Flavor Boulevard

Category: Northern Vietnamese

  • Bodega Bistro – Defining authenticity


      The laminated page has Goi Cuon next to Fritures de Calmars, Bo Luc Lac between Rossini style Tournedos and Agneau. Funny interlingual names like “Ap Chow Bo” and “Ap Chow Hai San” precede English descriptions of stir fries. Don’t bother google “ap chow”. Such innovative term doesn’t exist outside the menu of Bodega Bistro. Just like the dialogues between Jim and Huckleberry Finn, names like these can’t be understood unless you speak it out loud in your head. Ap chow is áp chảo, “press against the pan”, a Vietnamese way of saying pan fry. Why did the chef phonetically transform it into Chinese, while keeping Goi Cuon and Bo Luc Lac true to their original spellings? I don’t know, but I got a chuckle out of it.


      The menu alone, however, didn’t strike me as anything unusual. This wasn’t the first time I had to decode a strange name for a familiar dish. Vietnamese menus tend to have such mix between trying to keep the Vietnamese name and (mis)translating it into some other language. The unusual thing was that our thought-to-be-Vietnamese waiter didn’t understand me when I said the dishes’ names in Vietnamese. Then I noticed Chinese songs blasting shuo shuo in the background. And Chinese conversations between the waiters. And, shame on Vietnamese restaurants, very good service.

      More on the service part later. But I have a small grudge against Chinese restaurants dishing out Vietnamese food. It’s probably rooted in the powerless distress at the rice-paper-wrapped-and-fried spring roll confused with the Chinese egg roll, or the names of vegetables, fish, and New Year festival with the word “Chinese” attached to it, as if China were the whole Asia. Not that it’s the Chinese’s fault. To my mind, the Chinese have enough dishes of their own, they don’t need to adopt our recipes and innocently serve them without reference. Likewise, I feel slightly vexed by orange chicken and sweet-and-sour pork on Vietnamese menus, things that just mean to attract the safe eaters.

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    • Sandwich Shop Goodies 1 – Banh gai (thorn leaf bun)


        Sitting still, it looks like a rock. It is sweet with a hint of lard. It is chewy with a weak crunch, similar to a lasagna’s crust. The smooth, thick black skin shines like lacquered wood, but possesses an almost clear and cool embrace of jello. Though closely related to the superglutinous and mud-heavy banh it, banh gai takes it light.

        The same everenduring stuff of Vietnamese villagers’ creations are thrown together, wrapped and steamed in banana leaves: sticky rice flour, water, mung bean paste, sugar. If you make it in cone shape and let the sugar brown the flour naturally, you get banh it. Go the extra mile of picking, chopping, sun-drying, boiling, and grinding the ramie leaves to a black powder that you would mix with your sticky rice flour in a 1:10 ratio, then after the fire settles you get banh gai.


        Actually, you get the skin of banh gai. The thorny ramie leaves with silver underside give the black buns their color and trademark names, “thorn leaf banh it” (bánh ít lá gai), “thorn leaf banh” (bánh lá gai), or, most economically, “thorn banh” (bánh gai). But as proof of their everversatile imagination with ingredients, the villagers of North Vietnam mix the mung bean paste with shredded coconut, lotus seed, ground peanut, winter melon (bí đao) for crunchiness, and translucent cubes of pig fat or vegetable oil for a mild saltiness.

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      • Banh cuon, bun, and beyond – Tay Ho #9

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          I have discovered another great soup. My fingers trembled with anticipation over the sweet aroma, the shining aurulent broth, those fragile fatty bubbles that form a thin film on the surface, the promising dapple of fried shallot,… and the pictures got all blurry. So just squint your eyes and pretend for the moment that you’re hunching over a bowl of piping hot succulence and the steam makes your eyes hazy. Can you smell that sweet aroma? No? Grab a chair at Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #9 in North Oakland, ask for a bowl of bún mộc, and find out for yourself.

          Before diving thy chopsticks into the noodle soup, let us start with the name. It can be spelled either bún mọc or bún mộc, the hat on the “o” changes the word’s meaning and thus the name’s origin, but nobody is certain which one is correct. “Mộc” means “simple”, the broth is simply boiling water savorized by salt, pepper, nuoc mam, pork, shiitake, and wood ear mushroom.  “Mộc” also means pork paste (twice-ground or pounded pork, seasoned, known as “giò sống” in Vietnamese), which is the central ingredient in the original soup but not in the rendition at Tay Ho #9. I like gio song, but sliced meatballs and cha lua (silk sausage) make a trustworthy substitution. The cook here also threw in some shredded chicken breast as a reassurance of familiar fixings. Now if you drop the hat on the “o”, “Mọc” is the nickname of the former village Nhân Mục, a part of west Hanoi today. This village can very well be the hometown of the meat-laden rice noodle soup, hence the noodle soup’s name. However the spelling goes, all we southerners know is bun moc comes from the north and is less than popular in Saigon. Most Vietnamese immigrants in the Star Flag States are southerners, so bun moc is even harder to find on the menus here. But as long as there’s a kitchen somewhere churning out these mouth-warming, bellicious bowls, there will be my pair of chopsticks eager for a hearty winter fling.

          In the mood for something a little more adventurous?

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        • Bánh dầy giò – sticky rice bun with sausage

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            It’s just a white bun made from sticky rice, loosely wrapped in banana leaf so that it doesn’t attach indefinitely to your fingers, ready to sandwich a thick cut of cha lua. The purpose of the bun is purely a textural enjoyment, it has neither taste nor smell. All flavors come from the sausage. Eating the bun alone would be like chewing an incredibly huge piece of gum, the only difference is you can swallow the bun. Come to think of it, we can make a bunch of bite size sticky rice “gum” for American school kids, they can chew until they’re bored, and swallow it, no unfortunate mess under the desks and your shoes. Cool, innit?

            Because of either its simplicity or its antiqueness, the bánh dầy is not quite a favorable snack among the young Vietnamese these days. Or perhaps because it is a treat from the North? Southerners have a sweet tooth and are attracted to fatty, rich, flavor-compact concoctions. Bánh dầy is none of that. When I was in Saigon I knew of bánh dầy through three sources: the extremely common tale of bánh chưng bánh dầy, the book “Hanoi 36 streets” by Thạch Lam, and the tiny buns filled with bean paste (bánh dầy đậu) Little Mother got for me from Ngọc Sáng bakery in District 1. Another case of cross cultural similarity: compare the banh day dau with the Japanese daifuku: the sticky rice coat is exactly like mochi, the mung bean filling is salty while daifuku’s filling is sweetened.

            banh day 4

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          • Giò Chả Đức Hương – sausage and so much more

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              Given how often my family comes here, I feel obliged to give this store a proper post. About every other week or so, my parents make the hour-long drive to get a loaf or two of cha lua (silk sausage) and maybe a few Vietnamese between-a-snack-and-a-meal goodies. The affable owner lady knows our usual grabs, and we know her trustworthy provision. Whether it’s wrapped in banana leaves, aluminum foil, or cling wrap, Giò Chả Đức Hương has the best of its kind in Bellaire.

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              The shelves of nem (fermented pounded pork sausage), bánh tét (sticky rice log), and bánh ít (sticky rice pyramid). These small bánh tét are sold all year round, they are only about 4 inches long, usually with vegan filling (mung bean paste or banana). They make an appropriate snack for a teenager, but usually a little too much for me. Unwrapped below, left-right-down: bánh giò – bánh ít – bánh tét:

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            • Bánh giò – Boiled pork rice pie


              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.

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