Sirloin a Lot: Tenderloin joint steers customers with hearty Vietnamese fare
June 25, 2004
For those who are meat-phobic, you may not want to continue on with this week’s column. It’s all about beef, beef and more beef. I’ve been hearing about the Vietnamese seven-course beef meal for sometime now, so last Friday, I rounded up three friends with strong and sturdy stomachs to join me in an afternoon of bovine delights.
This traditional Vietnamese meal is known as bo bay mon or bo 7 mon, and consists of a succession of beef dishes that are served cold, hot, raw and grilled. It’s meant to be eaten slowly with a group of people, and features a do-it-yourself theme. Think of it as shabu shabu meets Chinese huoguo meets Korean barbecue.
When I first heard about this meal, I thought about a Simpsons episode: At a new restaurant called The Slaughterhouse, where diners chose their own cow, Homer downs a 16-pound steak in a eating contest.
At Pagolac on Larkin at Ellis streets in the Tenderloin, there’s no bo bay mon-eating contest; instead Vietnamese families and locals congregate at this comfortable restaurant to eat the communal meal, which comes nowhere close to Homer’s behemoth beef dinner.
For $13.95 per person, Pagolac’s Bo 7 Mon starts with Bo Tai Chanh, a raw beef salad. Thin slices of beef are marinated in lemon juice and sugar and served with red onions, chopped mint and crushed peanuts. The acidity of the lemon juice broke down the proteins in the beef, which made for a soft and tender texture. But I thought the sweetness of the lemon-sugar sauce masked the beef flavor, to the point where you really didn’t know if you were eating beef.
Our server then brought over a huge platter of lettuce, carrots, half-moon cucumbers, mung bean sprouts, mint and basil leaves along with a fish sauce, dried rice wrappers and a shallow bowl of warm water in which to reconstitute the wrappers; these ingredients were accompaniments to the five remaining courses.
For the second course, Bo Nhung Dam, a plate of raw, bright red carpaccio came with a boiling pot of vinegar, sugar and red onion slices. We cooked the beef at our table, and after a few dredges in the vinegar mixture, we rolled up the beef along with vegetables and herbs in the softened rice pancakes. The pot was replaced with an intricately cut cast-iron grill slathered with bubbling butter, which was used to cook the third course, Bo Nuong Vi, marinated, thinly sliced beef sprinkled with sesame seeds and red onions.
Pagolac655 Larkin St. (at Ellis Street) San Francisco, CA 94109 415-776-3234 8ours: Mon. – Sat. 11 a.m. – 10 p.m.; closed Sundays Prices: Bo 7 Mon: $13.95 per person; appetizers: $4.75 - $5.50; soups and salads: $6.25 - $15.95; pho: $5.95 - $13.95; entrees: $6.25 - $7.95 Cash only. |
The fourth, fifth and sixth courses were served on the same platter, which caused a bit of confusion at our table. It was hard for me to differentiate between Bo La Lot, grilled beef rolls encased in wild pepper leaves, and Bo Mo Chai, grilled ground beef wrapped in fatty casing with pieces of lard in the center. These were definitely the heaviest dishes of the meal, and left me with bovine coma. Bo Lui, barbecued beef skewers, tasted like sweet beef jerky, and the rough texture was a welcome change to the slippery pieces of fat in the meat rolls.Chao Bo, a Vietnamese rice congee with pieces of minced beef and cilantro, rounded out the meal. We were all too full to finish the porridge, but the warm, ginger-infused gruel felt nice in my stomach.
No one really knows the exact origins of bo bay mon. Some claim it was inspired by the French; others say it evolved from a combination of traditional Vietnamese dishes. I wouldn’t recommend going on a completely empty stomach, as the seven dishes require some work and patience — cooking, soaking, wrapping — before you can enjoy them.
Beef has gotten a bad rap over the years, which can be attributed to its high cholesterol and saturated fat content, but a 3-oz. serving of lean beef accounts for less than 10 percent of the daily value for calories. Lean beef has eight times more vitamin B12, six times more zinc and three times more iron than skinless chicken breast, according to the Texas Beef Council.
A 3-oz. serving of beef is an excellent source of protein, zinc, vitamin B12, selenium and phosphorus and is a good source of niacin, vitamin B6, iron and riboflavin. To obtain the amount of iron in a 3-oz. serving of beef, you’d have to eat at least three cups of raw spinach. So grab a couple of friends with you to Pagolac and try Bo 7 Mon, and enjoy several hours of entertaining hands-on dining.
Reach the Picky Eater at pickyeater@asianweek.com.
Comments
Got something to say?