The Wrap on Tofu

Orange County may boast the biggest Vietnamese neighborhood in America, mile after mile of Vietnamese supermarkets and bakeries and used car dealers, but Rosemead’s Vietnamese commercial strip is catching up fast. The mini-malls stretch east along Garvey Avenue in an unbroken line of plastic signs full of exotic monosyllables from Chinese San Gabriel to the birrierias and cantinas of Mexican El Monte. In this bit of Rosemead, you are never far from a glass of cafe filtre or a packet of fruit-flavored beef jerky, a bowl of pho or a place to buy fresh squid.

My Dung (pronounce it “mee zoong”--please), a noodle shop in an office building toward the edge of Vietnamese Garvey, in an area of Vietnamese attorneys’ and dentists’ offices, real estate companies and supermarkets, identifies itself as serving Vietnamese-Chinese cuisine. As usual, this is a sign that the stir-fries are good (here, especially the squid tossed in a dark, intricately spiced sauce with ginger) and the pho dac biet, the purely Vietnamese beef-noodle soup that is usually the best thing to get in a Vietnamese noodle shop, will be just OK.

Hu tiu, a spaghetti-thick, slippery, cellophane pasta famous as Saigon’s favorite noodle, is especially swell at My Dung. It floats in a pungently garlicky Chinese-style clear broth, slightly sweet in the manner of the best Thai noodle soups, along with shrimp, crab claws and thin slices of roast pork. The hu tiu is good enough, but when you squeeze a bit of lime juice into the broth and add some sliced chile, the flavors clarify with an effect almost as startling as what happens when you put on those glasses at a 3-D movie.

Banh xeo is a crunchy, bright-yellow Vietnamese crepe with shrimp and bits of pork incongruously fried into it, scented with coconut, enclosing a great heap of garlicky sauteed bean sprouts. It looks a little like a fried Manila envelope. There is a nice Vietnamese salad that combines Milk Duds-size pieces of sauteed beef with thin-sliced onion and shredded lettuce dressed with toasted sesame oil.

I’m guessing, based on the restaurant’s use of toasted garlic as a universal garnish, plus the presence on the menu of such dishes as jellyfish salad, salt-and-pepper crab and Teochew noodle soup, that at least somebody involved is Chiu Chow--Vietnam’s long-resident “ethnic Chinese,” whose forebears came from the area around the Cantonese coastal city of Swatow.

One of the most famous Chiu Chow dishes is tau hu ky, which this menu calls “bean curd skin” (some Chiu Chow restaurants translate the name as “shrimp ball”), and it’s the great house specialty here. Coarsely chopped shrimp are wrapped in a thin sheet of bean curd and deep-fried, and the compressed bundles are sliced into chunks about the size of after-dinner mints, crackling-crisp, tasting of ocean and clean oil. Dishes including bean curd skin take up most of the first page of the menu.

You can eat tau hu ky in at least a dozen ways here. You could tuck them into a lettuce leaf with slivers of marinated carrot, a little mat of steamed rice vermicelli and a few leaves of mint and dip the bundle into a bowl of the sweetened Vietnamese fish sauce nuoc cham. You could fold them with a few herbs into a sticky wafer of rice paper. You could moisten them with nuoc cham and eat them with the restaurant’s excellent, short-grained, slightly oily rice.

You could perform any of those activities while incorporating the five-spice-scented grilled pork or grilled, fine-grained Vietnamese beef meatballs called nem nuong into your spring rolls. You can eat tau hu ky in combination with the gritty Vietnamese chicharrones called bi, or sheets of baked Vietnamese omelet, or chao tom, shrimp paste wrapped around short lengths of sugar cane and grilled. You could even make a rice-paper spring roll with tau hu ky and cha gio, in its own right a rice-paper spring roll, although the deep-fried cha gio are, frankly speaking, not so hot.

Dessert, as at most Vietnamese restaurants, tends toward baroque interpretations of the mung bean jelly parfait, but the Vietnamese drip French roast coffee with condensed milk is especially strong: first rate.

My Dung restaurant, 8232 Garvey Ave., Rosemead; (818) 571-0379. Open daily, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Cash only. Beer and wine. Takeout. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $9-$18.

House special bean curd skin with shrimp and meatball on rice; hu tiu noodle soup with crab, pork and shrimp; tiny rice stick with meatballs and bean curd skin with shrimp.

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WHERE TO GO

My Dung restaurant, 8232 Garvey Ave. Rosemead

(818) 571-0379. Open daily, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Cash only. Beer and wine. Takeout. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $9-$18.

WHAT TO GET

House special bean curd skin with shrimp and meatball on rice; hu tiu noodle soup with crab, pork and shrimp; tiny rice stick with meatballs and bean curd skin with shrimp.