Flavor Boulevard

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

Pork meat ball with tomato sauce (seasoned with sugar, salt, garlic, and onion), thin omelet (just egg and green onion), and marinated cha lua, on French bread.

Pork chop, marinated with salt, sugar, onion, and garlic. Very simple. To the left is xoi dau xanh (mung bean xoi), and canned green beans (OK, I added the green beans).

Pork chop sandwich. Same pork chop as above.

Catfish fried with the usual sugar-salt-garlic-onion and lemon grass. Mixed with white rice for serving.

Pasta and rotisserie chicken (dark meat).

Pork-stuffed potato and cucumber, in tomato sauce (No garlic and onion this time, I believe, albeit I’m no Remy).

So, what’s for dessert? Dua nuoc (literally “water coconut”, scientifically Nypa Fruticans – why the ‘s‘ at the end?). Somewhat similar to water chesnut, if I have to make a comparison.

Happy weekend!

Lunch today, at Pie Are Square:

Yes, that was my lunch in its entirety (minus a bite).

Name: I have no idea what kind of muffin it is, although it reminds me of Thanksgiving, with pecan, pumpkin color, and raisins, and some red thing I can’t make out.
Pleasing to the eye: Hmm… Nice color, I’d say.
Taste: First bite: not bad. Second bite: like Thanksgiving, October-November-ish, when all the leaves fall and, well, dry. See what I’m getting at? It tastes like sun-dried leaves. Now where did my water go?
Filling: Yes. After I drank a lot of water.
Satisfaction: Com’on, Pie Are Square, where did your good meals go?
Price: $1.49.

On the other hand, here’s lunch yesterday, at home. And made in home (by little mom, actually):

Name: goi cuon (salad roll).
Pleasing to the eye: what do you expect me to say?
Taste: crunchy lettuce, tender chicken, firm shrimp, soft rice vermicelli, thin and moist rice paper. But really, the taste of a goi cuon comes from the dipping sauce in the little bowl. Meat sauce, in this case, flavoured with garlic, sugar, salt, and onion. Hard to explain, you just have to take a taste for youself. But no worries, you can’t find this sauce anywhere but my mom’s kitchen and my fridge. And you’ll have to step over my dead body to get this out of my fridge.

Not the best shot, but try to take a picture with one hand that isn’t your right hand, when the button is on the right hand side of the camera. Bon appetit!

Is it filling? What do you think?
Satisfaction: Hold on, let me lick my fingers… Ok… Hey, I’m trying to be objective here, please don’t make it any harder.
Price: being a good and obedient child.

The pho was good. The broth was beefy and the noodle was brothy. Every twirl you manage to pick up with the pair of disposable bamboo chopsticks was worth inhaling a deep breath for the flavor to soak your taste buds and dally with your turbinate. The tripe and the sweet onion rings texture-wise taste about the same to me (see, tripe tastes just fine!), which is good, since I’m soft-tongued and those little zings of spiciness can easily bring me to tears. Tendon and Flank were, frankly, tender, but still a good change of texture from the lean brisket consistency and the rice noodle naivete.

Rosie’s Pho does not serve just pho. It serves a whollota things. Mudpie once amusedly predicted that one day its menu will include pizza and hamburgers. But no, it has stopped expanding, at a menu large enough that I had to carouse over for 5 minutes to find my order amidst various noodle and rice dishes. But my dad didn’t take that long, and he didn’t even have glasses on. So here’s his order:

Grilled beef chunk steak served over rice. Don’t you just love the colorful display? I have no idea what the sauce to the side was, he didn’t have it with his rice, and I was busy snouting in my soup, so I didn’t remember to chopstick a taste, until now. My take is soy sauce with ground peanuts, but please let me know if you have a guess at what it is.

Another shot close up. I just really like the colours, the flowery arrangement, the inviting variety. We see fresh cucumber, tomato, lettuce, onion; we see stir fried bell pepper, more onion; and we see grilled marinated beef, and very little rice. The Vietnamese dishes here are so Americanized that meat overpowers everything. Anyway, dad said he remembered the beef here used to be more tender. Maybe the chef was a little occupied with my humongous USS Pho, and chunky beef got overcharred. Sorry for the hype over the colours.

