Veggie Dishes Are the Meat of the Order

Your first clue that Vien Huong is a vegetarian restaurant would be the bumper stickers on the wall that read, “Be Kind to Animals, Don’t Eat Them.”

It wouldn’t be the food. You’d never guess that this 200-item menu, which lists eel hot pot, fish with ginger sauce and seven-flavor cold plate, features nothing more karmically blameless than mashed soybeans, wheat gluten, braised bean curd and Chinese mushrooms.

On the table, the food looks so non-veg a friend of mine headed for the door with the reproachful words “You know I don’t eat meat!”

Neither does chef Kim Huynh. She has taken traditional Vietnamese Buddhist cooking and practically made it her own personal domain. You might have experienced Kim’s bag of tricks at the original West 1st Street restaurant in Santa Ana, now closed. She does some of the Southland’s most inventive cooking; it’s downright otherworldly.

The restaurant is a family affair. Kim’s sister Tran assists her in the kitchen, while her son Quoc and daughter Huong (the restaurant’s namesake) tend to the service. Her husband, Pham, manages the entire show.

The dining area is crowded with round, family-style tables and rather uncomfortable hardbacked chairs. Next to the front register is a deli counter filled with homemade pickles, bottled sauces and multicolored takeout snacks.

I’ve sampled Buddhist cooking in half a dozen Asian countries but never anything like the dishes conjured up by Huynh.

If you order duckling with orange sauce, what you’ll get is a chopped “duck” made out of bean curd “skin,” mashed soybean “meat” and fried gluten “bones,” perfumed with star anise and ginger.

Fish with ginger sauce has a blackened, crunchy skin virtually indistinguishable from genuine fish skin. Eel with special sauce is Kim’s most Houdini-like effect, with the flavor and texture of the real thing.

Huynh says she learned to cook from her mother, but that doesn’t explain much--it’s like Beethoven paying homage to his piano teacher. Her own daughter, now 20 and a college student, can only tell you about the components of an individual dish, not how the effect is achieved.

“I haven’t really learned how to do any of this,” Huong said sheepishly. It’s a skill that probably will be lost when Kim Huynh retires.

Start with an order of the refreshing shredded pork rice rolls (bi cuon). These are rice-flour crepes rolled up into 8-inch cylinders and stuffed with a mixture of herbs, vegetables and slices of Kim’s vegetarian barbecued pork, which has the look, feel and sweet, spicy taste of Chinese-style pork.

The assorted plate is an extraordinary platter of Vietnamese-style cold cuts, mostly resembling pork products, which are meant to be eaten with chili sauce, mint, basil and sticky rice. “Mecca” egg rolls are deep-fried and densely filled, deceptively flavored like crab and minced pork.

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One of the best lunch dishes in Little Saigon is com bi cha thit nuong. Normally this is a rice plate that combines shredded pork, a grilled pork chop and a little egg cake. Kim has re-created the dish in its entirety, right down to the differing shades of red and brown, in tofu, mushrooms and gluten. The components are spiced so skillfully that it’s an effort to remember you’re not eating meat.

The same is true of many other dishes. Crispy chicken is silver-dollar-sized patties with a crisp golden coating and enough chicken flavor to make you swear off McNuggets for a couple of lifetimes--but all made from tofu. Sweet-and-sour shrimp is an amazingly convincing pile of breaded shrimp shapes in a sauce swimming with chunks of fresh pineapple and tomato.

Some dishes may not fool you but are fun to eat anyway. Such is Mongolian beef, served on a sizzling platter; it’s thin slices of textured soy protein with tofu, broccoli, onions and a rich, salty dark sauce, the whole thing just made to be spooned over steamed rice. Hot and spicy abalone is thin, rubbery white slivers in a delicate chili and five-spice sauce--pleasant, though not truly abalonesque.

When the magic works, this food can take your breath away. A case in point: luon um, eel with special sauce. It has a slippery black “skin” made from bean curd and a crunchy interior of wheat gluten. The “eel” is sliced into scallop-sized pieces and served with eggplant cooked in coconut milk and lemon grass, spiced up with a hot bean paste.

Also expect several vegetable dishes that do not attempt to reproduce non-vegetarian foods, such as eggplant with bean sauce, salty fried bean curd and Chinese broccoli with black mushrooms, which you’d have to class as just plain good Chinese-style dishes.

A raft of interesting beverages is available. If Sparks Non-Alcoholic beer isn’t your cup of tea, have a fresh-squeezed orange juice (with or without sugar), a tart lemonade, a glass of fresh coconut juice (dua tuoi) or even rau ma, a grassy, pale green drink made from the pennyworth leaf.

And if you don’t fancy exotic desserts such as young jackfruit and little drops of cornstarch flavored with pandanus leaf in palm sugar and coconut milk, drop by the Bao Hien Rong Vang Bakery next door for an Indochinese pastry on your way back to the planet Earth.

Vien Huong is inexpensive. Dim sum are $1 to $4.95. Specialties are $2 to $19.95.

* VIEN HUONG

* 14092 Magnolia St., Westminster.

* (714) 898-8146.

* Open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.

* MasterCard and Visa.