Inside Long Island's Vietnamese restaurants

Can we talk about pho? Peer into that fragrant, steaming bowl of noodle soup and you can see the depth and breadth of Vietnamese cuisine. The tangle of rice noodles speaks to the country’s tropical climate — no wheat can grow there — as do the aromatic spices (black pepper, cinnamon, star anise and ginger) and the lavish use of fresh herbs. The broth is based on beef, popularized by the French during their occupation from 1897 to 1954, but it is ineffably deepened by fish sauce, the fermented condiment that is absolutely indispensable to Vietnamese cooking.

Worldwide, pho (pronounced "fuh") is probably the most famous dish in the Vietnamese repertoire even though it’s only about 100 years old. It originated in North Vietnam and got its big break in 1954, when the country’s partition caused more than a million North Vietnamese to flee to South Vietnam. There the dish became sweeter and more herbaceous, in line with the cooking style of the south.

Vietnam extends more than 1,000 miles (about the distance between New York City and Orlando, Florida) and encompasses diverse culinary traditions. The cuisine in the north tends to be less exuberant than that of the south, while in the middle of the country, spicy rules, as does the sophisticated cuisine of Hue, the former imperial capital.

Tung Thanh Nguyen, the chef at Saigon Casa in Port Jefferson Station, is from Saigon, in the south, but his favorite dish on the menu is the great noodle soup from Hue, bun bo Hue. On a chilly afternoon in November, he fixed himself a bowl during the downtime between lunch and dinner. He started with the same broth that gently bubbles away all day for pho orders, but added chili paste, fermented shrimp paste and various bits and bobs of meat. The noodles for bun bo Hue are, as in pho, made with rice, but they are much thicker — almost as thick as Japanese udon — which suits the soup’s robust character.

Nguyen’s daughter, Jackie, opened Saigon Casa in 2017. Since COVID-19 hit, she’s having to spend all her time at her other business, a nail salon. Her father still runs the kitchen but the general manager is Ron Zheng, a restaurant veteran and former customer who, though he is Chinese, is passionate about Vietnamese food. "I knew Jackie needed help," he said, "and I didn’t want the place to close."

Zheng considers himself a student of Vietnamese cuisine, and "Papa Tung" is his teacher — no mean feat since the two communicate largely through gestures and Google Translate. His eyes light up when he talks about Papa Tung’s broth, and he excitedly showed me a canister of spices, all imported from Vietnam, that imbue it with a distinct character. Not knowing Vietnamese nor Mandarin, I could only identify coriander and fennel seeds, cloves and pieces of cinnamon among the welter of spices.

Zheng knows well that many Vietnamese restaurants in the New York area are owned and operated by Chinese, which can result in menus "with lots of Chinese dumplings and edamame." But, he said, "if you love the food, then you start learning. It takes patience, but I am here to keep this place authentic."

"Authenticity" comes up constantly when you talk to Vietnamese restaurateurs. Tony Nguyen (no relation to Tung Nguyen) and Casey Koehl, the owners of the four-month-old Pho 34 in Levittown, never went out to eat Vietnamese food unless they were on vacation and craved a taste of home. "A lot of it tasted more Chinese than Vietnamese," Koehl said.

Nguyen, the chef, left Vietnam when he was a teenager. He spent a year at a Buddhist monastery in the Bronx, where he helped the monks in the kitchen, and he put himself through college working in pizzerias and Chinese restaurants. Throughout his career repairing soda machines, he dreamed of opening an authentic restaurant and he named it after the Vietnamese dish "that most Americans know."

Nguyen’s pho broth starts with beef hip and shank bones that simmer, never boil, for about six hours. Then he adds onion and ginger, both of which are charred first, as well as big hunks of brisket and flank, which will later be sliced. His spice mixture includes cinnamon, star anise, coriander, black and white peppercorns, cardamom and cloves, all of which he dry-toasts in a pan and adds for the last 30 minutes of cooking, at the barest simmer and with the lid on "so the flavor doesn’t escape."

Once a bowl of pho is ordered, everything speeds up: Nguyen briefly boils a fist-sized knot of snow-white rice noodles until they are pliable, shakes them dry, then places them in the bottom of a big bowl. On top of the noodles he piles layers of thinly sliced brisket, flank steak and barely cooked eye round, onions and scallions. Lovingly, he ladles the broth into the bowl and the pho is almost ready to eat.

Almost. Because, as with many Vietnamese dishes, it’s up to the diner to finish the dish at the table according to taste, selecting garnishes from a plate heaped with basil sprigs, lime wedges, jalapeño slices and bean sprouts. According to Kim Hang Knight, Koehl’s sister and a manager at Pho 34, "I don’t know if you like bean sprouts, or how spicy you like your soup. If we put them in in the kitchen, the flavor isn’t as fresh, and if you do it, you are more engaged." When she packs up pho for delivery, broth, noodles, meat and garnishes are all packaged separately.

