Garden of Eatin’

Other places might be more festive for Christmas, but Westminster goes gangbusters around Tet-- now , more or less--with carnivals, concerts and fairs, tasty mooncakes and giant festive dumplings, small children wandering around in costumes. In parking lots of Little Saigon supermarkets and shopping centers, little boys dash after loose balloons, and rows and rows of potted kumquat trees are set out for sale, heavy with bright orange fruit.

In front of a Vietnamese sandwich shop, I contemplate buying a dwarf tangerine tree. A 10-year-old girl comes up behind me and tugs at my sleeve. “They die,” she says solemnly, and then scurries to her parents. They try hard not to laugh. I look at potted daffodils instead. Then I head around the corner to Asian Garden and think about lunch.

In the heart of Little Saigon, Asian Garden is something of a Vietnamese Beverly Center, a multistory shopping mall where you can stock up on Gucci and Armani, buy exquisite jewelry or lunch in a chic cafe. A large Chinese seafood restaurant anchors the top level. Posters in almost every shop window advertise the newest videotape from Dalena, a big-voiced, blonde Amerasian babe who seems to be sort of the Vietnamese Debbie Gibson. A vast parking lot in back is nearly always jammed to capacity with late-model cars.

And Asian Garden is a pretty amazing place to eat. There’s a branch of the famous Vietnamese noodleshop chain Pho ‘79, which serves beef stew and good chicken-curry noodles in addition to the usual beefy phos and buns you’ll find in the Chinatown restaurant; there’s the cavernous Queen Bee, as filled with mirrors as a Brooklyn disco, whose (generally crummy) noodles and guanabana drinks are spelled out on the walls in glowing neon as they might be in a Vietnamese Hard Rock Cafe. At the Cafe Rendez Vouz, a deejay spins Lionel Richie tunes really loud, and the clientele--which seems to be about 90% teen-age boys--nurses strong iced coffee and tasty pureed avocado drinks, and practices smoking cigarettes. (The waitresses become confused if you try to get a check before at least an hour or so has passed.)

But mostly there is the food court up front, a confusing, bustling, noisy collection of coffeeshops and Vietnamese fast-food joints that seems closer to a vision of Saigon than to anything else in L.A.

Most malls smell a little like Calvin Klein Obsession, overlaid with chocolate-chip cookies, new shoes and the sweet stink of flavored-coffee bins. When you walk into Asian Garden, what perfumes the air is freshly torn basil and dark-roasted coffee.

The first thing about the food court is that the French-drip coffee is good everywhere; the second, is that basically everybody sells the same kinds of food: banh mi sandwiches; banh cuon noodles; miscellaneous rice-paper rolls; and a garlicky, sweet green-papaya salad, tossed with strips of smoked, dried beef-liver jerky, that has the disconcerting name of du du bo kho . (You can ask the counterman for a plate of du du , and try not to flinch, but it’s easier just to point.) The second thing about the food court is that almost everything reaches its highest level at the first stall, Dakao, which is typically mobbed.

The thing to do is to grab and maintain a presence at a table, and take turns buying items from each stand.

Dakao’s banh cuon are especially fine, floppy rice noodles rolled around peppery crumbles of pork, topped with cilantro, flurries of fresh basil, hunks of curried fry-bread, a handful of toasted garlic, a mound of cooked bean sprouts, and garnished with baloney-like slices of Vietnamese pate . The papaya salad is sweet and ferociously spicy, gamy from the liver, by far the best in the mall. Some of the rice-paper rolls are great too--especially the meltingly tender one filled with sauteed slices of Chinese sausage and matchsticks of marinated root vegetables--though the shrimp-filled goi cuon were tough. Try the bright-green, ferociously sour pickled stonefruit served like Popsicles on wooden sticks, and a glass of cold soy milk or grassy longan drink.

The stall next door, Hoa Binh, sells basic steam-table stuff, along with sweet-bean desserts and tapioca/fresh-banana puddings that are nearly as good as those sold at Dakao itself.

Banh mi , Vietnamese sandwiches served on hot, crisp French bread, are everywhere in and around Asian Garden, and the competition keeps the prices down and the quality high-- banh mi thit , the basic, fresh-chile-spiked barbecued pork sandwich--is usually 99 cents, and it’s hard to find a bad one. If you throw in an extra half-buck for the deluxe sandwich, you’ll get bits of every pig part you can imagine. Phuoc Loc Tho, which also specializes in sweet green-bean dumplings, seems to be the place to get banh mi here--a typical order is eight to go. Crisper and lighter are those at the C&C; stand around the way; more savory still are the banh mi from Ba Le, which is on Bolsa just east of the mall.

And when you’re done, if all the iced coffee hasn’t sent you into an insane caffeine fit, stop at the Queen Bee--a couple of bucks will get you a great cuppa jake, and all the large-screen Dalena videos you can possibly watch.

Asian Garden Food Court, 9200 Bolsa Ave., Westminster. Open daily. Lot parking. Cash only. No alcohol. Takeout. Lunch for two, food only, $2-$10.