Thai and Vietnamese Food Feel Like One Family

After a long journey, when homesickness runs deep, the thing that comforts a traveler most is often a bowl of noodle soup. No matter where home is, or whether the bowl hidden in your heart is Lanzhou beef noodles or Cantonese wonton noodles, a Chinese stomach always keeps a place for noodle soup. On the road, in the dark, in cold wind, nothing can settle a Chinese person’s homesickness better than a bowl of noodle soup.

If Chinese noodle soup cannot be found, other Asian flavors are better than nothing. In this sense, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants are better able to shoulder the role of a “late-night diner” than Japanese or Korean ones, because not every Japanese restaurant serves ramen, but every Thai or Vietnamese restaurant in North America is sure to have a noodle soup that comes incredibly close.

1. Noodle Soups and Stir-Fried Noodles

The reason Thai and Vietnamese food are put together here is that in North America the two cuisines cannot really be separated. Almost every Thai restaurant sells a few Vietnamese dishes, and Vietnamese restaurants always have a bit of Thai-style fried noodles or snacks.

From what I’ve seen, Vietnamese restaurants in North America do not seem to be very large. Most focus on Vietnamese beef noodle soup. In Vietnam, this dish is found in streets and alleys everywhere and is known as a national dish. Its popularity in North America spread with the wave of refugees after the Vietnam War.

On English menus, Vietnamese beef noodle soup is written as pho. Some say it takes its name from the “fun” in Cantonese “hor fun”; others say it comes from the “hor.” Another group believes the French brought the habit of eating beef to Vietnam, and that pho evolved from a French dish.

For a shop that sells pho, the key is to simmer a pot of beef broth that is clear in color and deep in flavor. Every kind of pho on the menu relies on that broth for taste. The broth is slightly brown; what matters is that it is clear enough to see the bottom, while the flavor is rich and smooth. At the first sip there is the savory fragrance of beef, and in the aftertaste a faint sweetness. The seasonings must be well matched, present but not overpowering.

With this pot of broth as the base, more than half the battle is won. The different names of pho are just arrangements and combinations of meat toppings. The basic version is beef and tendon. Broadly speaking, beef is beef, but shops specializing in beef noodles list more choices. Flank and brisket are both called beef brisket in Chinese; flank is from the belly, while brisket is near the chest. Cantonese beef brisket shops have both, while French cooking uses brisket more.

What attracts me more to Vietnamese beef pho is the rare beef, sliced paper-thin. When it comes to the table, there is a big bowl of scalding broth, snow-white rice noodles lying elegantly in the soup, and a layer of raw beef on top. You stir quickly with chopsticks, and like eating Yunnan crossing-the-bridge noodles, you use the heat of the soup to cook the meat to the doneness you like. It melts in the mouth.

Besides beef, there are tripe, tendon, beef ball, and other choices. The menu will also always have a special pho, with rare beef, well-done beef, brisket, tripe, tendon, and beef balls all together.

Whichever noodle soup you order, it comes with a bowl of bean sprouts, a few green or red chiles with a strong flavor, a wedge of lime, and a small pinch of Thai basil, to add to the soup according to taste. The Thai basil used here is the kind common in Thai and Taiwanese cooking. It is the same family as the basil often used in Italian cooking, but a different variety.

As famous as Vietnamese pho is pad Thai. The noodles used in this dish are flat and translucent, with a chewier texture than the rice noodles and rice vermicelli common in Chinese food. This texture comes from tapioca starch added during the making of the rice noodles, the same starch used for the “pearls” in bubble tea.

The reason this fried rice noodle dish became the most famous Thai dish in North America is, besides the special character of the noodles themselves, most importantly its sweet-sour and slightly spicy flavor. In fast-food stalls, the sauce is prepared in advance, and the sweet-sour taste comes from sugar and vinegar. But in an authentic Thai restaurant, this sweet-sour flavor should come from tamarind juice. Tamarind is found in many places in China, shaped like a lentil, dark brown, and also called suanzi or suanzao.

When ordering pad Thai, there are usually choices such as mild, medium, and spicy. For the accompanying ingredients you can choose chicken, beef, shrimp, tofu, and so on. After it is off the wok, you can add crushed peanuts according to taste.

