The charm of crunchy-skin grilled fish

Thiên Phú has been in my draft list for over 18 months. I wanted to write a post worthy of their dishes, but a proper post requires proper pictures, and either I was too hungry at the time or I just sucked at taking pictures at the time (I still suck now, but less than before) that every single picture was blurry like a blizzard. I was more concerned about food than food blogging so I didn’t snap many shots and didn’t check the clarity of the shots I took before digging in. I also didn’t know any photo editing. Basically, I was plain dumb. At many points I thought about abandoning the post altogether, but we had a good meal that time and I even fed the birds in the parking lot while waiting for my friends to come join us. The birds were full, we were full. The restaurant was, as usual, empty except for us (because their menu is catered to large groups and wedding parties), so we got extra attention from the staff. Such memories kept me from deleting the draft that had nothing but terrible pictures. Then my parents came to […]

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Beef wrap n’ roll

It took me six years eating steaks and potatoes and one evening of eating beef sausages rolled with greens and rice paper to realize that perhaps the best way to eat meat is to eat it with vegetables. No hard feelings, dear steak, you are like pure chocolate, and bulgogi in lettuce wrap is like orange flavored chocolate. Then you add pickled carrots and daikon, minty herbs, rice paper, sweet and sour nước mắm, and the beef is bound to take off just like the Apollo 11. Such revelation dawned on me when I took the first bite of a bò lá lốt roll at Ánh Hồng in Berkeley. Ánh Hồng was famous in the old Saigon for their creation of the seven courses of beef, a menu that other Vietnamese restaurants quickly imitated to serve big parties. Despite knowing the menu’s popularity, I rarely thought of its main items as desirable, simply because, for instance, I wasn’t a fan of the wild betel leaf (lá lốt in Vietnamese and cha phloo in Thai) that wraps outside the ground beef. It’s […]

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