Vietnamese homecoming lunch

It used to be that every time I would go home to LA, I would make a ritual homecoming jaunt to the local In-N-Out. I would go from the airport to the In-N-Out and then home to my parent’s house; I was that slightly obsessive. But, that was back in the day when In-N-Outs were a rare breed anywhere outside of Southern California and back when I didn’t work just a few blocks away from one. Now, In-N-Out has been replaced by Vietnamese food of all sorts--banh mi sandwiches stuffed with questionable pork products, big bowls of pho, vermicelli noodles with mung bean sprouts and a salty, lemony sauce, spring rolls filled with shrimp, lettuce, and mint. I love it all. So, during this visit to my parent’s place, I hand not just one, but two Vietnamese lunches.

Friday Lunch
The first stop Jeanne and I made when we got back to the city where we grew up was not at our parent’s house to say hello to them or to drop off our stuff, but to the Vietnamese restaurant next to the In-N-Out on Mission Drive and Rosemead Blvd. across from the high school where we spent four years of our lives. It was already past one in the afternoon, and she and I were starving (those faux cupcakes baked in a Madeline mold eaten during the drive did nothing to satiate my stomach).

We were promptly seated and started to flip through the pages of the laminated color menu with pictures. I knew what I wanted by sight alone—there was no need for words when a color photo of the food I was about to order could do the job. I ordered the vermicelli noodles with pork, fried shrimp rolls, and shrimp paste, and a preserved plum drink. Jeanne ordered the bum boa hua, a spicy noodle soup with beef, pig’s feet, and pork blood, and the lemon juice with soda water. We also ordered the fried shrimp rolls along with the shrimp spring rolls.

We were set. We just had to wait for it to come. And, just as quickly as the waiter swooped away with our order, he came back with a plate of fried shrimp rolls and another plate mounded with lettuce leaves, mint leaves, and cilantro. I was in awe. We dug in—wrapped our lettuce leaf with the fried shrimp roll, mint, and cilantro, and dunked it into the gelatinous orange-colored sauce. It was crispy, salty, spicy (from the chili sauce we mixed into the orange-colored one), and refreshing. It was perfectly what I had craved for months.

Next, came our big bowls of noodles. Jeanne’s was pouring with steam from the dark soup. And, mine was cool and composed, with each corner of the bowl sectioned off for pork, shrimp patty, shrimp rolls, or greenery. I put some chili into my lemony sauce, spooned it onto my noodles, mixed it up, and put chopsticks to mouth. The pork meatballs were garlicy and good. The shrimp paste was tender and salty. And the fried shrimp rolls were crisp. None of the meat products actually tasted like the meat they were made from (the other flavors and textures were so pronounced as to sort of mask the natural flavors of the meat) but that was okay; I had no problem that my pork meatball tasted more like garlic than pork or that it was shaped more like a flat log than a ball. The whole bowl of noodles was a well-working combination of salty, spicy, and sour, crispy and chewy, and pungent and refreshing. I ate it all up.

Jeanne’s noodles were good too. It’s what she always ordered from this restaurant. And, her bowl of noodle soup had the same blend and balance of flavors as mine. The saltiness of the broth worked with the slight spicy flavors which sought a balance with the squeeze of lime added at the end. Each taste sensation could be distinguished from the others without being overbearing.

Our spring rolls were wonderful, as always. The spring rolls here are different from any that I’ve had elsewhere, and mainly for the fact that these are also stuffed with the fried shrimp rolls. So, there’s an extra bit of crunch. They also come with the gelatinous orange-colored sauce, which I have yet to figure out of what it is made. And, they’re skillfully wrapped, so that the thin rice-paper wrapper is tight enough to keep all the noodles, sprouts, and lettuce in one neat package while being eaten.

I washed all that food down my preserved plum drink, which is a slightly bizarre combination of preserved plum, soda water, and sugar. It’s salty, a little sour, and only hints at sweetness, but it’s refreshing and works as a palate cleanser. Delicious.

Saturday Lunch
Jeanne and I had plans for lunch again. We would go to the little Asian restaurant and order chicken with rice and crispy fried noodles topped with stir-fried vegetables and seafood (something I had forgotten that I used to adore eating). We had driven over to the place, parked the car, and were walking toward the restaurant when Jeanne’s phone vibrated. It was our dad. He said that our cousin was at our house, that he wanted to take us out to lunch, and that we should come home. Jeanne and I were only steps away from the restaurant, but we turned around, got back in the car, and drove back home.

Once at home, the four of us (Jeanne, Dad, our cousin, and I) got into our dad’s van and headed off for another Asian restaurant for lunch. Our cousin was sick so he didn’t want to eat fried noodles, as Jeanne and I were hoping he would, but wanted something soothing, so we went to get Vietnamese noodles, again. We went to Pho Pastuer, a Vietnamese restaurant that took over the space where the Round Table Pizza (the place where I spent many afternoons after school as a middle school student) once stood.

None of us had to look at the menu. We all knew what we wanted, the special combination pho noodles, or, what may be more commonly known as Number One. We also asked for an order of the pork spring rolls and one of the shrimp ones. Our noodles came out quickly since, as our dad mentioned, everything was already made and the workers merely had to pour soup of noodles.

The bowl of noodles was huge, with pieces of pink meat floating on top. I poked at them with my chopsticks and pushed them into the hot soup to cook. I tore up pieces of mint and put that into my bowl along with mung bean sprouts, a squeeze of lime, and a squirt of chili sauce. I stuck my face into that bowl, slurping up noodles and drinking up soup. The noodles were thin and chewy but soft, and the soup was strongly flavored of beef without being too salty or too heavy. And, there was a lot of meat in my bowl, so much that I didn’t think I could eat it all (but I did).

The spring rolls were good too, although of a different variety than the ones before. These were more quotidian, the kind you’d find at almost any Vietnamese place. The shrimp one came with the standard peanut sauce, and the pork one with the salty, lemony sauce.

As we sat there finishing up the last bits of our food, I remembered one of the last times I had lunch in LA only just a few months earlier. I was with my cousin, my dad, Jeanne, and Karen. They had argued over which Vietnamese restaurant was better as I said I didn’t care where we went since I knew nothing of the restaurants in LA, and we drove to a few of them before we finally settled on a place to eat. Our dad taught us how to count in Vietnamese and how to order by number in Vietnamese. And, this time, watching my dad order his food in Vietnamese as I was left confused in his conversation with the waitress, I was glad we were having lunch at this place that was once a Round Table Pizza. My dad would never have lunch with us at In-N-Out but he would gladly oblige to have lunch here (he even changed his shirt before we left the house).