EatingAsia

Grilled Pork: Saigon Edition

A fatty marinated chop on the grill in Saigon

     Malaysia boasts Asia's best pork -- fatty and flavorful, unmatched by the pork eaten anywhere else in the region. This is what I tell anyone who might ask about pork in Asia, and it's what I tell myself every time I dig into a plate of char siew (sweet and sticky barbecued pork), bite into a baked BBQ pork bun, or spoon up one of the tender hand-formed pork balls that float in my favorite version of Penang's breakfast noodle soup, koay teow th'ng.

     Then I go to Vietnam -- most recently, Saigon, where gauzy clouds of porcine charcoal smoke waft over the streets, especially in the mornings and the evenings. Has Ho Chi Minh City become porkier since we left? I doubt it, and yet I don't remember such an omnipresent scent of grilling pig from our years there in the early naughts. It may be that I was never much of a pork fan before we moved to Malaysia. (This is a bit ironic, though the assumption that pork is hard to find in Muslim Malaysia is mistaken. The country's Chinese population assures that even on the mostly Malay peninsular east coast pork can be found in restaurants and wet markets). Whatever the reason, these days when I return to Vietnam my food wanderings are very much about the hog.

     Which is why our first meal on this last trip back "home" (a stop en route back to Penang from Phu Quoc, where Dave worked on what promises to be a delicious article with Vietnamese-American food writer and cookbook author Andrea Nguyen) was such a disappointment. After dropping our bags at our hotel we headed straight for Nhu Lan, an old favorite sited kitty-corner to the electric shaver-shaped Bitexco tower. Back in the day Dave and I would hit Nhu Lan once every weekend for lunch; our standard order: dependably tasty bun thit nuong (grilled pork with cool rice vermicelli and pickled vegetables) and fresh spring rolls with fruit shakes (pineapple and sapodilla for me, soursop for Dave).

Bun thit nuong at Thai Binh market, Saigon

     Times have changed. Nowadays it's not strips of hot-from-the-grill fish sauce and sugar-marinated pork or pork patties that sit atop Nhu Lan's rice vermicelli, but cold pieces of meat with a strangely artificial Liquid Smoke-like flavor that have been reheated in a microwave. (Our other dishes -- a banh mi, sticky rice steamed in lotus leaf, and banh cuon or steamed rice noodle sheets -- were equally disappointing. Unfortunately Nhu Lan has taken a nosedive. We won't return.)

     A few days later we went again in search of grilled pork, this time to a morning market. As I've argued elsewhere, Asia's morning markets are (too often untapped, by tourists) street food goldmines. They're especially useful to a.m grazers in Vietnam, where the number of breakfast specialties numbers in the dozens.

     At District 1's Thai Binh market we found what we were looking for: not one but three grills belching smoke laced with the heavenly scent of well-marbled meat. Dave's bun thit nuong featured a mixture of herbs and lettuce hiding beneath a nest of vermicelli topped with pork, peanuts and a dainty dab of chopped scallion greens wilted in hot oil. Daikon and carrot pickle in nuoc mam (fish sauce) were served on the side and -- nice touch -- the table held a glass jar containing more pickle with which to serve ourselves.

Com thit nuong, broken rice with a grilled pork chop topped with scallion greens in oil

     I opted for com thit nuong, a whole pork chop sliced crosswise and laid atop "broken" rice. As I dug in I was reminded how much I love the rice in Vietnam, with its wonderful chew and not-quite-sticky texture that hovers somewhere between short-grain and glutinous rice. Next to my rice lay carrot and daikon pickle, cucumbers, and a few leaves of lettuce and basil. The fish sauce for dipping I doctored to my (somewhat extreme) taste with a couple of spoonfuls of crushed fresh red chili.

     What makes Vietnamese pork so tasty? It might be down to the variety of pig raised there, and probably is linked to what they eat. But there's also the issue of freshness.

A butcher in the wet market; crusty BBQ pork to serve with rice vermicelli or rice

     The average Vietnamese housewife/home cook shops for ingredients at least once and often twice a day. Most Vietnamese wet markets have two rush hours, in the morning and evening. Fresh ingredients are delivered to stall holders throughout the day (much as the best banh mi vendors have fresh bread delivered to them hourly).

