Inkwatu

I take Mandarin classes at the Clearwater Chinese School. On my way home, I often stop at the nearby Mekong Vietnamese Restaurant for lunch (5944 34th St N # 20, St Petersburg, FL 33714, 727-521-3378). I’m very fond of Vietnamese food. Fortunately, Vietnamese restaurants abound in almost every major city in the US, including St. Pete. Each is subtlety different.

My standard getting-to-know-you dish is Pho Ga (chicken noodle soup). No two restaurants fix it the same! Mekong’s is good; the soup base is particularly fragrant. My second most frequent how-does-this-place-compare-to-other-Vietnamese-restaurants-I-have-known dish is Bun Cha (hot grilled pork–sometimes with or without cut-up egg rolls mixed in–on top of cold rice vermicelli which, in turn, is over shredded lettuce, various whole herbs, and julienned cucumber, the whole thing topped with lots of Nuoc Cham, or fish dipping sauce). That juxtaposition of hot against cold, crispy against soft, unified by the melange of flavors from every angle: heaven! Mekong’s Bun Cha is stellar.

[Note, I’ve also seen it called Bun thit nuong. I think the chopped up egg roll version is called Bun Cha Gio. Here’s three recipes–1, 2, and 3–out of many on the Internet.]

[Since this post first came out, there has been published an excellent and very informative post about nuoc mam (fish sauce, one of the ingredients in nuoc cham, fish dipping sauce) on Wandering Chopsticks, a really good food blog I read regularly. Here’s the permalink to that Wandering Chopsticks article. A special thanks to Wandering for personally clarifying the difference for me between nuon mam and nuoc cham.]

Mekong has a wide assortment of vegetarian selections and also has take-out. They serve beer and wine and don’t use MSG. The tough thing about 34th street in this part of town is that it’s hard to go more than 3 blocks without passing a Vietnamese restaurant. Slowly, I’m eating my way the length of 34th street.

Next door (literally right next to it in the little strip mall) is Chợ Lớn Oriental Market (5944 34th St N # 1718, St Petersburg, FL 33714, 727-527-7511‎). Tampa has several, quite large, Asian grocery stores, but St. Pete seems to have more, smaller ones. They are very much neighborhood markets where locals hang out. Next door at the Mekong, there’s a row of chairs against the outside wall where old and young men smoke cigarettes and have long ardent conversations.

There’s an Asian market near my home where I’ve developed a good rapport with the proprietress (Cantho Oriental Market; 1960 16th St. N., St Petersburg, FL 33704, 727-896-8310‎). She now gives me lots of tips on cooking different Asian dishes and on which products to buy to improve the authenticity of the taste of my recipes. So even though I usually shop at her store, when I stop to eat at Mekong, I can never resist going next door to Chợ Lớn and buying something, even if I don’t need it. Did I really need that Sichuan cookbook last time? Yeah…I did: Now I have a recipe for “Homely Ducks Breasts.”

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