THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702210040
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: DINING OUT
SOURCE: BY M.F. ONDERDONK, SPECIAL TO FLAVOR
LENGTH: 150 lines
THIS IS a story of two very different restaurants and the people who own them. It is a story that comes out of a war, a story of how, more than 20 years after the U.S. military pulled out of a divided little country in Southeast Asia, the food of that country is poised on the cusp of culinary renown. It is a story of lemon grass and chilies, seafood and rice paper, noodles and beef in a bowl of broth. It is a story about freedom. And also, sometimes, about peace.
Jimmy and Lynn Bui smile happily. And when they smile, they look yet more beautiful than before. He has thick, graying hair and a small mustache and he laughs as he says, ``Everybody call me Jimmy.'' She is lovely. Her wide-set eyes and long black tresses punctuate a delicate charm. Her English is still broken and accented after 20 years.
In 1975, Jimmy and Lynn and their infant daughter Kimberly left Vietnam amid the cataclysm that was the fall of Saigon. He was a lieutenant in a South Vietnamese airborne unit. He had been wounded. And he got up out of his hospital bed and limped into a boat leaving the city.
That Jimmy is shy about his name is an Asian-American-flavored contradiction. For that name is on Little Jimmy, a small empire of pizza eateries, stretched in a delta from Virginia Beach to Newport News, where the family first lived when they came to Hampton Roads. Now settled in Norfolk, with four more children, the Buis have made a sentimental journey of sorts to Saigon - New Saigon, that is, the Vietnamese restaurant which they opened late last summer in Virginia Beach.
``People like our food for the light, delicate mix of flavors, for the use of herbs, the textures,'' Lynn explains. ``Cool vegetables and hot meat.'' She believes that more and more Americans are also attracted by the healthfulness of Vietnamese cooking.
Of course, they like the crispy spring rolls, too.
Located on Military Highway in the former Kayloon, the restaurant glows with a Chinese opulence bequeathed by its predecessor - lacquered screens and enameled pictures, tasseled lanterns and wooden carvings, a handsome mural of carp swimming, white and gold. Little vases with fresh carnations adorn the tables.
Lynn Bui brings out some prints of Vietnamese scenes - a Saigon flower market, a houseboat, a peasant girl floating in a ``thuyen'' (punt), near a stand of papaya plants. These are images of a simple life, almost as removed from the restaurant's evocation of imperial China as from the stop-and-go frenzy of nearby Military Highway. These are postcard scenes that a customer had enlarged for her. One day she's going to get them framed. She also shows a visitor an issue of Martha Stewart Living, with a big story on Vietnamese cookery.
``I am very proud when I see this,'' she says.
Jimmy estimates that half of their clientele is Vietnamese and half is American. Among the latter, many are veterans, drawn by the flavorful dishes they remember from some few pleasant moments in Vietnam - shrimp and pork rolled in rice paper, the elemental soup known as ``pho,'' seafood stir-fried with black mushrooms and vegetables.
Lynn displays a bottle of ``33'' beer, its label adorned by a tiger's head. ``A lot of people come in and want it because they drank that one in Vietnam,'' she explains. For less adventuresome companions who happen along in tow, the Buis will gladly dish up a steak with fries. And for the Vietnamese (and, of course, Westerners, whether reckless or cosmopolitan), more exotic offerings beckon. ``Ca ko to,'' a ``caramel'' hot pot, to which toasted sugar lends a special flavor. Fried fish with fish sauce. Hot and sour fish soup with okra, chunk pineapple and bean sprouts.
Friends and former countrymen of the Buis come to New Saigon for the food. But they stay for the karaoke. ``On karaoke nights, it's a zoo in here,'' says Kimberly. She has grown up to be beautiful, like her mother, though far more Western in appearance. Somehow life in America has smoothed the Asian angles from her face. A pre-med student at ODU, she waits tables in her parents' restaurant.
``It's packed.'' She shakes her head - somehow, mysteriously to her, ``Hotel California'' has become the American song most requested on karaoke nights. As to tunes of the homeland, the crowd-pleaser is a smoothly produced and stirring pop number in which a coterie of beautifully dressed Vietnamese singers croons thanks to the countries of the world.
Thanks Aus-tra-li-a . . . Thank you Can-a-da . . . Thanks A-me-ri-ca . . .
We thank the world for this true freedom . . . .
``We really appreciate that we make a good life over here,'' says Lynn, who hasn't been back to Vietnam since she left in the late '70s. ``I came here when I was 19. America is my country now.'' | On the other side of the city, where Virginia Beach Boulevard and Great Neck Road collide, is an eatery of a very different sort.
From the outside, Vietnam Garden appears to be a nondescript and slightly eccentric take-out joint. Wedged sideways along an alley into the London Bridge Shopping Center, the restaurant posts its entire menu on the exterior wall of the building. But when customers enter, they find a dining room like a little bower.
Shielded from the street by paper screens, it is simple and immaculate, with lace curtains and white walls decorated in artificial greenery and flowers. Asian patrons sit enjoying their food, while owner Mian Evans Tran, garbed like her dining room in simple white, dispenses advice to confused Westerners.
``Have a crispy spring roll,'' she says. Redolent with seafood, it is a sure winner with the Yankee crowd.
What makes it taste so good? She laughs and shakes her head at the question. That's a secret. She brings a big bowl of steaming ``pho'' - noodles in broth, with slices of beef. She shows a visitor how to add bean sprouts and fresh basil and slices of hot pepper, and then a squirt of lime and more squirts of hoisin and hot chili sauces, from the big ketchup-style containers that sit on the tables. The beef is handled with chopsticks and dunked into more sauce, using a little side dish. The broth is so good the porcelain spoon just doesn't seem big enough. One wants to drink it straight from the bowl.
She brings ``chao tom,'' ground shrimp molded onto sugar cane and fried, with the dipping sauce called ``nuoc cham,'' sweet and slightly fish-flavored.
At another table, two women are meeting for lunch.
``It smells so good in here I want to chew my arm off,'' one says.
Tran has a way of pressing little gifts upon her customers - almond cookies, a bag of pastries. She began her business career running a gift shop.
``I have had a terrible life,'' she says. For a moment a life of bitterly hard work writes itself across her face, like a map of the world she has traversed. ``But I love people. The important thing is to appreciate the people who help you.''
A native Chinese who grew up in Vietnam, she cooked for eight years in Saigon. When she emigrated to the United States in 1981, she went to work cleaning houses for $25 a day. She cries a little when she talks about those days, and about her son, whom she hasn't seen in some time.
``My dream was always to own a restaurant,'' she says. And today she owns two - Jade Star, a Chinese eatery she established in Chesapeake four years ago; and Vietnam Garden, which she opened last fall in the former Pho of Saigon.
``I want,'' she says, ``to let the people know. Vietnam has good things.''
She recalls the decision. ``My husband said, `Nobody will eat your Vietnamese food. Nobody knows how.' And I said, `People are looking for healthy food with no fat. Let me try it.' ''
She was right. With its flavorful, light and accessibly priced fare, the restaurant is gaining a larger following. Tran shows the business cards of people who've helped her and of guests who've come in and praised her food. Two of the cards are from prominent local chefs.
``Do you know them?'' she asks. ``They like my food!''
``Sometime God - he sends somebody to thank you,'' she says. ``I believe that.'' MEMO: M.F. Onderdonk is a free-lance food writer in Norfolk.
[For a related story, see page F6 of THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT for this date.] ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
HUY NGUYEN
The Virginian-Pilot
Lynn Bui and Jimmy Bui...
Mian Evans Tran...