Flavor Boulevard

Tag: bun

  • one shot: Bun Rieu at Ba Le Sandwich

      ba-le-sandwich-bun-rieu
      Good ol’ tomato and crab noodle soup from Southern Vietnam: bún riêu (pronounced |boon rhee-oo|). The broth looks alarmingly spicy but this soup is actually never spicy. The orange red color comes from tomato and annatto seeds, and if you’re lucky, crab roe (if fresh crabs are used for the soup).

      The sweetness of the broth comes from freshwater paddy crabs, where the whole crab (meat and shell) is ground to a paste and strained for the juice. It’s a delicate, distinctive sweetness that can’t be reproduced with dashi no moto, meat bones or mushroom. To deepen the flavor, the cook adds some mắm ruốc, fermented krill paste, to the broth.

      Traditionally, bun rieu has crab meat and tofu for the protein part, but bun rieu at Ba Le Sandwich is ladened with cha lua, pork and shrimp.

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    • Bánh cuốn Hoa – The rule of the steamed rolls


        Like with most Asian eating establishments, it’s virtually impossible to answer the question “what is the best Vietnamese restaurant in [name of city]?” Let me stay there for about half a year, and I can tell you where to get the best pho, the best cha gio, the best bun thit nuong, the best banh mi, but not the best Vietnamese. Assuming you would agree that I can’t compare a place that specializes in noodle to another that specializes in beef, I would admit: I don’t know what you mean by “the best Vietnamese”. Do you mean everything on the menu is the best of its kind? Everything is good? Everything is cheap and good? Everything is cheap and good and the service is the best? Everything is cheap and good, the service is good, and the ambiance is the best? You see, there are more variables in your generic question than I could possibly control with my subjectivity. And that is not to consider the possibility of you asking that question just because I’m Vietnamese, which doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m usually not sure of how much detail you’d like to receive. (I’ve included the preferred question at the end of this post.)


        That said, if you ask me, what is the best Vietnamese restaurant in Houston, which I take that you’ve given me the full freedom to interpret your meaning and exert my subjectivity, I’d say Banh Cuon Hoa. Why? Because they serve the best of my favorite Vietnamese dish, and as I’ve discovered, the “best Vietnamese” shops are those with the best steamed rolls. Steamed rolls are hard to get right, so when they get them right, everything else they have is good. 😉

        The flour skin is super thin, cool but not sour, and not oily. The pork-and-mushroom stuffing is well seasoned, not too much to bore, and not too little to bore. This banh cuon is better than banh cuon from Tay Ho’s. Ask any Vietnamese person, and they’d agree that that statement is not to be precariously thrown around unless the banh cuon is very good.

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      • Hương Giang – Savour Huế in Houston


          I lost my memory card. If you’re a food blogger too you’d know how devastated I felt: the first advice to a food blogger these days is “good pictures”. Well, the pictures I took at Hương Giang are amazing, they just no longer exist. But, pictures or not, as my professor Lawrence Hall would say in his British tongue, “you can’t stop me,” or in this case, I can’t stop myself from blogging about the restaurant.

          Is their food that good? Hương Giang takes a shy, small square in the parking lot at the corner of Bellaire and Boone. If you drive westward on Bellaire Blvd, you’ll see its sign on the left before you reach Hong Kong Market. It’s really a tucked-away place for scoffers, the outlook unimpressive, the sign blue and white like a tired worker shirt. The inside is similar to any average pho joints you’ve seen, wiped clean and plastic cheap. I knew my mom wouldn’t come here if not for blogging’s sake, but in this city it’d be hard to get a menu more Huế than this one.

          There are pictures in the menu and printouts taped to the wall to tell you what the specials are. For us it’s a matter of getting what we’ve heard of but not had: gỏi mít tôm thịt, bánh ít ram, cơm hến, and bún suông.

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