Beware: extreme food porn to follow.
My only real contact with true Vietnamese culture has been
through food. In the late 1980s, as a young graduate architect in Orange
County, California, I had befriended several Vietnamese émigrés who steered me
through the culinary mysteries of restaurants of ‘Little Saigon’, a loosely
defined community in Westminster and Garden Grove. Lots of soups, wonderful
crunchy deep fried stuff using rice in a myriad of forms: straight up, noodles,
broken, flour. Fresh and pungent herbs.
And that ubiquitous and iconic Vietnamese condiment, nước mắm, fish sauce. Mixed with
lime and/or sugar, chilies, herbs it is a classic example of umami and you want
to put it on everything, Whatever you order here in Saigon, a bowl of fish
sauce accompanies. To simply call it a condiment like ketchup is insufficient;
it is a catalyst to the amazing flavors of this cuisine.
My brief visit
to Saigon on the simple task of finding great examples of just two classic
staples of Vietnamese cuisine, pho and banh mi. These are actually relatively
new dishes in the history of this ancient culture, but are wildly popular here
and abroad.
Pho
I hope this
whole internet thing catches on. Prior to arriving here, I did some research
online to find where to get the best pho, mainly in Saigon District 1,
preferably a short taxi ride away. Apparently defining who makes the best pho
is like deciding what kind of Protestant you want to be- at the core its
basically the same, just what kind of frills do you want.
I decided on
Pho Hoa at the very north end of Louis Pasteur Boulevard. In the south, they
usually eat pho in the morning, so I left the hotel after a somewhat staid
continental breakfast, visited a dark, incense-fogged Taoist temple full of
oversized scary god/men statues and walked the mile over to Pho Hoa. The
sidewalk full of parked motorbikes was a good sign, and waiting for a table at
ten in the morning on a Saturday also boded well. Simple and clean with stools
and folding tables, this place is not about atmosphere. A stainless
steel-surfaced box right off the sidewalk housed the small kitchen like a
precious jewel and indeed this was the simple hearth from which the one product
of this place sprung, soup.
Fortunately
for us tourists, there is a picture menu of the varieties of pho. I point and
grunt. In three minutes, a huge bowl of steaming rice noodles and beef in broth
was plopped in front of me. Fine chopped green onions covered the surface like
the North Pacific trash gyre. The customary bowls of bean sprouts, lime
segments and fresh chilies were dropped as well. An enormous pile of fresh
herbs as well, including my favorite, holy basil, with its slight anise flavor.
Piling all that in, along with Hoisin and chili sauce, my bowl was filled to
the top.
For me, soup
is all about the broth. Screw that up and the dish fails. The broth of pho is a
very long, slow process, working every bit of flavor from beef bones, beef
pieces and oxtails. Roasted onions and roasted spices like ginger, cinnamon,
star anise and cardamom part their wonderful tastes. The result is a perfumed
rich liquid that stimulates the olfactories as much as the taste senses. I
could taste the experience of the cook, focused as she was on basically doing
one thing. And doing it well.
Eating pho is
never elegant, involving much slurping. But doing as the locals, I hunched over
and devoured.
Banh Mi
The classic
Saigon sandwich can be found everywhere in the City. By triangulating a couple
of local foodie blogs and TripAdvisor, I found the very close Bánh Mì Huỳnh Hoa. The store is so small it is
basically just like a food cart with a fixed address. Cars and motorbikes stop
and park illegally right in front to grab a sandwich. This is the closest to
drive-thru fast food in the heart of Saigon yow will find, but serving
something far beyond Mickey D’s.
Just as pho depends on a
good broth, Banh mi relies, as do all sandwiches in my mind, on the quality of
the bread. French colonialism taught the Vietnamese how to make exquisite
breads and pastries, often- quelle
horreur!- better than France herself. The baguette used by Bánh Mì Huỳnh
Hoa differs subtlely from the French original. The crust is crunchy but
thinner, prone to cracking under gentle pressure, like the vitreous sugar
veneer of a crème brulee. The light fluffy mie
inside has just enough body to support the sandwich innards, but with no real
substance otherwise.
A rich paté was generously slathered along the bottom half.
BBQ pork, a pork cold cut and dried shredded pork followed. Then pickled
carrots and daikon radish, green onions, fresh herbs, a squirt of something
like fish sauce or soy, some little but effing hot chili fragments. In one
movement he wraps it in paper, bags it and ties a rubber band around it. He
gives it to me as I handed over the 30,000 dong to him. Yeah. A dollar eighty
for this sandwich I travelled 20 hours to enjoy.
A mouthful of this
sandwich simply has everything going. Sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, herbaceous, crunchy,
smooth, umami. Heaven.
I also had Bánh xèo, a fried rice flour pancake
stuffed with shrimp and pork.