     When I was last in Vietnam, Australian chef, Vietnam cookbook author and Hanoi Cooking Centre owner Tracey Lister told me that for pigs in Vietnam, the average time from slaughter to butcher block is 4 or 5 hours. It doesn't get much fresher than that.

There are several grilled pork vendors at small, easily navigable Thai Binh market, which located across from the bus terminal at the edge of Saigon's backpacker district on Pham Ngu Lao Street. Or follow your nose to -- and judge with your eyes -- the grilled pork dishes served up by any of the city's hundreds of other vendors, who usually set up in the mornings and evenings. I judge a bun thit nuong / com thit nuong by the vendor's generosity of pickles, the presence of a sprinkle of peanuts and dab of oily scallion greens, and his or her pork's lardy glaze and crusty surface.

Phở: Not (Just) A Noodle Soup

So sue me. I thought that phở referred to a Vietnamese street dish comprising rice noodles in a rich broth. It does, of course. But phở is much more, for the dish is actually named for the rice flour sheets from which its noodles are made.

So there I was, like an idiot, proclaiming myself to be unimpressed with phở -- it is true that I am not enamored of the dish, but I'm open to being converted -- when by doing so I was unwittingly writing off a whole host of foods made with phở or, to be more precise, bánh phở (those rice flour sheets).

But, before we go there, a quick diversion into the murky origins of Phở the Dish. By now pretty much every phởnatic knows its story: phở is the result of a marriage of French culinary prowess and Vietnamese adaption, an indiginized version of the classic pot au feu.

But not so fast. There is a contrarian take on phở's origins. I was glad to learn of it (thank you Mark of Stickyrice). The pot-au-feu-to-phở tale always struck me as a wee too neat and tidy.

In her book Aspirations and Appetites in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century Erica J. Peters tells us that phở first appeared on Hanoi streets (the creation of one single cook? or many cooks? the identity of the dish's inventor(s) are lost to the ages) after cows -- not traditionally eaten by Vietnamese but used as draft animals -- were imported into the country and raised for the colonial French table.

"Networks of Chinese and Vietnamese who butchered meat for the French or cooked their meals probably diverted beef remnants to street soup vendors," Peters elaborates in a paper titled "Defusing Phở: Soup Stories and Ethnic Erasures"

And to me at least, this take on phở's origins rings true. Wouldn't Vietnamese cooks, as enterprising as any cooks anywhere, have figured out what to do with meaty bones and scraps? Would they have needed -- or wanted -- to call upon a classic French dish for inspiration? For that matter, why should we assume that phở''s inventor(s) knew pot au feu firsthand? In her book, for which she drew on French writings from the colony, Peters describes French colonials who went to great pains to hold themselves apart from locals, right down to what they ate.

Yet there is still the question of name -- phở' must certainly be a Vietnamese transliteration of feu, right? But the word phở' could have come from fun -- Cantonese for phở'-like rice noodles -- which Vietnamese would have known from the noodle dishes that, Peters observes, were sold by southern Chinese on the streets of Saigon and Hanoi.It wouldn't be the last time Vietnamese street cooks adapted a noodle specialty from a neighboring Asian country (see hủ tiếu).

Whatever phở''s true origin story we know its evolution: from Hanoi street specialty to Vietnam's most iconic dish. Food-focused travelers to the country tend to obsess over it (often to the point of missing out on other, equally delicious Vietnamese noodle specialties) even in Saigon, which lies about 1,780 kilometers south of Phở' Central. (Phở' made its way to Saigon with migrants from Hanoi in the middle of the 20th century, and morphed into a whole other animal. Which version is better? I'm not sticking my toe into that debate.)

Lesser known to visitors is that Vietnam's beloved noodle soup now lends its name to other dishes made from banh phở', those rice flour sheets. A few weeks ago we sampled two, in a neighborhood near Truc Bach Lake that's home to a rash of shops spilling tables streetside and serving all things banh phở'. For reasons I know not of, most of these dishes include beef.

Phở cuốn are rice rice flour rectangles rolled around roughly chopped beef, cilantro and lettuce served with a nuoc mam floating thin slices of kohlrabi. Think Vietnamese fresh spring rolls with a thicker, slicker wrapper and a meatier, heavier filling. Whether it's made from wheat or rice flour I love a noodle or a dumpling wrapper that boasts a bit of heft and chew, but the phở cuốn didn't wow me. The beef was a bit chewy for the delicacy of the wrapper and I missed the in-your-face herbiness of a classic "salad roll". Tasty enough but I probably wouldn't go out of my way for a repeat nosh.

