Oh mai.

For dinner, we went to Mai's, a Vietnamese place downtown that's been around for thirty years and is family-owned. The decor was eclectic, in a kitschy neon and glass block kind of way. I had "salt toasted tofu" and Vietnamese pork dumplings topped with bbq pork...I wanted to like the place.

First, it should be said that I tried to order eel sauteed in curry and coconut sauce, but our waiter reacted with "NOOOO. That is BAD. Very bad!!! Bad. No, get this instead (points to "our most famous dish", "traditional" garlic beef). He seemed to be in a huge hurry, and was so emphatic that I didn't try to clarify if he meant "don't eat it, it's cat meat contaminated with arsenic", or if he just meant "white people don't order that here, you'll hate it and get grossed out and complain". I know this is the reaction I've gotten before at Vietnamese restaurants when I try to order something strange, so it was probably #2 (unless you are in Waco, where I swear I was once served cat). I was weirded out, and didn't want the boring-sounding dish he suggested, but I also didn't want to risk eating something he had such strong feelings about. So I scanned the menu for something else that sounded interesting, and came up with salty tofu. Big mistake.




Granted, I've never been to Vietnam. I have strong opinions about what makes good pho, and that's about it. But the salty tofu, along with a number of other dishes on the menu, looked and sounded like Chinese food. We theorized that maybe it's northern Vietnamese, but either way I didn't like it. The tofu was not particularly salty, nor was it toasted. It was battered and deep-fried, mixed with veggies and garlic, and covered in a mysterious tan glaze redolent of MSG. The menu calls it a lemon sauce, but I had no inkling of lemon when I was actually eating it. The most exotic part of my dinner was learning to remove the husks from garlic cloves with chopsticks, because they didn't peel them before adding them to the veggies. Halfway through dinner, it struck me- the "salty tofu" tasted just like Chicken McNuggets! A spongy protein, surrounded by a thin layer of undercooked batter goo, enveloped in deep-fried batter, dipped in additive-laden sauce. Seriously, click on the photo below to appreciate salty tofu in all its glory (and my dirty fork...)


Not all was bad. The pork dumplings were delicious. The dough resembled what I'd call Chinese dumplings- white, translucent, very soft and pillowy, with a slightly chewy consistency- and was amazing dunked in fish sauce. The presentation was a little strange: dumplings laid on a bed of lettuce, on top of which was a huge crown of BBQ fried pork that reminded me of Filipino tocino, on top of which was a mound of fried shoestring onions.

Jon's meal was more interesting- a bed of rice with minute steak, sunny side up egg, veggies, and a "pork cake". Minus the cake, it reminded me of the food that developed when Japanese immigrants moved to Peru in the 1900s.

I'll give them another chance to evaluate their pho, and maybe next time they will deign to let me try their eel. I really hope it's good, because, based on tonight's experience, I'm really not understanding how they've managed to stay in business this long.