In the end, all that matters is food. While atmosphere and service
can enhance a dining experience, when someone places, say, a grilled
bone-in rib eye in front of me, I’m barely able to tell the restaurant
from my bathroom, the waiter from my brother. Some of my favorite meals
don’t even involve a restaurant, just a spring roll eaten off a
Styrofoam tray by a lake, or grilled meat eaten off a stick while
strolling down a dirty street. Forgo your expectations of the ambience
of a typical “dining experience” and you’ll find cheap, tasty eats at
delis and markets all over town.
Everyone knows that if you want good, cheap banh mi, all you
have to do is stand at the corner of Jackson Street and 12th Avenue and
wait for one to fall out of the sky. Beyond banh mi, each of the delis
in this area also offers an amazing assortment of other
delights—rice-paper rolls, sticky-rice dishes, noodles, salads,
all neatly plastic-wrapped in trays—as well as dirt-cheap spring
rolls. You can easily assemble a full meal for two with three sundry
items and come in under $10. (Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the
exact cost of every item—most are not labeled, and these are not
places where you bother the lady behind the counter with trifling
questions in English.)
Banh Cuon Tan Dinh (1212 S Main St #A, 726-9990) makes some
of the best fried spring rolls around, filled with superpeppery ground
pork and shrimp, for a mere 50 cents (!!!!) each. Across the street at
Spring Roll House Deli (1221 Main St, Suite 104, 726-1628),
spring rolls (less spicy, but quite good) are also 50 cents a pop and
banh gio ($2.50), a heavy triangle of sticky rice filled with
mung-bean paste and ground pork, is a meal unto itself. Saigon
Deli (1237 S Jackson St, Suite E, 322-3700) offers what I believe
to be the greatest pork and shrimp salad rolls in town. The roasted
pork is moist and rich, the peanut sauce less sweet than salty and
pungent (thanks to fermented fish sauce), and the addition of
house-made spicy shredded pickled carrots results in salad rolls more
complex and intriguing than most others I’ve tasted.
Follow the sound and smell of sizzling meat to the back of La
Conasupo Market (8532 Greenwood Ave N, 782-0533), where they serve
enormous quesadillas, sopes, and tacos for startlingly low
prices. A quesadilla de chicharrónes ($5) comes filled
with what seems like a whole pound of shredded pork and crispy skin,
and the sopes ($5), masa cakes covered with black beans and
cotija cheese, are probably three times the size of what you get
at taco trucks. Above this backroom eating area hangs the store’s
selection of piñatas, which makes for a strangely festive
gorging experience.
