You know who you are. You sell $8 banh mi sandwiches from a FOOD CART propped in my middle-America farmers’ market. Stop. The Vietnamese want their sandwich back.
In another area of the metropolis, Vi Bakery, looms oven-warm. Try to shake the sensation that you’ve reached a house, not a restaurant, when you see its one room, stacked with Styrofoam trays of food cairned to eye level; hear two generations chattering in Vietnamese, then shifting to halting English to service the corn eater and smell the acrid incense of fish sauce. There is no music, no AC and no printed menu.
There is a staging area for to-go bags, not for sitting. Don’t ask many questions. You get one question per visit. "No photographs, please," reads the Vietnamese thought balloon. "You wouldn’t do that in your friend’s house, now would you?"
Behind the counter is a family from an alternate reality, one with whom I have a barely functional relationship. I irritate them. The older lady speaks little to no English, the younger guy converses in three tongues. Fortunately, one of those is English. Fortunately again, he doesn’t quip, or explain much. I’m tired of restaurants courting me.
I speak enough Vietnamese to order lunch. Banh Mi, the Saigon sub, is stuffed with ham, cilantro, pickled carrot, cukes, chili, jalapenos, smeared with mayo and served for $2.50, on a crusty, overfilled rice and wheat flour baguette baked that morning. They’ll make it with Vietnamese sausage if you ask, and that’s my preference.
Or should you not want to slow down the works, take the bread to go, .50c a loaf, and make your own home version with the seafood-can-be-spongy shrimp paste on sugarcane available on the steam table. Remove the paste, suck the sweet stalk and then notice how the shrimp paste, with its soft briny flavors and chewiness contrasts with delicate shredded, pickled carrots and crisp cucumbers, both in texture and temperature.
Contrasting, but distinct, ingredients is the essence of Vietnamese dining.
For the most part, the Vi Bakery kowtows to southern Vietnamese food roots. Nuoc cham, the ubiquitous fish sauce-based condiment served with spring rolls, grilled meats and most everything else in Vietnam, is a little thinner and sweeter than at the neighboring soup shop, Pho So #1, whose pho menu, and thicker, spicier nuoc cham, winks more at the northern end of the country. Other hints that suggest the owners of Vi Bakery specialize in southern favorites include the many coconut desserts and snacks, widespread utilization of roasted peanuts, lots of sugarcane somethings — and the bakery case stocked with ham and cheese croissants.
Southern Vietnam is the area most influenced by the cuisines of other countries (especially France) and its food is richly variegated with garlic and shallots, sour and sweet, rich and creamy, pastry and plentitude. One such dessert that has infiltrated this area of Vietnam is the mud-thick pastry shake, popular in India, and available at Vi Bakery, along with che thung, a sweet mung bean, peanut and coconut snack. Snacking is huge in Vietnam — dessert isn’t. Most of the many, many dessert options at the bakery are eaten when one wants just a little something sweet, instead of at the end of a meal, ala American dessert.
If you didn’t grow up eating sweetened beans or seaweed, the snacks may take a bit of getting used to, but try to acclimate. Nothing kicks the tail of thermometer reading 102 like a sweet adzuki snack, an iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk, or, on a savory note, a fresh spring roll wrapped in rice paper. Let the farmers’ market food cart swelter next to its overpriced subs.
Vi Bakery **
6312 Rigsby Road
(804) 288-2448
What’s in the Stars:
0—don’t go
*-average
** above average
*** very good
**** excellent dining experience
Imagine learning to process caviar in Russia after a childhood of Cup-a-Soup. Needless to say, Varmit Pickeral was inspired. Thus began 20 years of restaurant gypsy-hood, beginning with Varmit’s first job as a dishwasher in an institutional kitchen and then trying out most any job Varmit could get in the hospitality industry, including; NC BBQ pit line-cook, cheese steward at Artisanal in Manhattan, grape picker, and specialty buyer for Balducci’s Food Lover’s Market in Northern Virginia.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement