Roll It

Everybody knows about Orange County’s Little Saigon, the largest community of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam itself. Recently, Rosemead and the eastern edge of San Gabriel seem to be developing a Little Saigon of their own, with giant Vietnamese supermarkets, Vietnamese nightclubs, great stretches of Vietnamese hair salons and Vietnamese real-estate offices, Vietnamese coffee shops and Vietnamese appliance stores. There are restaurants too, dozens of them, each specializing in a different style of food: seafood houses and sandwich shops, places with seven-course beef dinners, a zillion places serving the noodle soup pho . . . and a couple of good places to get banh cuon .

Of the world’s street-food specialties, the Vietnamese steamed wide rice noodles banh cuon might on the surface seem among the less compelling. Sort of like the ghost-white noodles that come under the oval metal hoods in dim sum restaurants but thinner and more often wrapped around stuff, banh cuon can be chewy, unsubtle, no fun. Banh cuon may be on the menu at most of the Vietnamese noodle restaurants in town, but I’ve not felt compelled to order the dish more than a couple of times.

In the new Gold World Plaza, Banh Cuon Tay Ho, sister restaurant to the Tay Ho in Westminster, you notice a bare dining room, a few posters on the walls and a line outside to get in, a refrigerator case toward the rear filled with Vietnamese drinks full of colorful squiggles. On each table are what look like wide-mouth milk carafes, decorated with Disney dog Goofy’s grinning face, filled with the pungent Vietnamese table sauce nuoc cham .

Across the street and down the block, like a Burger King that happens to open kitty-corner from a Wendy’s, the noodle shop Banh Cuon So 1 has almost an identical menu, as well as some pretty good Vietnamese barbecued meats. The place even has Disney-theme nuoc cham carafes on the tables.

But there’s really no competition: Tay Ho serves the Stradivarius of banh cuon , transparent, almost membranous noodles, with the slight, stretchy resilience of caul and a faint fine-cloth nubbiness that catches bits of the thin sauce you ladle from the Goofy thing. Here you can get the banh cuon wrapped around ground dried shrimp, or wrapped around a filling of crumbled pork sauteed with black pepper and tree ear mushrooms. Tay Ho’s banh cuon is among the most delicate noodles around.

If you don’t look Vietnamese, you will be brought a photo album illustrating every dish on the menu, but in any case, you’ll probably get the house special--also, oddly enough, the house special across the street. The combination plate includes both kinds of banh cuon , a heap of slivered cucumber and another of parboiled bean sprouts, a shrimp-topped sweet potato fritter and a kind of shrimp cruller spiked with green beans. Surrounding it all, like beams from a cartoon sun, radiate slices of Vietnamese pate. Noodles, shrimp crullers, cold cuts . . . they go together like ham and eggs.

Order the banh cuon with thit nuong and you’ll get sort of noodle burritos stuffed with sweet Vietnamese barbecued pork; order them with bi and there’ll be a gritty julienne of stewed pork skin. But get the banh cuon . The stock in the hu tieu , Saigon-style beef noodle soup, tastes like something inspired by a bouillon cube; the spring rolls are tough; the Hue-style beef soup is not really worth discussing.

* Tay Ho Restaurant

In Gold World Plaza, 1039 E. Valley Blvd., San Gabriel, (818) 280-5207. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Lunch for two, $7-$9. Also 9242 Bolsa Ave., Westminster, (714) 895-4796.