Like the beef in pho, the sandwiches called banh mi, which are made with long baguette-style rolls, are a legacy of the French colonization of Vietnam. They’re split and filled with various meats — typically, cooked pork roll, pâté, minced pork and head cheese — along with pickled carrots and daikon radish, greens and herbs, and mayonnaise, which Nguyen dolls up with hoisin and sriracha. The end result is a sum far greater than its humble parts, a complex play among flavors — bright, earthy, sweet, sour, spicy — and textures — crunchy, tender, fatty, lean. The texture of the baguette, crisp on the outside and soft within, is especially important, and Nguyen searched the Island for the just the right bread. The rolls from Lakewood Bakery in Farmingdale came closest to his Vietnamese ideal; they are too long for the boxes the sandwiches are packed into, so he cuts off the ends to fit.

Pho and banh mi, rice and vermicelli noodle bowls, summer and spring rolls — they are all made in the same kitchen at Pho 34, but that is an adaptation for the American restaurant culture. "In Vietnam," said Koehl, "these are all street foods. You go to the pho stall for your pho, then you go to the banh mi lady for your banh mi."

Joe Bui, owner of Rolling Spring Roll in Farmingdale (est. 2013) and Syosset (2016) concurred. "Eating is very different in Vietnam," he said. "You can have pho for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And most of the traditional restaurants specialize in one type of dish. This restaurant makes this great fish dish, say, or this one makes great banh xeo [a puffy rice crepe filled with pork, shrimp and sprouts]."

Bui left Vietnam in 1979 when he was eight; his mother and three young children boarded a ship bound for the South China Sea. It had no other destination, only a hope that it would encounter a Philippine island or passing ship. After five days, the ship was spotted by a French merchant vessel. The family wound up in France for a year before arriving on Long Island to join Bui’s father, who had fought with the Americans during the war.

Bui worked on Wall Street as a stock- broker and day trader and was well assimilated into the American way of life and eating. But embedded in his palate were the flavors he grew up eating in his mother’s kitchen. Always a keen cook, he moonlighted in the kitchen at West East Bistro in Hicksville with its original owner, Danny Wu (now owner of Thom Thom Steak & Seafood in Wantagh). It was then that he had his "eureka moment."

"My whole life I would visit my parents, they always seemed to be digging in the garden for herbs whose names I didn’t even know. That’s when I realized: All this is inside me. And I started to learn the techniques that would allow me to recreate those flavors."

To his parents’ befuddlement, Bui gave up his career in finance and, in 2012, debuted his food truck, The Rolling Spring Roll. There, parked alongside Spagnoli Road in Bethpage, he began to hone his techniques, starting with the judicious use of fish sauce, nuoc mam, the runoff from anchovies fermented with salt. (Fermented anchovies are also a key flavoring in Worcestershire sauce and the main ingredient in colatura, the fish sauce from southern Italy that is a direct descendant of garum, an ancient Roman condiment.)

Fish sauce, which imparts a deep savory richness to a dish, is a true power ingredient, and there are two techniques for deploying it: using it sparingly and holding the bottle securely. "The number one rule in my kitchen is if you break a bottle of fish sauce, you’re fired!" Bui said, while conceding that while "The taste is good, the smell … Well, they say if you spill fish sauce in your car, the car loses its value."

Diluted with water and goosed with lime juice, sugar and other seasonings, nuoc mam becomes nuoc cham, the ubiquitous Vietnamese dipping sauce. This is what The Rolling Spring Roll serves with its eponymous spring rolls. Traditionally, the fried rolls, or cha gio — slimmer and more delicate than egg rolls — are wrapped with fresh herbs and other accompaniments in lettuce leaves at the table before being eaten.

In Vietnam, Bui explained, diners even roll their own summer rolls (goi cuon) which requires no small amount of dexterity. The wrappers are round sheets of rice paper which are ever so briefly dipped in water so they become pliable but not gummy. Once a wrapper is laid at on a work surface, you’ve got only seconds before it becomes too sticky to work with. A mixture of chopped lettuce, mint and cilantro is laid alongside a pile of rice vermicelli and then covered with thin slices of pork. Three sides of the wrapper are folded around the filling, burrito style, and given one roll before sliced shrimp and a length of garlic chives are added and the rolling is completed.

I gave this a try and am very grateful to The Rolling Spring Roll that ordering summer rolls does not require me to wrap my own.

Bui has a philosophical approach to authenticity. "Food can only be as authentic as its surroundings," he said. "To make it taste exactly like it does in Vietnam, I would have to use lemons and limes that don’t have to travel from Florida or California, herbs that don’t grow here."

While cilantro, mint and Thai basil are easy to source on Long Island, saw leaf herb, Vietnamese coriander, wild betel and perilla are not. There’s also a limit to how much a restaurant can spend on hard-to-find ingredients if it wants to keep its prices reasonable.

But Bui makes no excuses for his pho. A few years ago, he visited Vietnam for the first time since he left as a boy, curious to see the land of his forebears and to assess his own ability at recreating its flavors. "Sometimes we ate pho three times a day," he recalled. "And I have to say, mine is on point."