I would, however, travel many hours for another go at phở chiên phồng, a delectable saucy stir-fry of beef, tomato and choy sum or Chinese mustard (thanks Duy, for the correction) ladled over crispy golden rice flour pillows. The rice flour puffs are made by deep-frying squares cut from two banh phở' sheets that have been pressed together.

The puffs are slightly oily (difficult to avoid when you're deep-frying any dough made from rice flour) but boast the most lovely delicate crunch, which they manage to retain even after absorbing some of the dish's beefy juices. By no means a light dish (this meal was one of the few moments of our week in Hanoi during which I was actually thankful for the persistent bone-penetrating cold) this phở chiên phồng was utterly delicious.

The next day I asked Hanoi Cooking Centre's Tracey Lister, author of two cookbooks on Vietnam (Tracey's Vietnamese Street Food is out in the USA as of this week) about the dishes' origins. Almost all of the customers at Phở cuốn Hưng Bền, where we ate our phở cuốn and phở chiên phồng were young, university age or below, and this made me wonder if the dishes were relatively new. Was this a "kids' thing", a group of dishes that Hanoians middle-aged and beyond simply can't wrap their minds around? Tracey dates their appearance on Hanoi streets to fifteen or so years ago, give or take a few, and reminded me that this isn't the first "new take" on a dish made with banh phở: versions of the noodle soup made with chicken didn't appear until Vietnam suffered shortages of beef during wartime.

They're a reminder of the ever-evolving nature of street food, which we tend to think of in terms of Classics. Like phở cuốn and phở chiên phồng, beef phở itself must have once challenged notions of what one should, or would even want to, eat on the street.

Phở cuốn Hưng Bền, 26 Nguyen Khac Hieu, tel. 043-829-2040. Is this place the best of the dozen or so similar shops near Truc Bach Lake? No idea. But we did enjoy our lunch.

 

Op La La!

Every morning on the pavement just outside our house in Saigon's District 1 a vendor arranged eight tiny plastic stools around a makeshift cooker. There, from about 630 until 10 in the morning, she served order after order of op la (fried eggs cooked with various sausages).

Back then Dave worked a different sort of job, one that required a shirt and tie and his presence at an office from an early hour, so we didn't partake often. But when we did, we marveled at the perfectection of her sunny-side-up eggs: lightly crispy on the bottom, whites just past the point of jiggly, and yolks runny enough to generously stain the baguette we ate alongside.

 

After we left Saigon in 2005 that op la served as our fried eggs gold standard -- until, on this last trip back, we were introduced to the op la at Hoa Ma Quan.

This 40-year-old establishment occupies a typically long, narrow corner shop in District 3. Tables overflow its small space onto the alley outside. And on Saturdays and Sundays and before office hours on weekdays, they're filled with folks digging into op la.

Hoa Ma Quan opened as a banh mi shop (we'll have more to say on that specialty later). The proprietress, who moved with her family from Hanoi, can still be found behind the counter taking money and making change while her daughters split and stuff baguettes.

At Hoa Ma Quan they do things the old-fashioned way, which means that most banh mi and op la ingredients -- mayonnaise, pate, and many of the sausages -- are made in house. Baguettes are kept warm in an oven heated with charcoal.

 

All of this attention to detail makes for an op la that is a cut above the average.

Think Western-style bacon and eggs given a twist and a leg up courtesy of Vietnamese culinary ingenuity.The eggs arrive in individual pans, yolks done just so and bottoms browned and crackly. Nestled in the egg whites are slices of pork sausage and a few chunks of a bacon-ish meat that, unlike many lesser pork products, really taste of the pig. Triangles of chewy gluten browned in pork fat add an intriguing textural dimension.

The op la is served with a plate of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers and a bit of bracing carrot pickle. And, of course, a big warm, crusty baguette.

There's only one way to improve upon Hoa Ma Quan's op la, and that is to order it with a side of pate (smooth, mild, and very porky) and mayonnaise (impossibly rich and eggy). We allternated bites of egg and sausage and baguette dipped in runny yolk with bits of bread spread smeared with pate and freshly made mayonnaise. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

A couple of weeks ago, this was my birthday breakfast. And I couldn't help but imagine that starting the day with pate must be an auspicious way to start a new year.

