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| - Friday night I was gifted with a foretaste of heaven.
After shopping at Whole Foods and doing the wine pairings there, my wife and I went around the corner to Bowl of Pho in Woodmere. Bowl of Pho is basically "Bowl of Soup", in my opinion a misnomer. Had I named the restaurant, I would have called it something like Imperial Gardens of Vietnam. Vietnamese cuisine emphasizes the freshness of its vegetables. In a good Vietnamese restaurant all their cuisine features vegetables that are fresh from local growers.
I had the grilled shrimp with Vermicelli noodles as my entrée, but I started with a shared appetizer of spring rolls. I've enjoyed Vietnamese cuisine for fifty years, and Bowl of Pho presented me with the best spring rolls I've ever eaten.
I've never been a fan of the spicy hot that a lot of guys I know eat to apparently prove their manhood. That kind of hotness, for me, eliminates the flavors of whatever it is that you are eating. On the other hand I love a kiss of hotness, and that is exactly what was provided with my entrée.
Fifty years ago I began nearly a year-long study of the Vietnamese language at the Presidio of Monterey. As I was reviewing the menu, I asked the Vietnamese gentleman, who, as it turned out, owns the restaurant (Mr. Nguyen Van Bi - we would say Bi Nguyen), why there was no dau nga diacritical mark above the My on his sandwich menu featuring Banh My. I thought that that meant American sandwich. He explained to me that I had it wrong. No big surprise there, since I've gotten about a million things wrong in my lifetime.
Naturally, because I still retained some of my language training after fifty years, we went on to talk quite a bit, even though the restaurant was near capacity. He was from the Hue area on the DMZ. His father was a soldier in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. After our duplicitous Congress decided to longer support South Vietnam in 1975 (the South had held off the communists for three years after we left in 1972), the south fell, mostly because China and the USSR immediately doubled their support of the North. Bi's father was sent to a "re-education camp" for seven years. "Re-education camps" were actually concentration camps where those being "educated" were used as slave labor and fed a diet with very high salt content to maximize their work while minimizing the cost of the slaves' upkeep.
When the seven years of incarceration ended, Bi's mother made sure his father ate lots of meals featuring pig's kidneys to pull the salt from his body.
As the evening progressed, Bi (pronounced bee) introduced us to his wife, Nicole, and his nearly two-year-old daughter, Zoie. Nicole, fully Vietnamese, may be more American than I am (and my ancestors came here on the Mayflower). We had some great conversation with her. My wife and I told her how impressed we were with our meals, and she shared some stories about the effort that goes into ensuring that the freshest of ingredients are obtained for their clientele. She asked how it was that we'd heard about Bowl of Pho and I told her it was from Yelp. She said that Yelp only rated the restaurant at 3.5 stars. As you can guess from what I have written, I am quite familiar with Vietnamese cuisine, and Bowl of Pho is the best of the best.
Bi and I exchanged business cards, and I look forward to future conversations with him both online and at his restaurant.
But the evening's pleasures for me did not end there. I could not help but hear parts of the conversation in the booth next to ours, and the gentleman talking had served in some of the same areas in which I had served (I was a Vietnamese Voice Intercept Operator for the Army Security Agency [cover name in Vietnam was Radio Research Units] and had been assigned to operations in Saigon, Nha Trang, Phan Rang, Dak To, Tuy Hoa, Phuc My, Cam Ro Bay, Hue, Phu Bai, Pleiku, Phan Thiet, Kontum, Cam Ranh Bay, and points betwixt and between). As he got up to leave, I said, "Welcome home." We talked briefly and it turns out that he had retired as a colonel after twenty-seven years in the Army. His first tour was with the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne in 1965. My first assignments were with combat units of the 1st Brigade in 1966. His next assignment was managing Arc Light operations (B-52 bombings of the Ho Chi Minh trails). When I mentioned Army Security Agency, he said twice that, "We used everything you guys sent to us." That's a big deal for me and my fellow spooks and spies because we never got feedback on what happened with the intelligence information we provided to operational units. I pointed out that we were the only intelligence unit to predict what was going to happen during Tet '68, and he confirmed that was the case.
I know I've digressed a bit from reviewing Bowl of Pho, but I think you can understand that I would be giving my dining experience there ten stars if I could.
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