The norm at Long, as at Tamarind Tree, is food that creates monsoon season in your mouth. A salad of julienned green mango, pickled carrot, and pickled jicama was tossed with greens and herbs and roasted peanuts, all topped with grilled chicken and fistfuls of frizzled shallots, and served alongside a bowl of peerless tamarind dressing. A crepe arrived as a crisp-fried half-moon of eggy pastry, bits of pork and bursting prawns and shiitakes baked into the rice batter, bean sprouts crammed inside, with a fragrance of coconut milk wafting like a soft breeze across the whole. There may be no more sensual dining experience than tearing off a fold of crepe, swaddling it in that ubiquitous Vietnamese chorus—coriander, lettuce, basil, mint—then dunking it in herbed fish sauce.
Pastry dishes like these pay homage to some of imperialism’s finer influences. But the broad menu further reveals the lesser-seen cuisine of Vietnam’s tropics, like a dish of 12-hour-braised pork, sumptuously fatty, and lacquered in thick sauce with chewy spears of coconut that release their subtle sugars the longer you work them. Dried lily blossoms show up in a fine noodle dish of steamed halibut with soybeans and shiitake, oyster, straw, and black mushrooms.
Nguyen exploits Western weaknesses shrewdly. Much of the menu traffics in straight-up comfort. Salted-chili crispy chicken wings are marinated in exotic Phú Quõc fish sauce, but their deep-fried feistiness would satisfy any Super Bowl crowd. In a straight pitch for the after-hours market, Long serves until 2am on weekends. All martinis are doubles. Nguyen even subs whole prawns for the prawn mousse on some dishes, having learned that they’re more palatable to Americans.
All of which has contributed to the success of the Nguyens’ enterprises. But make no mistake: Long’s largest appeal lies in stunning execution of Vietnamese village food. By the time you’re licking the appealingly grainy homemade coconut ice cream off your spoon, even the soulless setting has receded into another place entirely.
Published: July 2009
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