Some Thai restaurants also offer fried rice noodles called pad see ew, or egg noodles.

Noodle soup, however, is not really a specialty of Thai snacks. Some restaurants and food stalls, to highlight Thai character and enrich their menus, have added rice noodles with a Thai tom yum soup base. Tom yum is also written tom yam and is generally translated into Chinese as dong yin gong. It is a representative soup dish in Thai food. The soup includes strong-flavored spices such as lemon grass and kaffir lime leaf, producing an extremely intense sour and spicy taste. Combined with the fresh taste of shrimp and other seafood, it is very unique. Mixing rice noodles into this soup is actually a good choice.

Besides hot food, Vietnam also has a cold mixed vermicelli street snack, and it is also widely popular in North America. This rice noodle is usually written as vermicelli on English menus. The word originally referred to a long, thin Italian pasta; now it broadly refers to all rice noodles and cellophane noodles, while in Vietnamese restaurants it specifically means cold mixed noodles. The vermicelli for this cold dish is not all rice flour; it is mixed with mung bean starch, so it is more chewy. Because of this mung, Cantonese often translates this Vietnamese vermicelli as “mong.”

Vermicelli can be paired with all kinds of grilled meats: grilled pork, grilled beef, and grilled chicken all work. The grilled meat is salty with a hint of sweetness, while the noodles themselves are seasoned with a fresh sweet-sour taste. With the intense aroma unique to Southeast Asian tropical spices, it is sure to stimulate the appetite when you have none.

2. Rolls and Skewers

In the Jiangnan region, spring rolls are mostly eaten fried, and they appear at the New Year’s Eve dinner. In Sichuan, however, spring rolls are generally eaten cold. The most classic filling is a cold mixed three-shred salad—shredded celtuce, shredded carrot, shredded kelp or vermicelli—brightly colored. They are not eaten at the New Year’s Eve dinner, but during Spring Festival visits, around the fifth or sixth day, when the New Year is almost over, this fresh cold appetizer is most popular. This Sichuan way of eating spring rolls is a bit like the spring pancakes eaten in the north when “biting the spring,” but the wrapper used is as thin and small as the Jiangnan spring roll wrapper.

In North America, the spring roll is not only one of the most popular snacks in all American-style Chinese restaurants, but also an indispensable item on the menu of every Thai or Vietnamese restaurant. Compared with Chinese restaurant spring rolls, those from the Thai-Vietnamese side are larger, fried to a crisp, and usually filled with plenty of ground beef or ground pork; chicken and shrimp are also used.

The only one eaten cold and not fried, like a spring pancake, is the Vietnamese spring roll. On English menus it is generally written as shrimp roll or salad roll to distinguish it from the spring roll. Vietnamese spring rolls do not use a wheat wrapper but a transparent rice wrapper. They are larger than Sichuan and Jiangnan spring roll wrappers, about the same as northern spring pancakes, but thinner.

I do not know whether Vietnamese restaurants make this wrapper themselves. In Asian supermarkets in North America, dried Vietnamese spring roll wrappers are often seen for sale; soak them in cold water and they soften. The filling is mainly white vermicelli, topped with a layer of green lettuce or other fresh vegetables, plus a few whole shrimp. Red and green alternate, and the fresh, pleasant colors can be seen through the wrapper. There is almost no flavor in the filling of Vietnamese spring rolls. When served, a plate of dipping sauce is added, with a strong fragrance of fish sauce and a slight sweetness.

The most distinctive cold dishes in Thai and Vietnamese restaurants use fruit. Green papaya salad and mango salad both use fruit that is not fully ripe and still slightly green. When cut into shreds, it is still firm; in the mouth, sourness is greater than sweetness and can really stimulate saliva. The dressing is sweet chili sauce, which complements the sourness of the fruit.

These salads have now also become fillings for Vietnamese spring rolls, and many restaurants, even food stalls, have them.

Grilled skewers are also an indispensable appetizer in Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. In Thai food, satay chicken skewers are the most famous. The chicken is marinated thoroughly in satay sauce, grilled until tender, then brushed with a semi-dry dipping sauce made with a peanut butter base, and sprinkled with crushed peanuts. Before you eat, the aroma has already made a striking entrance.

