The Vietnam war was an immeasurable debacle. Its vibrations still rattle us in complex ways along with those from all the other explosions of history, large and small. Some are so distant in time we can only infer them from perturbations as astronomers infer the collapse of stars. It washed a diaspora of refugees over many transoms including America’s. They took root. Their culture took root, including their culinary culture.
The first American-situated Vietnamese restaurants were humble, staffed by family, utilizing many ingredients from their gardens because they weren’t available otherwise, herbs in particular. Lines of excited eaters began to form outside them. Eating this food was like regaining vision after being blind. Your optic nerve might now work, still your brain didn’t quite know how to process the images. It was a taste kaleidoscope, thrilling, daunting, revelatory.
At a time when the finest grocery stores stocked only curly parsley, folks began tasting varieties of basil and mint, cilantro, galangal, lemongrass, and, like blasting caps, Birdseye chilis. Flavors and flavor combinations, textures, foodstuffs never before imagined appeared: A sauce made from fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, chili, sugar. A sauce from peanut butter, coconut milk, palm sugar. Lemongrass lashed beef, charcoal-grilled before you, wrapped in moistened rice paper with herbs and rice noodles and dipped in one of those sauces. A whole duck swaddled in sugar cane splints, tied, roasted. Sausages of pork, crab, peanut, coconut milk, fish sauce, curry paste. Chemosensory neurons fired that no one knew they had.
Nourished by the tears and toil of these immigrants, Viet cuisine grew in the culinary soil of different nations. Now there is a thriving eco-system of Vietnamese restaurants and appendages worldwide. There’s high end Viet. There are Vietnamese restaurant conglomerates. There’s Vietnamese-Cajun. Vietnamese fusion. There are pho joints. Banh mi shops. There are non-Vietnamese restaurants riffing Vietnamese dishes, such as rice paper rolls made with smoked salmon or lobster or foie gras. There are Sriracha sauce magnates. Fish sauce tycoons. There are Vietnamese ingredient sections in mainstream supermarkets. Anthony Bourdain ate Bun Cha with Barak Obama.
Saigon Etoile – Vietnamese Street Food in Hong Kong (the original is in Paris), started by Mrs. Ngoc Anh, has chosen a refreshing niche for itself in the Vietnamese culinary schema, simplicity. It offers a small selection of Vietnamese street foods thoughtfully presented.
Pho is to Vietnamese as porridge to Dickens, “please, sir, I want some more.” Long-simmered beef, beef bones, herbs make the broth. Rice noodles, various forms of beef, and herbs are added. Fresh lime, chopped Birdseye chili, and herbs (and Hoisin and Fish Sauce) are typically served alongside so customers can add to taste. As with Ramen, there is a hierarchy of phos with some restaurants making their fortune on the genius of their particular formula or the sourcing of their beef (Wagyu, for instance). In rural California you once encountered a Vietnamese restaurant that made its pho based on goat. One restaurant in Hong Kong, Chua Lam’s Pho (temporarily closed), even makes its own rice noodles, which requires an improbably large, Willy Wonkoid machine.
Saigon Etoile adds cardamom, cinnamon, aniseed, cloves, and coriander seeds to their broth which impart mild aromatic flavor. Rice noodles are naturally soft, but the ones in their broth were just a tad too soft, slightly overcooked. There was a tuft of basil, and lemon (not the usual lime which you prefer) and chopped Birdseye chili to strew over. It contained raw beef, which cooked in the hot broth, brisket, and beef meatball. This was a solid, though not transcendental, pho. You think it would have soared higher had it come with a big bowl of fresh basil, mint and sprouts and lime wedges for anointing. Though you don’t know for sure, you have an intuition that this is a typical street rendition of this dish, tasty, plain-spoken, gets-the-job-done.
You had Bun Rieu -- tomato, minced crab and pork soup. To be completely blunt, you didn’t bond with it. Not listed in the menu description was pig blood, a coagulated hunk, for you as appetizing as zombie toe. Reasonable people may disagree, but you believe it is axiomatic: if there is blood, always say so on the menu. The last thing you’d ever want is to stumble over some in your Eggs Benedict. Some carnivores just prefer their blood within their meat, not separate like police evidence. You give this soup kudos for authenticity, but blood aside, it seemed barely crabby to you. The taste of shrimp paste seemed more prominent. Quite possibly your unculturated palate is the source of your discontent.