Hoa Ma Quan, 53 Cao Thang, District 3. 6am-12pm (officially -- they close up shop when the run out of supplies, which can be as early as 1030am).

Don't Be Late, Take Your Time

We arrive at the no-name shop at 2:45 pm. The place gets packed the minute it opens at 3, our friend Van has told us. So packed that its one item -- banh canh cua, thick round tapioca-starch noodles in a rich meaty broth with crab and pork -- sells out in an hour and a half.

The doors are closed and there's no sign of life within. It's the first workday after a four-day national holiday -- perhaps the shop's proprietors are taking the week off. Van's been here before, she knows the owners, so she slips down the alley running alongside the shop house to the back, where they live. And returns smiling.

"They're open today," she reports. "They're almost ready."

The double doors swing open. Inside, a smiling, freckled middle-aged woman wearing Vietnamese-style matching flowered top and pants beckons us in just as a wheeled cart bearing stacks of red plastic stools comes trundling down the alley. The woman begins placing stools in two rows, one against each wall of the shop house.

"This shop is sooo clean," Van says.

It is. The word "spotless" really doesn't do it justice. You could eat off the floor. You could eat off any of the plastic stools. I dare say you could eat out of the hands of any of the four sisters running the place. Having just come off hours spent preparing their specialty, they're all cool as cucumbers. Not a drop of sweat, not a strand of hair out of place, not a fingernail that's not been scrubbed.

 

Almost as soon as the first stool is set on the floor customers begin arriving. We all sit down, facing each other across the room, and wait. Each customer has a plastic stool cum table placed in front of him or her, and next to that, a pink plastic basin. There will be no refuse left on the floor here. We're sure of it.

Another cart is rolled down the alley, bearing a red plastic bin (the sisters like red and pink, apparently) filled with banh canh finishings: chopped chilies and scallions, lime wedges, fish sauce, a plastic shaker of white pepper. The sisters neatly lay them out on towels bleached a blinding white, next to a stack of bowls, another of saucers, and still another of shiny stainless steel ladles.

"They have enough bowls for the whole service," Van tells us. "They want to each bowl to be clean, so they wash them all after they're closed."

Saucers of dipping sauce are assembled: fish sauce, chilies, a dash of white pepper. By now the room is full of bodies and suffused with an air of expectation but no one grumbles, no one complains about being pressed for time. No one talks either, unless in hushed tones. The sisters smile and laugh and joke with their regulars but it's all subdued.

They don't hurry. They move deliberately. After finishing with the dipping sauce one of the sisters places the saucers on a stainless steel tray and walks up and down the room, pausing in front of each customer to lay one on his or her plastic stool-table.

 

The elder sister -- the cook, we're told -- glides down the alley bearing a pan piled with meaty pork hocks stained a rich orange. They've been cooked in the banh canh, which owes its lovely crimson color to annatto seeds.

 

Finally, at 3:15, another cart appears in the alley. This one supports two massive vats. At the front of the shop portable burners are lighted and the banh canh is heated. A sister passes out glasses of tra da (iced tea). The older one begins assembling orders.

For us it's banh canh with a hock but sans crab because the crustacean isn't shelled and there's nowhere in the shop to wash up. We notice that everyone else in the room orders similarly. Crab claws, we soon find out, are popular with take-out customers, who will carry their banh canh back to home or office where they feel free to make a mess.

 

As each customer is served there is less and less talking. It's a very, very good banh canh. The soup, having taken on an ever so slight viscosity from the starch in the noodles, has body. It tastes of pork and seafood (the crab claws are cooked in the soup), with enough chili heat to get the nose running. The hock is exceptional; even though its lent flavor to the soup it's still rich and meaty tasting, and tender enough to slide off the bone.

Everyone eats slowly, leaning over occasionally to spit piecea  of bone into their pink plastic basin. (More than anything else about this shop it is this that astonishes us -- that not a single customer drops a tissue or spits a bone anywhere but into their little plastic basins.)

Some customers order a second round. A crowd has gathered outside but there's no pushing, no jumping queue. When a customer finishes and gets up to leave one of the sisters moves in to clear their bowl, saucer, and glass and wipe the plastic stool-table with a snowy white towel. Only then does the next customer come in and take a seat.

