What is it about the national media that gets Vietnamese-food trends laughably late and wrong? If it's not The New York Times “discovering” Sriracha and bánh mì, it's the Washington Post devoting way too many words to some D.C.-area chefs who, as the headline puts it, “put their own spin” on pho. And what are those personal touches? Using higher-quality meats, duck instead of chicken, and what writer Tim Carman calls “a heady little leaf known as the rice-paddy herb.”
BREAKING NEWS! Little Saigon chefs have done all these things for years.
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The story is laughable. The Southern Californian jingoist in me wants to be sympathetic to Carman, but the D.C. area has a chingo of Vietnamese–maybe not approaching San Jose or Little Saigon numbers, but sizable. And when Carman gushes about a restaurant that “injects French classicism into Vietnamese cooking,” I laughed. It's a whole genre of Vietnamese cooking, Tim!
The only thing I find interesting about the story: non-Vietnamese chefs trying to make pho. Wonder why we don't see that here in OC . . . Instead, otherwise-sane chefs try to make tacos.
