Hawking her ya-ka-mein soup at a recent New Orleans concert, Linda Green went through her basic sales pitch: it's beef and noodles. It's a local secret, she told me. It's an African-American tradition. But then came an odd clincher.
"It's a little like pho," she said. "But better."
It took a second to process. Pho? As in, the Vietnamese beef and noodle soup? Why would she assume a random customer would know pho?
Because we were in New Orleans, that's why. Just as New Yorkers nosh knishes and Miamians munch medianoches, New Orleanians know pho – and Vietnamese culture in general. It's just one more classically American example of outsiders turned insiders. In the 1970s, attracted by both a climate and a local industry – shrimping – that they knew well, Vietnamese refugees settled by the tens of thousands in Louisiana. And New Orleans culture met them halfway, absorbing and adapting what they had to offer.
Though I had come to New Orleans for more mainstream purposes, I carved out some time to tour Vietnamese New Orleans. Though I did need a car – the Vietnamese communities are concentrated across the Mississippi River on the Westbank (outside New Orleans proper) and down Chef Menteur Highway along Lake Pontchartrain – there were few other major expenses. Vietnamese New Orleans, it turned out, is even more budget-friendly than the rest of the city.
It does, though, wake up earlier. Arrive at the Saturday Vietnamese Farmers' Market, out Chef Menteur and down Alcee Fortier Boulevard in a strip mall parking lot, after 8 a.m., and it's already winding down. I pulled in at 6:15, when the morning was still misty and dark enough to obscure the suburban houses across the road. I could also imagine that I had slipped across the Pacific.
Women – mostly grandmotherly in age and many wearing a traditional non la, the conical Vietnamese hat – were selling produce: wrinkly starfruit, purple yams, cabbage, even mini fruit trees. I bought some fruit, including a pomelo, an oversize grapefruit relative that I at first mistook for a honeydew melon. There were also banh tet and banh tet chuoi, logs of glutinous rice stuffed with pork or banana and wrapped in banana leaves. You could even buy a non la for $5.
The customers were mostly Asian – Vietnamese, I presumed. But not all. A few curious white New Orleans residents were poking around as well, and one black woman in sweats was neither curious nor poking: she lives nearby, she said, and was there on her regular run for collard greens ($1 a bunch). Actually, not even all the sellers were Vietnamese, as I noticed when I saw a customer walking off with a heavy sack that I was quite sure was honking like a goose. In fact, it was a goose: purchased for $25 from two Mississippi farmers, who every Saturday truck in their chickens, rabbits and other livestock.
It was fascinating, though not enough to make me forget I had woken at 5:15. Luckily, I spotted a likely strip-mall caffeine source: Bien Nho Cafe. Inside the bare-bones spot, I was struck by an odd sight: a table of men playing a board game that translated as "horse race." Now, men playing board games is a common sight in cafes around the world. But at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday? I could only guess that if you're from a shrimping culture, you're used to being up early.
I ordered coffee, which, this being Vietnamese New Orleans, was a hybrid: the coffee, chicory in the New Orleans style, was sweetened and thickened, Vietnamese style, with condensed milk. A woman behind the counter served me in a large plastic foam cup and I went to sit down, watch the Horse Race and wait for the coffee to cool. She soon came over with a smaller cup and placed it next to my coffee. "Here's your tea," she said.
On my way back to the city center, I stopped along Chef Menteur Highway for breakfast at a Vietnamese New Orleans institution, Dong Phuong Bakery. Some claim Dong Phuong has the best French bread in New Orleans, by which they mean the best New Orleans-style French bread, with its crackling crust and a cottony-soft interior.
At Dong Phuong, they use it to make banh mi, sandwiches with crisp pickled vegetables, cilantro and jalapeño. They start at $2.25 for the liver pâté variety, which in New York, I thought on the drive back, would have been the most delicious subway-ride-priced sandwich in the world.
There's another name for banh mi in New Orleans: the Vietnamese po'boy. That's how they're listed at Singleton's Mini Mart at 7446 Garfield Street near the Tulane campus. Bau and Laura Nguyen didn't change the name when they bought it 10 years ago, nor did they stop selling regular po'boys from behind the counter. Now, on Saturdays, they sell Vietnamese food as well, including a $6.95 classic pho – the kind with thinly sliced raw steak that cooks in the broth (staying pink in the folds, if you're lucky), and topped with bean sprouts, fresh basil leaves and sliced jalapeños. Is it the best pho in town? Probably not. Was it fresh and light yet hearty and satisfying? Absolutely.
That night, it was back up to Chef Menteur Highway. Sandy Nguyen, who runs a local nonprofit that works with Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers, had recommended I go to Nha Trang for karaoke. She said it ran 8 p.m. to midnight and was quite welcoming – all I had to do was sit at the bar and I was sure to make friends.
Sure enough, not two minutes after my plunking onto a bar stool, I was chatting with Minh and Hai, two Vietnamese-American men in their early 40s who had immigrated to New Orleans as children. But she was wrong about the karaoke, at least that day. With the New Orleans-hosted Super Bowl coming up, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that there would be no singing until the N.F.L. playoff game was over.
No matter. Minh and Hai were excellent company, and they told me briefly about growing up Vietnamese-American in New Orleans before we delved into more common beer-drinking topics: women and sports. The men pushed over some tasty fried quail, like chicken wings except scrawnier and more flavorful. Eventually, the karaoke started, and Hai belted out a Vietnamese pop song. My tab: $0, vigorously enforced by my new drinking buddies, who despite my objections would not let me pay.
Of course, New Orleans is loaded with more formal Vietnamese restaurants, so another day, Rien Fertel, a writer and Tulane Ph.D. candidate who loves Vietnamese food and has written on its New Orleans history, brought me to Kim Son, located in Gretna, a small city on the Westbank.
Kim Son looked like any Chinese restaurant in an American suburb. There were even Chinese items on the menu (General Tso's Chicken, Moo Goo Gai Pan), which Rien explained were likely holdovers from the time when locals were still wary of Vietnamese food. Dishes averaged around $10, and I left the ordering to him. Soon a feast appeared: from charcoal lemongrass beef (to be folded into rice paper or lettuce and dipped in fish sauce) to salt-baked shrimp (the most expensive — and delicious — at $12.95).
Rien dropped me off near Hong Kong Food Market, part of a wider Asian supermarket chain that in New Orleans specializes mainly in Vietnamese products. I could last hours in ethnic supermarkets (and have), but here I darted around for only half an hour, taking note of things I might buy, like lychee fruit bars (four for $4.96), and things that caught me eye, like duck tongues and mung bean starch.
A few days later as I packed, I realized I still had that massive pomelo from the farmers' market, and it would not fit in my carry-on. I grabbed it with my free hand, planning to peel and eat it at the airport.
Instead, it turned my trip home into my final chapter in Vietnamese New Orleans. It was not so much a snack as an attention-grabber – with all the advantages of toting a really cute baby (the oohing, the ahhing) and none of the disadvantages (the diapers, the crying).
The car-rental shuttle driver asked about it. At the airport gate, people smiled at it. As I boarded, a little girl already seated in 19D blatantly stared. I caught her glance and smiled. "What is it?" she said.
I had a transfer in Atlanta, but couldn't even ask the airline agents at the gate to point me toward my connection; they just wanted to talk pomelo. Others wanted to know how I had gotten it through security. Fruit, I noted, was not (yet) outlawed on domestic flights. The next morning, at home, I finally ate it. It was drier than grapefruit, and not as tasty as the pho or banh mi. But it provided some lingering Vietnamese-themed entertainment, and for that I was thankful.
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