Viet World Kitchen

Viet Scrambled Eggs with Fish Sauce Recipe

It was not so much nostalgia as a yearning for something deliciously Vietnamese that led me to whip up these scrambled eggs today. My mom taught me how to make scrambled eggs – after she let me prepare rice for the family. We’d have the eggs for lunch with bread. At the time, I didn’t realize how genius it was.

There were just a handful of ingredients involved: shallot or yellow onion, tomato, eggs, fish sauce, and black pepper. If things got fancy, green onion was added for color. Making the Viet scrambled eggs got me thinking about the brilliance of simple cooking.

Cooking and Life Lessons from Our Moms

Over the weekend our friends Diane and John invited us over for a Cinco de Mayo dinner. They have two little boys, ages 2 and 4, who are adorable, a little rascally but over all pretty well behaved. I don’t have children so I dig observing the parenting process.

A teacher by profession, Diane takes a kind-hearted educational approach to rearing her boys. While we were at their home, she got the older boy to fetch a step stool so he could stand at the kitchen sink to wash his dinner plate. We adults watched with amusement until we realized that there may be a knife in the sink. Diane let out a small cry, explaining to her son that sharp objects may be nearby, and ran over to check. No knife present. Disaster averted.

It’s hard to know what kind of impression that situation made on the four-year-old but parents do their best. Lord knows I’ve asked myself a zillion times whether or not I’d left a knife at the bottom of a sink full of dirty dishes. I don’t think I figured that one out from my mom but here are five cooking and life lessons that she did teach me. (By the way, the vintage photo at the top has Mom in center and on her left, 5 1/2-year-old me looking grumpy.)

Spring Asparagus and Shrimp Stir-Fry

Many people assume that Vietnamese food is highly influenced by French traditions. While that is true to a certain extent, the Chinese also influenced Viet foodways big time. Vietnam was a colony of China for nearly 1,000 years! Plus, there are legions of Vietnamese-Chinese people who’ve helped to shape Vietnamese food for generations. (Interactions via trade routes and with Vietnam’s neighbors factor into the mix too.)

My friends, Sophie and Eric Banh (below), the brother-and-sister team behind Monsoon and Ba Bar restaurants in Seattle could be the poster children for how Vietnamese food has blended with Chinese traditions. The Banhs grew up in Cho Lon in Saigon and speak Vietnamese and Chinese (as well as English!). They immigrated to Canada and found their way to relatively warmer climes in Washington State. Their flagship restaurants, Monsoon Capitol Hill and Monsoon East, help to define modern Vietnamese food in the Pacific Northwest.

Book Review: Vietnamese Home Cooking by Charles Phan

For years now, I and other Bay Area food people have asked chef/restaurateur Charles Phan this question: When will you have a cookbook? If you don’t know Charles, he and  his family own and operate one of the most successful and high-profile Asian restaurant empires in the U.S. Their flagship establishment is San Francisco’s Slanted Door, an 8,000-square foot space located not in the city’s Little Saigon but rather the Ferry Building — the iconic epicenter of the Bay Area’s local and artisanal food movement. As one of San Francisco’s top culinary destinations, Slanted Door announces that modern Asian food has arrived.

On a nightly basis, Slanted Door is packed with foodies, tourists, and suits feasting family style and relishing Vietnamese dishes. What attracts diners are the tight, ingredient-driven menu, inviting ambiance, and professional service, not a kitschy, themed experience. In fact, the sleek design of stone, wood and glass echoes the panoramic view of the rugged bay. Other than the faint whiff of nuoc mam, the environment doesn’t give away Slanted Door’s Vietnamese identity. By transcending preconceived notions of race and ethnicity, the restaurant is refreshingly post-ethnic, as dynamic and organic as Asia itself.

So when Phan’s debut cookbook arrived, I had certain expectations. Never mind that he collaborated with Jessica Battilana on the book. That’s what many chefs do these days. Jessica is a very able writer tasked with recording and conveying his words and recipes.

Most restaurant chefs first release a book about their establishment. Phan’s first book is surprisingly broadly titled, Vietnamese Home Cooking.

A slew of shock-and-awe travel shots of him in Vietnam open the book. They then segue into images what appears to be Phan's home in the Bay Area. There are few obvious photos of the Slanted Door, despite the fact that a fair number of recipes come from the restaurant and/or reference cooks there. Chefs coats and latex-gloved hands signal a professional cooking environment, not a home kitchen.

At first glance, Vietnamese Home Cooking seems perplexing, perhaps because it aims to fill too many needs.

How Banh Cuon Rice Noodle Rolls are Made (+ video)

On my last day in Seattle, Eric Banh took me and my friend, vegetarian cookbook author Michael Natkin out to eat. We started at noon and I ended up eating 4 meals with Eric that day. (Then I flew to Portland and had a very late dinner with other friends.)

Eric is the chef and restaurateur behind the Monsoon restaurants and Ba Bar; he also owned Baguette Box up until a little while ago when he sold it. He and his sister, Sophie, operate modern Viet restaurants that are fun and sophisticated tributes to Vietnam’s food traditions. We met in 2005 when I dined at Monsoon after it had been favorably reviewed in Gourmet. Eric and I clicked while talking about elevating the status of Vietnamese food. We’ve been friends ever since. Every time one of my book releases, he and Sophie organize a special event at one of their restaurants to showcase my work.

We hang out and eat a lot when I’m in town. Right now, Eric is obsessed about freshly made bun round rice noodles and banh cuon steamed rice noodle rolls. For more info on bun check the bun primer post but what are banh cuon? They are thin rice sheets that can be stuffed with a meat and mushroom mixture (like bottom row in the photo above) or served unstuffed (top row in the photo) with slices of silky Viet sausage (goi or cha lua), nuoc cham dipping sauce, and sometimes bean sprouts and herbs (if you’re southern Vietnamese). If you've had fun noodles or think of banh pho noodles, banh cuon are thinner and not cut into noodles. 

Though the noodles are more expensive, Eric and Sophie offer it at Monsoon at a fair price to customers. On the weekends at Ba Bar, Mr. Chau mans a banh cuon station by the front door, chatting with customers as he steams and fills their orders.

Eric is advocating for stellar bun rice noodles and banh cuon steamed rice noodles rolls so that his customers can further appreciate Vietnamese cuisine.  He wanted to show me what Seattle had to offer.