I know it’s not terribly PC to use the words “yellow” and “brown” when referring to people rather than colors, but some readers will, I hope, get the joke.  Hopefully this title (which Courtney frowns upon) will be better understood by the end of this inaugural post.  Some readers may know that one of my schticks about the South, both past and present, contends that it’s a multiracial place, a region filled with people who are neither black nor white and that both of these poles are themselves somewhat slippery categories.  Anybody in Durham today cannot help but notice the booming population of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, but few (myself included) have paused to think much about recent migrants from Southeast Asia.

Fortunately my stomach is more thoughtful about such things than is my brain.  This is not, the introduction aside, a blog about race and history and all that stuff I’m paid to write and think about.  Instead, it’s a journey through my culinary universe—a food blog that will include reviews, recipes, and a wide range of my cuisine-related epiphanies.  For example, today I saw a muffin standing all alone in the Costco parking lot.  It was not a Costco muffin.  I nearly stepped on it when Courtney let out a wild shriek that saved the pastry’s life.  If this blog had existed then, I might have had to take a picture to share it with you.  I’m not sure the event qualified as an epiphany, but it made us laugh and might have been blog-worthy.

You might not have lauged at all.  See, food is a deeply cultural experience.  I think of it as high culture akin to Renaissance art, though I don’t really understand the latter and can’t really appreciate it.  But it’s also pop culture, which I also generally fail to comprehend.  The bottom line is that everybody eats—it’s really the original mass consumption.  Yet we all do so in diverse, culturally-specific ways.  I’m a white boy from outside the South doing my best to eat my way through Dixie and someday America.  I can’t understand culinary variations without simultaneously thinking about all other kinds of difference.  It’s not really an inter-galactic gastric experience, but eating still is a cross-cultural exchange.  Writing about food means writing about people too—it’s high culture, democratized.

So all this brings me back to the South in yellow and brown.  Today Courtney and I tried the Saigon Grill in Durham’s Bragtown district.  As the name suggests, it’s a Vietnamese restaurant—just about my favorite type of cuisine.  I used to work in San Jose, home to one of America’s largest Vietnamese-American communities, so I think I have a decent idea about what constitutes a good Saigon-style lunch.  (Though I do admit I’m more of a Ho Chi Minh City kinda guy.)  Here’s a brief review: the waitress was amazing—she spoke great English and was able to answer all of our questions.  I feel like I could learn everything about Vietnamese food if I went there every day, talked to her a lot, and ordered a different item off the standard 90-ish item menu full of Pho, Bun, and other good stuff.  Iced coffee over condensed milk was weak, but the Goi Cuon spring rolls with shrimp, pork, mint, rice noodles, and other fresh leafy herbs were the best I’ve had in NC.  Courtney had the Pho, which earned a B+.  The steak was not at all pink when the bowl arrived and the noodles were clumped together and then broke into a million pieces.  The noodles in my Bun Thit Nuong (cold rice vermicelli with grilled pork and veggies) were also a little off—they seemed a little slimey and overcooked.  The meat was very flavorful but a bit over-sauced for my taste.  For the record, I like sauce, usually in huge quantities all over my entire plate of food, but this one just made the meat a little too sweet and added to the overall slimey-ness.  Give the Bun a C+.  I also had the simple side soup that normally comes with rice dishes, and it was perfect.  Overall I think it’s the second best Vietnamese restaurant in Durham, well below 9N9 but a thousand times better than either Kim Son or Banh’s.  To be fair we came at a strange time, which probably caused the noodle problem.  Rice noodles cook very quickly, and you need a huge pot of boiling water to do them right.  I can imagine this would be easier during peak hours, but who knows…  I think anyone would like the Pho enough to make it a worthwhile lunch spot, and I definitely plan to go back and continue experimenting…

After lunch we had one more errand: a quest for the biggest bottle of Tapatio we could find.  That took us up the road to Mercado, Taqueria, Panaderia, Tortilleria, y Carneceria “La Superior,” also on Roxboro Rd in Bragtown.  I had been there a few times previously, and I was excited to show Courtney around.  As the name suggests, it’s a regular enclosed mini-mall of mostly Mexican foods and sundries.  The supermarket section is filled with masa, Jarritos, enormous bags of laundry detergent (no lavar-matic on site), nieves wafer cookie things, and even a few CDs.  We bought a couple white onions, three beautiful tomatillos, and a few jalapenos to make some salsa verde tomorrow (stay tuned; apologies for the lack of tilda on my n).  The meat deli included every possible meat product, including carne seca (beef jerkey), pigs feet, chicharrones, tripas & menudo meat, and amazing looking cuts of marinated and unmarinated steaks.  I saw a man buy fajita-marinated chopped chicken breasts for $2.99 a pound!  Can’t wait to try me some of that….  The bakery has pastries and fresh corn tortillas for about a buck a pound.  We bought a bag of their homemade tostadas to go with the salsa verde and salmon tomorrow night.  Yum… The taqueria in the back is amazing, especially if you order one of the featured plates appearing on the photos near the register.  The kitchen has expanded since my last visit, now occupying about half the hallway.  There’s a salsa bar with all the normal condiments (onions, cilantro, pickled jalapenos and carrots)… Finally, there’s a juice bar (jugo-eria?) which now sells nachos, hot dogs, french fries, and other gringo carnival food.  I didn’t see a menu—just a display of about eight dishes out on the counter in front.  It all looked great…. We found a quart-sized bottle of hot sauce, managed to avoid buying cookies, and checked out for just over $10, the minimum for a credit card purchase.  Outside in the parking lot a man was selling homemade ice cream out of a couple huge pots kept cool with dry ice, an umbrella, and possibly his large cowboy hat.  We got the dregs of the fresa (strawberry) pot.  It was light, fluffy, and full of fruit, though it wasn’t particularly creamy.  He probably used milk instead.  It worked well for me, though serious cream fans might be disappointed…

Also made a great dinner at home that I’m too tired to write about… stay tuned if you liked this and want more.  Not all days are this overwhelmingly awesome, so don’t get too excited.  Hopefully no more muffins will attempt to commit suicide beneath my shoe before I find time to write again.

(PS - As a historian, I am authorized to inform you that both “yellow” and “brown” were reclaimed by student radicals in the 1970s.  Neither caught on like “black” did, but I still find folks that use both in their vernacular…)