Vietnamese skewers are different. They mostly use shrimp as the main ingredient, and sugar cane shrimp is especially distinctive. This snack does not use whole shrimp. Instead, the shrimp meat is minced into a paste, mixed with an appropriate amount of starch and seasonings, and made into a paste similar to Cantonese shrimp balls. The “skewer” is not the usual bamboo or metal stick; instead, sugar cane is peeled and cut into small sticks about 0.5 to 1 centimeter square and 2 to 3 centimeters long, used as the “skewer.” The shrimp paste is spread on the sugar cane stick. During grilling, the sweet juice of the sugar cane seeps into the shrimp meat, bringing a fresh fragrance of the fields.

3. Curries and Stir-Fries

When it comes to hot dishes, the biggest characteristic of Thai and Vietnamese food is still the use of fruit, mixed with rich seasonings such as satay and curry, which give the finished dish a dizzying composite flavor.

Curry is the most unforgettable representative of Thai composite flavor. Curry itself is a composite seasoning. Its spiciness comes mainly from chiles, but it is also mixed with cumin, turmeric, coriander seed, and other spices, giving it many layers. Curry originated in the Indian subcontinent and has a long history. Today, besides India, curry is also popular in Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, and other places.

The difference is that Japanese curry is much lighter and more elegant than its Indian counterpart, almost completely shedding its spicy character. In Shanghai, the standard companion to pan-fried buns is curry beef vermicelli soup, which falls between Indian and Japanese flavors: its lightness and lack of heat are close to Japanese curry, while the curry flavor itself leans toward the aroma of Indian curry.

Thai curry is different from all of them. It includes lemon grass, which is indispensable in almost all Thai food, and more importantly, it must be blended with a large amount of coconut milk or coconut paste. Coconut milk greatly dilutes the stimulation of spiciness on the palate, so Thai curry is relatively mild.

Thai curries on the menu generally include red curry, yellow curry, and green curry. The colors of these curries come not only from red, yellow, and green chile powders, but also from the colors of the spices. Green curry in particular is a true Thai specialty. It uses fresh coriander and Thai basil, as well as kaffir lime leaves. This Thai lime has green, wrinkled skin and is very small, only about 4 centimeters in diameter. The fruit itself is rarely eaten, but the leaves are an important seasoning in Thai food.

Although red, yellow, and green curries can all be made very spicy or not spicy at all, in North American Thai restaurants the default standard is that red curry is the hottest and green curry the mildest.

Ordering curry in a Thai restaurant always comes with a bowl of fragrant jasmine rice. Mixing the curry sauce with rice gives just the right richness. Coconut fragrance enters the mouth, rice fragrance reaches the nose, heat lingers on the lips, and a dense creaminess coats the teeth. Wonderful. Some restaurants allow you to pay extra to replace the rice with roti, an oily flatbread similar to the “Indian flying pancake” in China. Dipped in curry sauce, it is also very delicious.

Besides curry, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants also have various stir fries. In English, fry is a broad concept that includes Chinese pan-frying, stir-frying, deep-frying, and other cooking methods, while stir fry was coined specifically to describe the stir-frying technique in Asian cooking.

Among Thai stir-fries, basil chicken must be mentioned. Dried chiles are fried to release a fragrant heat, and the seasonings are savory sauces such as fish sauce and oyster sauce. Most important, Thai basil cannot be left out. In the finished dish, the fragrance of Thai basil is even stronger than in Taiwanese three-cup chicken.

4. Desserts

Such an intense meal needs a sweet ending to keep the palate and the mood in balance. Mango sticky rice is a Thai dessert that is especially popular with Asians. Very few locals in North America like soft, sticky glutinous rice; the English word sticky hardly brings up pleasant associations.

But this Thai dessert is sure to suit most Chinese tastes. The sticky rice itself is nothing special; pair it with thinly sliced mango and pour over thick coconut milk, and it becomes soft, smooth, fragrant, and glutinous, impossible to stop eating.

Tapioca coconut pudding and deep-fried banana are also common Thai desserts. Both use tropical fruit as the main ingredient, especially mango and coconut, and are full of wild flavor.