You’ve never had a finer nibble than their Fried Rolls (spring rolls) filled with carrots, vermicelli, mushrooms, prawn, minced pork, onions. You wrapped them in lettuce, tucked in fresh mint, and dipped them in a vibrant nuoc cham sauce. Like kippers to a cat! Likewise the Fresh Rolls (shrimp rice paper rolls). They came with a low-pitched peanut sauce from crushed peanuts, and coconut milk, with a scatter of caramelized shallot.
(Caramelized shallot is so delicious that you could eat a bowl of it alone. It’s one of the great omnipurpose, little known condiments finally infiltrating other cuisines. Recently the NY Times published a recipe for pasta with caramelized shallots created by Alison Roman. It’s made with bucatini, that prince of pastas, and the recipe is so popular that it actually has dented the US bucatini supply. There have been bucatini outages. The government has been forced to dip into the emergency bucatini stockpile. Google it. Make it. Be happy. If you can’t find bucatini, despair not, use Fusilli Lunghi, brother prince. Good prices at Amazon.)
The pork banh mi was better than that at Chua Lam’s Pho, but you were surprised by their bread that seemed a little stale, losing pliancy. The strands of carrot and daikon within were too mildly pickled for your taste, not giving the sharp flavor contrast you crave. Pork belly used here is quite fatty and though it’s undoubtedly authentic, you think an upgrade would not be out of line. There are better cuts of pork that could have been used. Your experience in this realm may be dismissed, but when you make banh mi with pork belly, you crisp it to pull out the fat and amp the flavor.
Dessert was a good, hot brownie. Why not one of the great Vietnamese desserts though?
You appreciated your 333 Beer, good for a tropical clime, not commonly available. You adored their coffee made from a mix of Brazilian and Vietnamese beans that were extraordinarily flavorful. Your coffee was made in an individual drip device over a glass of condensed milk, mixed, then poured over ice. You thought it was perfecto, the best coffee drink you’ve had in all your years in Hong Kong. Also, the least expensive.
The interior is concrete, Viet graphics on the walls, baskets on the ceiling, handsome in a utilitarian, Left Bank sort of way, good for wearing a tilted beret and earnestly discussing Heidegger. Taking another slant altogether, your wife saw it as a “workaday” shop worth knowing about if you’re in the neighborhood. There’s a chef and a greeter-server who is gracious.
Saigon Etoile is not an innovator, nor does it claim to be or seek to be. Clearly, it’s not driven to reach new culinary heights. Glory is not their mission. Go elsewhere for chefed up creations. Go elsewhere for particularly refined, intensified flavors. Go elsewhere for a deeper exploration of this cuisines’ branches and twigs. Their credo – expressed in their secondary title -- is “Vietnamese Street Food,” and this it delivers quite well. Come here for solid renditions of a few standard dishes. And, no small thing, come here if you’re seeking a superb deal. The phos and the banh mi were only HK$68 each (by contrast, the phos at Chua Lam’s Pho go from HK$88 to HK$198). The Fresh Rolls were HK$42, the Fried Rolls were HK$38. Drip coffee in the glass HK$38. Judged value for dollar, Saigon Etoile crushes.
This is not a destination restaurant, but you would certainly drop in for a comforting nosh if your tummy tapped you on the shoulder when you were nearby. Saigon Etoile dispenses good food, street style, not reaching pour les étoiles. Vibrating imperceptibly to the perturbations of history, infused with generations of indomitable spirit, Saigon Etoile fills a worthy niche.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food overall: 2.5
Ambience: 2.5 (you found it charming, your wife not as much)
Service: 2.5
Overall greatness: 2.5
Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.
From our website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4’s or 5’s. I reserve 4’s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5’s are for food that is stunning.”
This meal was comped.
Saigon Etoile
118 Electric Rd, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong