A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [137]
‘I give my heart. Make people happy,’ she says warmly, before snapping her head to the right and fixing a waiter with a brief look of withering scorn. Beers arrive at our table. Ashtrays are emptied. At Madame Ngoc’s restaurant, people are happy. The clean white room is packed with Vietnamese families. Tables of eight, ten, twelve, fifteen people tear into food all around us, with new guests arriving every minute. They drive right through the dining room, three and four to a motorbike, then into the backyard parking area. Napkins are popping everywhere from their packets. Every few minutes, a clay pot shatters loudly on the floor and a sizzling-hot rice cake goes flying through the air. The colors on the plates at every table are electric, psychedelic, positively radiating bright reds, greens, yellows, and browns; and it smells good: lemongrass, lobster, fish sauce, fresh basil and mint.
Com Nieu Saigon is the slickest, smartest, sharpest restaurant operation I’ve seen in a long, long time. Madame Ngoc, a tiny little middle-aged woman, divorced, living – as she is all too willing to tell you – all alone, runs it like a well-drilled battleship. Every table, every corner, every crevice of latticework in the open-air dining room is clean, tight, and squared away. Underneath the broken crockery, even the floor is spotless. The cooks, the waiters, and the managers move like a highly motivated – even terrorized – dance troupe. It does not do, I have long since gathered, to disappoint Madame Ngoc.
She’s figured out how to run a successful restaurant in a Communist country. Com Nieu is a loud, casual, comfortable family place with a distinctive gimmick. Madame Ngoc, reading up on Vietnamese culinary history, found a traditional preparation for rice baked in clay pots. The drill at Com Nieu is that when you order a rice side, a waiter retrieves it from the kitchen, smashes the crockery with a mallet, the pieces falling to the floor, then hurls the sizzling-hot rice cake across the dining room, over the heads of the customers, to another waiter, who catches the cake on a plate, flips it, sends it up in the air a few more times like a juggler, then cuts it into portions tableside, dressing it with fish sauce, peppers, sesame, and chives. The room resounds with the noise of breaking and broken crockery. Every few minutes, searingly hot disks of rice go sailing by my ear. It’s a tightly controlled riot of food, folks, and fun, kids standing on their chairs, their moms feeding them, granddad and sons tearing apart lobsters, crabs, and giant prawns, grandmas and dads smoking between courses, everyone chattering, eating, loudly and visibly enjoying themselves.
Who is Madame Ngoc? As she tells you, she’s just a lone hardworking woman, unlucky in love, who loves cookies, chocolate, stuffed animals (which she collects) and continental buffets in large Western hotels. (She took us as her guest to one of the bigger, newer ones – absolutely giddy around all those chafing dishes of French and Italian food, the cake stands of Austrian pastries and French petits fours.) She is driven everywhere in a new luxury sedan. When it rains, someone is waiting curbside with an umbrella. When she decides – at 10:30 at night – that she wants us all to have our picture taken together, she snaps her fingers, barks a few orders, and a frightened-looking photographer arrives in a full sweat only a few minutes later, an old Nikon and flash rig around his neck. Com Nieu is jammed full every night – as is her other restaurant, a Chinese-themed place down the street. And Madame Ngoc is at one or both, reigning over her devoted staff and adoring public for most of her waking hours.
‘I so tired. Very hard work. Very