Wrap Party

In the last couple of months, I have become nearly obsessed with the spring rolls served at Golden Deli, which is a Vietnamese noodle shop in the depths of a multi-ethnic San Gabriel mini-mall, hard by an Indonesian restaurant, a Thai restaurant, a Cantonese restaurant, a Taiwanese video store and a pizza parlor. These spring rolls are possibly the greatest on the planet.

Golden Deli is like a great Vietnamese coffee shop, a Vietnamese equivalent of Ship’s or the Apple Pan, pumping out the top-10 list of quick Vietnamese food to patrons who can tell one cup of java from the next. The restaurant is small, but the crowds are enormous--sometimes five-deep on the sidewalk--college kids and families and bands of young single dudes, who wait patiently for a shot at Golden Deli’s sandwiches and grilled meatballs and regional noodle soups, and draughts of strong filter coffee over ice.

Golden Deli’s spring rolls, cha gio , are crusty, golden things, four inches long and as thick as a fat man’s thumb, five to an order, sort of crudely rolled in a manner that suggests rustic abundance rather than clumsiness, and perfectly, profoundly crisp. You wrap them with leaves of romaine lettuce into bursting green tacos, along with fistfuls of mint, cilantro, opal basil, and an odd, elongated herb with a powerful metallic taste, also a few shreds of marinated carrot and turnip, a slice of cucumber, a squirt of hot chile paste. You dip the bundles into little bowls of nuoc cham , which is the thin, sweetish garlic-fish sauce that Vietnamese use as ubiquitously as Americans use catsup.

Then you bite through the vegetable-crunchy herbs to the many-layered rice-paper crispness of the spring roll wrapper, hot oil, the garlicky, pepper-hot forcemeat of crab and minced pork inside. No two bites are alike. Golden Deli has a long and complicated menu, but it is difficult to contemplate a meal without an order of these.

Hearty and gamy, chewy and shot through with sweet spice, Golden Deli’s version of the famous Vietnamese beef soup pho dac biet is quite different from what you’ll find elsewhere. The broth is neither so concentrated as Pho 79’s nor as spicy as Pho Hoa’s; the garnishes of brisket, tendon, tripe and rare beef seem rather less distinct from one another than at Pho 79, but the noodles themselves are more separate, less hard than most.

Bun bo hue , a beef noodle soup in the style of the Central Vietnamese city of Hue, is tart and hot, complexly herbal, stained brick-red with chile, with thick, dense noodles that feel almost alive under your teeth; bun bo kho features the same noodles in a delicious curry-scented beef pottage. The pungent, marine-tasting hu tiu glass-noodle soup with crab and shrimp is the classic Saigon breakfast dish: terrific.

Cha gio is served as an appetizer, but here it also comes over rice, as a garnish for thickish rice noodles ( bun ) and atop vermicelli-thin rice noodles ( banh hoi ) that have a vaguely sweet, tender quality and that you wrap into the lettuce bundles right along with the cha gio and herbs. Along with the cha gio , as part of a noodle or rice combination plate, you can mix and match delicious chao tom , the classic Vietnamese dish of pounded shrimp paste molded around a piece of sugar cane and grilled; bits of garlicky grilled beef or grilled pork; the crunchy barbecued meatballs called nem nuong ; the shredded stewed pigskin bi, and the fluffy, spicy pork-egg mousse called cha . (The nem nuong and chao tom are also delicious wrapped in herbs.) At Golden Deli, they do egg rolls any way you like ‘em.

* Golden Deli

815 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (818) 308-0803. Open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. (Closed Wednesday.) Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $8-$12.