This little shop is the anti-Saigon. There's order, there's peace, there's a striking amount of courtesy, and there's a wonderful air of comraderie among customers who look at each other with knowing, "we've got a secret" glances.

We've never seen street food vendors anywhere accorded as much respect (not fear, but respect) as these ladies are by the folks who flock to their shop.

By the time we leave at 3:40pm, the banh canh vat is half empty.

No-name banh canh stall/shop, 12C Nguyen Phi Khanh (near corner of Dinh Tien Hoang). 3pm-4:30pm daily. Be there when they open. VND20,000 / bowl without crab claws.

In Saigon, Hủ Tiếu With a Side of Crab

"No rushing!" the younger male member of the family running this more than 30-year-old shop in Saigon's District 1 barked at our friend My when she gently inquired as to the whereabouts of our meal.

We'd been waiting more than 15 minutes for two orders of hủ tiếu cá -- rice noodle soup with fish -- and customers who'd arrived after us had already been served. "I don't think they have a very good system for keeping track of orders," My observed.

Let's just say that customer service is not Nam Loi's forte. Mrs. Crabby, a stone-faced matron sitting behind the front desk, would probably pull a muscle if she smiled; Mr. Crabby Sr., dishing up noodles at the front of the shop, rags on the male Crabby Jr. almost as much as the latter snaps at his customers.

I should note that Nam Loi is a democratic establishment. We were not singled out for abuse; many Vietnamese customers also got a dose of the Crabby family's ire.

But it's worth enduring the 'tude for a taste of Nam Loi's hủ tiếu. My, Dave and I were there on the recommendation of another friend, a Saigon native who's been eating at the shop since at least the mid-1970s. They serve hủ tiếu cá, hủ tiếu gà (rice noodle soup with chicken), and hủ tiếu bò kho (wheat noodles with beef -- you can also order bò kho plain to eat with bánh mì -- a baguette).

Most patrons were supping on fish noodles; we followed suit. The base of Nam Loi's hủ tiếu cá is a milky broth with a not-overpowering sweetish fishiness and a bit of bite from white pepper and slivered scallions. The dish's wide koayteow-style rice noodles are silky yet retain their chewiness even after minutes in the soup. When the hủ tiếu is assembled the fish -- a mild, white-fleshed variety -- is added raw, to cook lightly in the hot broth. Bean sprouts lend a bit of crunch. This is not an assertive or spicy dish, but it's so beautifully balanced that it requires little in the way of additional seasoning from the bottles of soy sauce and worcestershire-like sweet black vinegar on each table.

I entered Nam Loi intent on limiting myself to a taste of Dave's hủ tiếu (we had other fish to fry that morning) but soon succumbed to one of the small meat pies displayed on the edge of Mrs. Crabby's counter. I expected a char siu (Cantontese-style barbecued pork) filling but was pleasantly surprised with something like a country pate -- roughly chopped pork, a hint of liver, and lots of black pepper, maybe a dash of sesame oil. The crust was fantastically flaky.

I caved further with an order of bò kho sans noodles (I waved away the baguette as well), served with lime juice-black pepper-salt for dipping. 

Although I suspect there are better versions out there -- I wanted a bit more richness and complexity in the soup, but then again maybe I'm corrupted by memories of the very American-style beef stew my mom used to make -- Nam Loi's broth was plenty meaty with hints of star anise and cinnamon. The beef chunks were so tender they literally fell apart beneath the tines of my fork (I resorted to a spoon); they accompanied chunks of carrot and tendon slippery, chewy, and fatty enough to make a tendon fan swoon.

We finished up and left without bidding the Crabby family farewell. When she joined us out on the street My told us that as he accepted her money Mr. Crabby senior complained that Dave had taken too many pictures.

"They want to introduce you to other people," she told him. "It will be good for business."

To which he replied: "I don't need it. I'm busy enough already."

You have been warned.

Nam Loi, 43 Ton That Dam Street near corner of Nguen Cong Tra. 6am-noon, Sundays also open from 2-8pm. Our advice: walk in, give your order to the guys at the front straightaway, and head for a table. Don't dither, and don't get in the way. If you want something to drink order tra da (iced tea).