Munch a <i> Bun Cha</i>

A few blocks from the glitz and glitter of Bolsa Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Orange County’s Little Saigon, Vietnamese restaurants tend to a funkier authenticity. That’s where you’ll find Binh Minh, located between a Builders Emporium and a Veteran’s Thrift Store in a gritty-looking mall.

The outside window is painted with the names of dishes: bun cha Hanoi, bun gia cay. Even people who think they know Vietnamese food may be puzzled by some of them--Binh Minh serves the less familiar northern style of cuisine, which has its roots around the city of Hanoi.

Inside there are red chairs and tables, a mirrored wall with green tinsel running around the perimeter, idealized lithographs of life in prewar Vietnam and some techno-pop posters of Vietnamese vocalists. (Hey, the guy in the slicked-back pompadour and pencil-thin mustache--isn’t he Wayne Newton? No, that’s Vu Khanh, a Southeast Asian male vocalist heartthrob.)

To seem authentic, a Vietnamese restaurant has tohave some singing in the background. A Saigon-born friend assures me that a restaurant owner’s taste in recorded music is more important to his success than his taste in chefs, and who could argue? But while I may not be able to judge the quality of the taped female vocalist who warbled throughout dinner at Binh Minh, I can vouch for the fact that owner Nguyen Co’s team of chefs is of championship caliber.

The farther north you go in Vietnam, the stronger the Chinese influence in the food. You find heartier, less fiery preparations, served mostly in enormous bowls. In the north they use practically no garlic, replacing it with ginger, both sliced and ground, and big wedges of lime. The one exception is the slightly garlicky bun cha Hanoi, tiny bowls of which seem to be required eating here. Look around the room and you’ll see them being devoured by everybody in the room.

Bun cha Hanoi is one of the great dishes of the world. It’s essentially slices of sweet and spicy char-broiled pork, crammed into a sugary marinade and topped with pieces of pickled radish and carrot. You mix it with cold tangles of wispy rice noodle and wrap it up in a lettuce leaf with mint, coriander and squiggles of an other-worldly green vegetable described only as choy. (Although the Vietnamese put nuoc mam --fish sauce--on nearly everything, do not douse your bun cha Hanoi with it. The pork already contains plenty of salt, and my waiter was horrified when he saw me going for the fish sauce.)

I made up for this transgression by ordering bun giacay --pig’s trotters in broth, not a dish for the unadventurous. The waiter tried to talk me out of it, and as he carried it to the table, several diners craned their necks to watch my reaction. I took only a few bites; they knowingly murmured the Vietnamese equivalent of “Aha, thought he wouldn’t eat it.”

They might have been surprised to learn that I actually considered bun gia cay a remarkable dish and would have finished it if I hadn’t gorged myself on bun cha Hanoi. There isn’t much meat on these hoofs--they’re mostly cartilage--but thebroth is the purest distillation of flavor I can recall this side of a three-star kitchen in Paris. And the idea of topping it with crumbled shiso (the “beefsteak leaves” so prominent in Japanese cooking) is an inspiration worthy of one.

Most of the other dishes are noodle soups. Bun vit sao mang is kind of the ultimate duck soup, with a pile of undercooked bamboo swimming on top. My favorite dish is bun bung, cubes of deep-fried tofu, taro root, banana, raw green papaya and chunks of stewed pork on a mountain of egg noodles. It’s one of the most exotic dishes.

In the nonsoup category, further enlightenment comes in the form of banh tom, one of the true specialties of North Vietnam. It’s a heap of yam cakes and lobster-sized shrimp fried in a bright orange batter that looks almost iridescent. Danke schoen, Binh Minh.

Binh Minh, 9908 Westminster Ave., Garden Grove, (714) 636-7103. Breakfast, lunch and dinner 9 a.m.-9 p.m. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $8-$12.