noodlepie

The hedgerow hits keep on coming

This is Hoang Ty Restaurant at 459 - 461 Cach Mang Thang Tam street in Saigon's District 10. It's ugly, it's popular and it serves a bewildering array of Vietnamese standards and Trang Bang specialities. I'm here for the Banh Trang phoi suong - a rice paper, pork, hedgerow and health wrap, roll and guzzle number. I've blogged about it previoulsy in this post. With your help, I've also attempted to dissect the collossal bush that arrives with the carnivorous end of this dish. Alors, I vill not prattle... suffice to say it is my favourite southern Vietnamese dish.

Hoang Ty does the full Vietnamese: White plastic chairs, shiny metal tables, fluorescent lighttubes, mammoth TV (turned on) and monsterbig sound system (also turned on) All in all this restaurant is designed to utterly destroy your dining pleasure. The fact that it fails is testament to one thing only - the food. It is superb.

The satellite imagery above just chops off the dish of beansprouts, cucumber slices and a bowl of mam nem on the far left The menu offers three meat variations, we skip trotters and fat and go lean. Cannot find fault with any thing going on here. It's excellent, even better than the Nguyen Van Thu street version in District 1.

Although the Hoang Ty number comes minus the he (a kind of chive) but with the welcome addition of bun (vermicelli noodles) and the not so welcome addition of mam nem (pungent friend loser). The nuoc mam (fish sauce) pictured above works just fine for this dish, IMO.

And here's the tab for three, with softdrinks at lunchtime - bit confusing with the sister restaurant address at the top, but won't deny the sentiment at the bottom. Hen gap bloody lai indeed. More photos from Hoang Ty.

Porked

This is one of my favourite dishes in Vietnam, Banh trang phoi suong (literally means "rice pancake exposed in the dew (at night)". It's so simple it's rude. Centre stage we have thin slices of boiled pork, nothing fancy going on, just the pork. The surrounding action has the pork trapped, no escape from a fate worth scoffing. Rustic style rice paper, a sweet nuoc mam (fish sauce), pickled carrots and onion-leek type thing, raw beansprouts and lengthways sliced cucumber. And then comes that mighty herb trough. Trang bang, by the way, is the name of the province the dish comes from.

That's a gargantuan set of greens in anyone's book. It's like no other platter on the Vietnamese table. A plate of this stuff will bring the David Attenborough out of anyone. Dig, delve and forage-mungussly good. Pluck a few leaves of what you fancy, sling them in a rice paper along with your meat, and whatever else you can squeeze in, roll, dip and nibble, munch or hog. I hog, you're probably a bit more polite. The big glossy green leaf is the special fella here. Name anyone? I fully intend to dissect this whole plate at another sitting. Any help mucho appreciated.

There's no real cooking involved here, a bit of boiled pork and someone slings the nuoc mam together. The whole thing's more of a gardening experience than a cooking one. Someone somewhere in this town must have a killer herb garden and this restaurant knows who that is. Whenever we grab this as a take home job there's always enough herbs leftover to hash into something else the next day. Alternatively, we sometimes order an extra plate or two of pork and rice paper to take the same trip the next day. There must be other places serving this in Saigon, although I can't recall seeing one, but when it's this good I'm not really looking for anywhere else anyway.

They serve a few other dishes. I've covered the slurpworthy Banh Canh from here before. Banh trang phoi suong for two with drinks is less than 40,000VD. From Quan Co Tam - Banh Canh Trang Bang, 188 Nguyen Van Thu Street, Phuong Da Kao, District 1. Deffo worth a visit.