Story by Thao Bui
Photos by Hae Min Lee
As a child, my travel-loving parents dragged me everywhere to not only embrace the cultures of various regions in Vietnam but also to taste each area’s different cuisine. That was how I first discovered my love and passion for my home country’s food. To me, heaven is simply sitting on a hammock underneath a mango tree and savoring fresh grilled shrimp with ginger fish sauce in a warm summer breeze.
Most of my memories about Vietnam either involve the food made by my grandmother or the various little food stands on the busy streets of Ho Chi Minh City, my hometown. During the cold winter months in Oregon, I usually crave something warm and authentic. However, I’ve found Vietnamese food in the States has been changed in certain ways to adapt with local taste, losing out on the original flavor.
Vietnam’s history and location have had a great influence on its unique cuisines; first occupied by China for more than a thousand years and later by the French for another hundred, Vietnam’s cuisine reflects a harmonious blend of Eastern and Western cooking. Its location in Southeast Asia has also allowed some influences from nearby Thailand.
Taking in all these various influences, Vietnam has developed a particular character of its own that is unlike any other. Different from Chinese cuisine, Vietnamese people don’t often like stir fry or deep fry, but focus more on steamed, soup based, or braised dishes. They also use as little oil as possible when cooking. It is all about the blend of different ingredients to create delightful and delicious food. With a simple cooking method, plenty of vegetable and fresh herbs, Vietnamese cooking is one of the healthiest on the planet.
In the Northwest, however, Vietnamese restaurants often fail to bring out the best of the Asian country’s cuisine. “I find the food here is somehow greasy and it doesn’t show the diversity,” says UO senior Ha Truong, also from Ho Chi Minh City. “Some restaurants I’ve been to use only one soup base for different noodle dishes. Everything tastes the same.”
Despite the diverse food found in the country of origin, Vietnamese cuisine in Oregon is most typically known for pho. Almost every Vietnamese restaurant I have been to has “pho” in the name and serves pho as a main dish. However, I have yet to actually eat a decent phở gà, which is similar to chicken noodle soup. The portion is huge and they mostly come with plenty of meat, lacking the fresh vegetables or herbs on the side that typically come as a standard with traditional pho.
Americanized Vietnamese food also differs in the type of ingredients used to create the final dish. This is mainly because many vegetables from Vietnam, like water spinach, sawtooth coriander, Vietnamese mint, and Thai basil, are rarely available in the Northwest. Plus, some traditional condiments like fish sauce and shrimp paste have a distinctive smell that Western people are not often used to.
Fish sauce (also known as nước mắm) is made with salt and anchovies placed in big wooden containers for a few months to get the salty, fishy liquid. Shrimp paste, or mắm tôm, is another condiment widely used in Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries. The paste includes fermented, ground, sun-dried shrimp, which creates a strong final flavor that those familiar with traditional Vietnamese cuisine note the absence of in American dishes.
“Whenever I step into a Vietnamese restaurant and see a lot of Americans eating inside, I have a feeling that the food will not be as good,” says UO junior Duy Nguyen, who is from the southeastern Vietnamese province of Binh Duong. “Although the food tastes great, it lacks a flavor of nước mắm or mắm that makes the dish here not very Vietnamese.”
Phuong Hsies, owner of Yi-Shen, a Vietnamese restaurant located on W 11th Avenue, says she often uses less fish sauce when preparing her restaurants’ food because most of her customers cannot stand the strong smell. Phuong also substitutes some original ingredients from Vietnam because they cannot be found locally and American tastes don’t always appreciate them.
“Most Vietnamese food includes pork like in the spring salad roll. You know back home, we have shrimp and pork both, but here we have to take the meat out,” Phuong says. “And we cannot put too much shrimp paste or fish sauce when cooking either.”
Despite these changes, Phuong says she no longer notices a difference.
“I don’t think the food here is very different from Vietnam, maybe because I’ve been living here too long,” she explains. “But I cannot speak for other people because we all have different tastes.”
It is true the idea of authenticity is subjective and people have their own interpretation of what makes certain cuisines “authentic.” For an international student like myself, food from home will always be different because it also reminds me of certain stories and fond memories. And although Oregon does not always portray Vietnamese food in a way I find fully “authentic,” I still enjoy a big bowl of pho on a cold winter evening, savor the tasty beef broth with tender meatballs, and dream about eating pho again with my family in Vietnam.
