Called banh nam, the delicate little dumpling is designed to be rolled up with chopsticks or a spoon; dipped in its own nuoc mam, a honey-colored condiment sprinkled with chopped chiles; then swallowed in a single bite — its supple, slightly meaty and fermented notes more of a tease than an attempt to satisfy any particular craving. This dish, if you want to call it such, is one that might have found its way onto the table of an emperor back when the royals still held nominal power in the Vietnamese Imperial City of Hue, Truong tells me.
Her restaurant, Truong Tien, buried deep within a mall at the Vietnamese shopping center in Falls Church, specializes in the dishes that collectively are known as Hue royal cuisine, named for the ancient imperial city where the preparations sprang to life during the Nguyen dynasty of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Imperial plates are not totally foreign to the D.C. region — chef Gene Binh Nguyen at Present restaurant, also in Falls Church, has been trading on his interpretation of royal cuisine for years — but I have encountered nothing like the food at Truong Tien in my years of learning and writing about Vietnamese cooking.
There may be a simple reason for this: Many, if not most, of the refugees who came to the United States after the fall of Saigon were not exposed to Hue royal cuisine. Imperial dishes were, as Truong explains, prepared exclusively for the emperor, and those inside the palace, even if they knew the recipes (which they probably did not), were not inclined to share the secrets. Hue royal cuisine, in other words, has not been codified in cookbooks in the same way French cooking has.
Truong, however, says she had an ancestor who was a high official in the Nguyen dynasty. This ancestor — I couldn’t quite pinpoint whether he was a great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather — would bring home food from the palace, and his family would begin the painstaking process of reverse-engineering the dishes to reveal their mysteries.
Once unlocked, these recipes became family heirlooms, passed down from one generation to another, until they landed in Truong’s kitchen. This form of hand-me-down knowledge naturally raises a question or two, such as: How close are Truong’s dishes to the ones served to the emperor all those years ago? And have the recipes lost something in translation, as they passed from the palace to a succession of home cooks, each one farther from the original source?
When I inquire about this passing of knowledge, Truong’s business consultant and unofficial interpreter Toan Ngo provides an answer, based in part on his years of friendship with the home cook turned chef. Ngo suggests that Truong’s ancestors had the talent, discipline and curiosity necessary to replicate these complicated dishes. They’re “maybe not 100 percent but at least 90 percent” authentic, he says.
Yet Truong will be the first to tell you she has made concessions to the imperial cooking as she learned it back in Danang, her hometown, just down the coast from Hue. For starters, the portions are larger than any emperor would have accepted; the royal table, Truong and Ngo say, would creak under the weight of 50 or so dishes, each perhaps no more than a single exquisite bite. Such jewelry-box cooking, however, doesn’t cut it in America, where our sense of value is often measured in terms of volume.
“If you make it too small, they’ll complain that they don’t get much,” Truong says, by way of Ngo’s translation.
At age 55, Truong has entered the restaurant business later in life, following years as a jewelry designer. She still has a shop at the Eden Center, Yellow Diamond Jewelry, but it’s dormant while Truong oversees all aspects of her restaurant. Her inexperience in the hospitality business has occasionally led to awkward moments, especially in the early days, especially for Western diners who, like me, may have been handed a single-page menu written entirely in Vietnamese. But even after the introduction of a thick, gorgeous, leather-bound menu, composed in both Vietnamese and English, I’m still not convinced you get the experience Truong wants you to have should you follow the standard American protocol of ordering an appetizer, entree and dessert.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve invited friends to Truong Tien, and we’ve cobbled together magnificent meals, relying on little more than our hunger and natural inquisitiveness. I’ve breathed in the lemongrass and shrimp-paste aromatics of bun bo Hue, the rich, multidimensional noodle soup that you can accessorize with fresh herbs and garnishes, including sliced banana blossoms, even if you have little control over the bowl’s chili-oil spice, often more suggestive than aggressive. I’ve extracted tapioca dumplings from their banana-leaf cocoons and savored their spicy, shrimp-heavy centers. I’ve delighted in the crispy, rice-flour shells of banh khoai, each stuffed with shrimp, mung-bean sprouts and other morsels, then wrapped in lettuce leaves and served in a taco tray, as if to emphasize the dish’s contrasts to the larger, more crepe-like banh xeo.
But until you spend time with Truong and come to understand the basic principals of Hue royal cuisine, you don’t know what you don’t know. You can pull up a chair in Truong’s warm, wood-heavy dining room and luxuriate in the jade and porcelain antiques or the illuminated photos of the Ngo Mon Gate that leads to the ancient imperial city, but until you let go and give the chef complete control over your meal, you’ll never get the full experience. You’ll never eat like an emperor.
On my last two visits to Truong Tien, I put myself in the owner’s hands. I was treated to a stately pageant of plates and individual bites. I reveled in a small bowl of fish-cake soup, featuring thick, housemade noodles and peppery sausages formed from fruits of the sea. I lapped up banh beo, these steamed rice cakes infused with pork and shrimp, then topped with their dehydrated counterparts, pork rinds and dried shrimp. I peeled back the banana leaf wrapper on my nem chua, a cured nugget of ground pork that promptly punched me in the face with a roundhouse of raw garlic. I was even presented what Truong calls “rice with seven dishes” (or eight, as the case may be), a kind of emperor’s meal contained to one overflowing plate.
The rice is surrounded on all sides by impeccably prepared bites, showcasing the kind of skills that Truong has developed over the years in her home kitchen. Perhaps they don’t compare, visually, to the elaborate, vegetable-carving techniques often associated with Hue royal cuisine, but they aptly demonstrate her apparent ease at producing a wide variety of dishes: pickled mustard greens, shrimp balls, lotus root salad and even gio thu, the compressed puck of pig offal, at once gelatinous and crunchy. The plate is a compact tour de force of Truong’s facility with the cuisine.
The rice plate also comes with an unspoken benefit: a relatively abbreviated dinner. Unlike a real royal meal, the rice plate doesn’t require an investment of time, as the kitchen trots out one dish after another in a 19th-century procession that can tax our 21st-century attention spans. But like every meal here, the plate ends with a gratis dessert, maybe a tapioca dumpling filled with mung bean paste, a small finishing bite that reminds you, just as you’re about to leave, what a jewel Truong Tien really is.
6763 Wilson Blvd., inside the Eden Center, Falls Church, Va., 703-216-2868.
Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and Friday through Sunday. Closed Thursday.
Nearest Metro: East Falls Church, with about a mile walk to the restaurant.
Prices: $1.50 to $34.95 for all items on the menu.