Houston, named Gio Cha Duc Huong. A triangular cylinder is its basic shape, a thick coat of rice flour with ground pork and minced woodear mushroom inside, with a little bit wandering too close out to be visible. In all splendor the banh gio is a coarser, thicker, chubbier, more stern and fulfilling version of a roll of banh cuon. I know what it is made of, and I know it is boiled, but I have no idea how they put the liquid mixture of rice flour and water outside a few spoonfuls of meat stuffing to form a pudding wrapped and cooked in banana leaves. The flour coat is bland, but the stuffing makes up for it just right. No condiment is needed, and I don’t know if it has ever been eaten with any kind of condiment. The whole package is somewhat like a student who just pulled an allnighter, rather easily shattered and just collapses in your mouth. A spoon would be much more useful than a fork, and I can’t imagine using chopsticks with this. But its endurance is remarkable: it was made and cooked the same day we bought, it stayed good in the fridge three days later, and its twin brother stayed good one day later at room temperature.

Banh gio is a kind, guileless meal. Unless you eat 3 in one sitting or something oversize like that, it won’t make you feel like carrying a stone around the rest of the day. Its lightness will never betray you.

Sold at most banh mi stores in the States.

My roommate is eating dinner, I haven’t had anything since 9am, and I’ve vowed to stay on this chair until I get a plot to show my advisor, so I can’t grab anything to eat yet (except the cookies within reach). The best solution to satisfy the saddened tummy is to blog about food. Above is a bottle of nuoc mam pha, and a jar of chilly sauce if you’re in the mood for crying.

We come here frequently when I’m in Houston. It’s Banh Cuon Tay Ho #18, belonging to the franchise Banh Cuon Tay Ho (but apparently not on the website, which is good, because the website, oddly enough, is quite Chinese influenced, when banh cuon is as Vietnamese as it can get). I’ve blogged about this chain before, in San Jose, but the restaurant in Houston is quite different. It’s a lot more spacious (you don’t have to worry about accidentally flicking your chopstick, or worse, nuoc mam, over to the other table). In all fairness, it’s Texas. You can’t blame California for being mostly inhabitable. It’s also a lot less Vietnamese-looking, minus the fact that the staff and all customers are Vietnamese. Nicer tables, less noisy, doesn’t have the smell of food, doesn’t have a TV with some beauty contest going on. Anyway, just go to the one in San Jose, then come here, then you’ll like it here better.

Asians like fish, don’t they? I never understand why…

Most of the time I get the to-go box. It’s just more comfortable slurping at home. The plastic box may look flimsy, but I admire it for not spilling out anything during the long drive (with various sudden hitting-the-brake instants).

Three pieces of shrimp tempura, a lone deep-fried shrimp (recall there was no such thing at the San Jose place), a small cup of nuoc mam pha, a bag of quick-boiled bean sprouts and greens whose names I have no clue, slices of cha lua (the ones with yellow curd are cha chien, or fried cha lua). Digging through the jungle, and the heart of goodness is…

…5 rolls of banh cuon. Five! Who can be full after 5 rolls of steamed carbon paper thin rice flour sheet gently stuffed with ground pork and finely chopped wood-ear mushroom? Each was just a little longer than my index finger. They’d make nice body pillows for a mouse. I dipped the rolls into the nuoc mam and they went down too quickly. Perhaps 10 rolls would have sufficed. (That’s why it’s breakfast food in Vietnam.) But making these flimsy pieces of woot requires a bit of skill. With a little less than $6 (cash only), it is a much healthier, more customer-cared meal than a burger or the bully version of a roll, a burrito. The wait was also fairly quick.

Address: Banh Cuon Tay Ho #18 (inside Hong Kong Mall, near Ocean Palace)
11209 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77072

It’s a Sunday night and I have a little more than 12 hours until my first class of a new week. If I make sure I have 8 hours of sleep as they recommend for everyone, and an hour of scurrying around to get ready in the morning, then I’d have only 3 hours left to tend my homework, make a plot to show my advisor, write my thesis (and hope one day I will finish), study for the GRE, and blog. (One would say blogging is a waste of time, but I personally think it’s a better use of time than hanging out at clubs and bars. Anyway, maybe that’s just me.) Of those activities blogging isn’t the easiest one, I kid you not. You got bored from working, took out a piece of pastry your mom got you from Lee’s Sandwiches. You thought, since it’s not popular where you live and you haven’t had it since donkeys ago and couldn’t find it on Wikipedia, maybe you should blog about it. Then you took pictures of it. You even took out a knife to cut it up nicely.

Then you ate it. Then you washed your greasy hand and wiped away the flakes and tossed the napkin into the trash can. Then you took the memory card out of your camera and slid it into the slot on the side of your computer. Nothing showed up. You opened Computer, but no form of external drive was in sight to click on. Windows Vista gives you surprises. Deterred? Nah. A USB cable came in handy, you got your images transferred. Uploaded too. Then you have nothing to write. The pictures are there. The names are there. Just no words in mind. It oddly resembles doing homework.

The pate chaud is a common pastry at any bakery in Saigon, and although I haven’t been to other parts of the country, I’d say it’s common everywhere in Vietnam. It’s not quite common here. This is the second time I’ve had it in America, the first time was at Shokolaat downtown Palo Alto, but Shokolaat serves it as an entree, not a snack, and the stuffing at Shokolaat is not seasoned ground pork. The ground pork clump in Lee’s pate chaud is similar to what I’ve had in Vietnam and the pork stuffing in banh bao (minus the peas and all). Unlike other Americanized Vietnamese dishes loaded with meat, this chap actually has a skim amount of meat inside. If the pate chaud in Saigon is Sarah Palin, fluffy, flaky, and shiny, then the pate chaud in Houston is Vladimir Putin, a charred, compact, powerful settlement in your tummy.

Bu it’ll also flake your desk. It’s a good treat if you’re carnivorous. My mom didn’t tell me how much it cost, regardless my guess is it’s less than $2. Now back to work…

I’ve been back to Texas heat and rain for a week, but my blog will still be on California for who knows how long. With my snail fast speed *maybe* we’ll finish talking about California when I graduate.
Anyway, 3 years after leaving Saigon guess where I had my first Vietnamese banh bao in America… Lee’s Sandwiches in Houston.

My first impression? Decent. That’s all I could say about Lee’s banh bao. But that was then. Now I can say something else: Huong’s banh bao is better. (I blogged about Huong’s Sandwiches here and here)

Both have half a boiled egg, seasoned ground pork, one piece of boiled Chinese sausage (lap xuong), and some kind of vegetable relatives, which is green pea in Huong’s version and some diced carrot in Lee’s. Both are coated with a thick layer of wheat dough, then steamed, hence banh bao can be called steamed bun. The piece of boiled Chinese sausage, remnant from the Chinese ancestor baozi, is a letdown in both Huong’s and Lee’s (the moral of the story is never eat your Chinese sausage boiled just because it tastes good when it’s fried). So what’s the difference? Well, the coat is one difference. Huong’s has it fluffy and light, it looks thick but it tastes lighter than the inner fluff of a biscuit, and the inner most side is wet with sauce from the stuffing. The stuffing is the other difference. Huong’s is slightly sweet, slightly salty, slightly peppered, and it was just down right savory. I savored it, every bite. That clump of meat couldn’t be any better seasoned, the egg also sipped some of the savory sauce and became seasoned itself. For only $1.50, it surely makes your tummy happy for a while.

We got one banh bao with 4 banh mi thit nuong and a tray of banh bot loc, all for $15.50, and the lady took only $15 (we believe she didn’t want to break our 5-dollar bill, since we didn’t have 50c in change). She doesn’t know a whole lot of English, but we could tell she was happy that Mudpie could speak some Vietnamese. 🙂 I don’t know when I will be in the area again, so I’m counting on Mudpie to do more exploration with the wide variety of labelless food items in that little shop.

If you have a handful of shrimp, some pork, some cassava roots, and a banana leaf, what would you do? I’d boil the cassava and hope it doesn’t kill me, throw the shrimp and pork in the skillet with some stir fry vegetable, and wouldn’t know why on earth I even have a banana leaf. That’s why I’m not a Vietnamese chef.

Banh bot loc. That’s what you can make out of a handful of shrimp, some pork, some cassava roots, and a banana leaf. We were looking at these banana wraps while waiting for our banh mi thit nuong at Huong’s, and the owner, noticing our cuckoo stare, kindly told us what they were. The simplicity of the name gives away the main step of making the banh: loc (filter) the bot (flour), in this case cassava flour, which makes it translucent and a tad chewy. The shrimp-pork stuffing is well seasoned so the banh is good by itself without nuoc mam. I have the feeling the stuffing is cooked separately before coated by the flour to be steamed, but how it is cooked I know not Here’s the recipe. But I wouldn’t bother, if you’re in San Jose, for only $3 you get 6 of these.
I’m not sure what food category banh bot loc belongs too, appetizer, perhaps? We had them for snack one night. The nice thing is that was 4 nights after we bought them from Huong’s, refrigerated, and microwaved for 2 minutes on high. They tasted perfectly fresh.

It’s always interesting to read reviews online. A good place always has some reviews that smash them down mercilessly as if all those reviewers were served was a piece of wood with splinters and a side of mud. One thing people should keep in mind when they go to Vietnamese restaurants: order the house specialties. It’s in their name. It’s something they started out with and have earned a living from. It’s what they know best. It’s the difference between an authentic Vietnamese restaurant and a mass-production Chinese buffet. Try something else on the menu only if the specialty satisfies you, and if you want to be adventurous, well, keep your complaints to yourself. Adventures rarely bring satisfaction.

If you ate at Banh Cuon Tay Ho in Bellaire, Houston before, Banh Cuon Tay Ho in San Jose will satisfy your craving, but will not give you the oomph and aaahhhh. Small tables under a small roof, equipped with the usual tray of bottles of rooster chili sauce, soy sauce, some other kind of chili sauce I’m not sure if my tongue would allow me to try, and a huge bottle/vase of nuoc mam mixed with sugar, lime juice, water, and a moderate amount of chili pepper. Pictured above is the house specialty: banh cuon nhan thit (rice rolls stuffed with ground pork and minced wood ear mushroom), served on flowery melamine plate, with bean sprout and sliced cucumber for the bedding, one piece of unknown tempura, and 5 thin slices of cha lua. (Now if you had it in Bellaire, you’d have gotten 3 pieces of shrimp tempura.) Nonetheless it is good.

Also ordered is a serving of banh cuon thit nuong (banh cuon with barbecued pork stuffing). No bean sprout visible on the plate, no cucumber, lots of cilantro and fried shallots atop.

Embarrassingly I must admit I did toss a chunk of the banh cuon roll into the spoon of nuoc mam then into my mouth before I remembered to take a picture. It was very good. Bean sprouts were inside the rolls, so no funky chopstick pickups required. The meat was well seasoned enough that you don’t really need a pool of nuoc mam to buff up the taste. I’ll remember to order it again when I go to Banh Cuon Tay Ho in Bellaire, for comparison.
The TV in the small corner was speaking in Vietnamese. The people around us were speaking in Vietnamese. The waiters were speaking to us half in Vietnamese and half in English. Minus the food carts and woven baskets of goodies on the streets, it’s just so Vietnamese in San Jose.
Lunch for two plus tip was $16.
One more thing, Vietnamese restaurants don’t like to have a website for themselves, and if they do, it doesn’t seem very well updated. Either that, or the Banh Cuon Tay Ho #18 in Bellaire isn’t part of the corporation. And what’s up with the Chinese characters?

Address: Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #8
2895 Senter Rd
San Jose, CA 95111
(408) 629-5229