But we have desserts to make up for it. 🙂

I know, that is not the most dazzling presentation. We had to ask for to-gos, because we sat there too long to let the dust food settle before ordering dessert, and ended up running out of time. In the plastic cup is green tea ice cream, which tastes extremely like banyan pandan leaf (lá dứa) to me. My favorite. I can come here just for this ice cream. Avocado bubble tea and chocolate Capuccino bubble tea were pleasant endings as well. What else can you expect?

Lunch for three with desserts costs a total of $36, tip and tax included. (I kinda miss dining in Vietnam, no tip and tax there.) And we were rolling out filled to the brim.

Address: Rosie’s Phở – Asian noodle soup
2001 Texas Ave S #300
College Station, TX 77840
(979) 680-8580

There is no Hong Kong Market or Bellaire (or 99 Ranch Market or Bolsa, if you are Californian) in College Station, but there is Vietnamese food here. Rosie’s Pho (noodle soup) opened about two years ago. We were among their first customers, and the owner of the place, Ms Hồng, even remembered me when I came back a few months later with my friends. Talk about hospitality. (Guess how we know she’s the owner: hồng means rose in Vietnamese.)

We came early for lunch. When we finished our meal at around 12:30, the place was a whole lot more crowded. It’s good to sit again at the familiar booth we always sit, close to the entrance and far away from the kitchen’s action. It’s also good to see the same ole expression on the cashier’s face, definitely not unfriendly, but so contemplative that makes me wonder if he has important exchange going on at the stock market or something of sort. It feels casual, and you don’t need to put up big smiles here for a show of warmth. The warmth comes to you in a bowl.

I ordered a the-more-the-merrier karnival of beef brisket, tendon, flank, and tripe phở. Large bowl. Huge mistake. No, WAIT. No. Don’t leave. Let me explain. The mistake is mine, not the pho’s or the cook’s. I had no idea what I was up against (I don’t remember it being like this before). For all its goodness and meatiness and brothiness, as you can see above, look at the size of the bowl! I could take a bath in there. And I would drown. But before I do, shall we take a minute to spot the white bundle at 4-5 o’clock of the bowl? It’s Tripe. Tendon and Flank were camera-shy and hidden under Brisket. If you are grossed out by the thought of eating anything animalia, muscle, but non-flesh, offensively commonly known as offals, and think that they taste gross, let me beg to differ that they are texture food, and they do have their unique charms. If you chew gum, why not give tripe a try?

The herb plate accompanying the USS Pho here has the basics: cilantro, rau hung, rau ram, bean sprout, interestingly-cut pieces of lime, and (the American substitution for cayenne pepper) jalapeno. I eat my pho without any condiments or herbs, but little mom likes the greens and the bean sprout…

… which makes her bowl look so much prettier than mine.

(To be continued)

Address: Rosie’s Phở – Asian noodle soup
2001 Texas Ave S #300
College Station, TX 77840

Around noon time, in front of the smaller-than-a house’s door gate of the old Pho Thong Nang Khieu high school (notice they don’t show you the gate in that picture…), came an ice cream man. The typical street vendor, with a big styrofoam box on a bike, maybe a couple of buckets on the sides, I’m not sure if I remember correctly the details here. He sold kem ong, i.e. ice cream tubes. It’s something I’d never had before and possibly will never see again.

His ice cream had a skinny tubular shape, about a foot long, stick to a long skinny bamboo stick. The ice cream is actually contained in aluminum tubes, from which he quickly pulled out when we asked to buy. I usually went for the jackfruit kind (kem mit), where you have little strips of jackfruit hidden inside the ice cream, quite a treasure to chew as the vanilla milky bits melt on your tongue. For VND1000 a stick, the kem mit was sold out within 15 minutes or so. He also had kem dau xanh (mung bean ice cream), kem dau do (red bean ice cream), and a few other types, but I don’t remember getting those. It was a very nice treat for lunch break between 5 hours of morning classes and a few more hours of afternoon ones. It’s fun to share with friends too, since the tubes were so long and took you longer to eat than it to melt.

Does he still sell ice cream there, anyone knows? If you can take a picture of the ice cream, please do, and send me a link! I’m dying to just look at them again…

Side note: This post was originally written to explain the idea behind Eistube, my old little blogging corner. After moving, I feel oblige to keep the ice cream content with little editing. It was just too sweet a memory to erase from a food blog.