When a batch of banh beo comes to the table at Van Da, any confusion about how to eat them does not last long. Banh beo, a species of small rice cake, are a favorite afternoon snack in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. Each one is steamed in a ceramic dish just big enough to hold a few spare coins.
Faced with a platter of banh beo, you realize fairly quickly that you have essentially two choices: You can use a spoon, or hold the dish to your mouth and tip it up while throwing your head back, as if doing a Jell-O shot. If you go the Jell-O shot route, it may help to bring a pair of chopsticks or a fingertip into play at the last minute to encourage the banh beo to leave the nest.
You have now transferred to your mouth a warm divot of steamed rice and tapioca flours that has a consistency like panna cotta’s and a negligible flavor on its own. All the action is in the toppings. At Van Da, these include a spoonful of chopped scallions and the green oil in which they were sizzled, red rings of fresh Thai chile, some fish sauce, rehydrated dried shrimp and a flap of fried tofu skin, standing in for the pork rinds a banh beo vendor in Hue would use. The divot of rice cake is still warm, which helps the aromas drive their way into your head.
It’s over in a minute. If you’re lucky, there will be another banh beo on the table so you can start over.
CreditEllen Silverman for The New York Times
Ms. Ngo, who owns the place, was raised in Dalat, Vietnam, and while she has worked in restaurants and catering in New York City for years, she has never had a chance before to show off the food of her childhood, like the banh beo steamed by her mother, who had grown up in Hue.
Ms. Wong is the chef. Though she has cooked at Gramercy Tavern and Battersby, her background in the food of Vietnam before Van Da was more or less confined to the roughly two weeks she spent traveling there while living in Hong Kong on a Fulbright grant a decade ago. Nevertheless, she has put together a trenchant, concise and pleasure-focused menu of Vietnamese dishes. Some she learned directly from her boss, and on those recipes she was apparently discouraged from drawing outside the lines. Others are more freely interpreted. It’s a credit to Ms. Wong’s sensitivity that if you don’t already know the original templates, it can be hard to tell where they end and her imagination begins.
Banh beo and the other snacks from Hue that Ms. Ngo taught Ms. Wong get their own berth on the menu. As you’d imagine, they tend to be very good. Banh it ram are chewy, fried balls of mochi, filled with a coconut-soaked mash of mung beans and shallots. Banh khot are little rice-flour pancakes molded into edible cups about the size of a Ritz cracker. In Vietnam, the cups would be filled with shrimp. Ms. Wong instead spoons sautéed mushrooms into hers, along with a crisscrossing of fresh herbs and a spill of coconut cream.
Ms. Wong makes an effort to bring out regional differences in Vietnamese cuisine by devoting sections of the menu to Saigon and Hanoi, hundreds of miles apart, as well as Hue, somewhere in the middle. She doesn’t have quite enough dishes from any one place to paint a full picture, but the project is intriguing.
Like other New York chefs, she has been caught in the tractor beam of cha ca la Vong, the turmeric-and dill-scented fish dish that is a specialty of a 100-year-old Hanoi restaurant of the same name. Her version, though, supplies less dill, less sauce and less satisfaction than some others.
Her two improvisations on the theme of Hanoi’s best-known contribution to gastronomy, pho, are more effective. One gives you the soup without the noodles; floating in a rich and cloudy broth are ghostly white, billowing won tons that contain chopped beef fillet freely seasoned with black pepper. The other dish is, humbly enough, a plate of soupless pho noodles stir-fried with springy mushrooms, bitter greens and chopped scallions. Its simplicity makes the impact of the dish hard to explain until you learn that it has been showered with Maggi Seasoning, a soylike sauce that is the invisible secret of many Vietnamese dishes.
Nodding toward Saigon, Ms. Wong makes a rendition of shaking beef by stir-frying tender and chewy marinated hanger steak with potatoes and then throwing a fistful of watercress at it. If you think that sounds like a French bistro plate, then you are starting to understand how her mind works.
Ms. Wong cooks skillfully, with an appreciation for nuance, and she doesn’t abuse her freedom by innovating pointlessly. It’s possible, though, that she could stand to be less shy with chiles and herbs. The table salad of greenery to be wrapped around grilled shrimp offers no herbs other than mint and basil, and you’ll run out of lettuce before the fourth shrimp has been dressed. The green papaya salad is a little too innocuous, and while her version of the street snack of grilled corn in fish sauce is a real success, fresh chiles would have more impact than the chile threads Ms. Wong balances on top. (Incidentally, the kitchen at Van Da makes a fine hot sauce that is like a milder and less acidic Sriracha, but servers never seem to remember to mention it until the end of the meal.)
There are just three desserts. By the time you order, one or two may have been 86ed. With luck, though, the che will have survived. In Vietnam, che is thought of as a drink even though it can take the form of a pudding, as it does here, where warm pearls and threads of tapioca are cooked in coconut milk with cubes of soft taro. It is just sweet enough to qualify as a dessert. A black dust darkens the surface: black-sesame brittle, ground to powder.
Even a single dessert qualifies as an impressive feat inside Van Da’s tight quarters. Through the miracle of careful design, the space almost never feels cramped, but this is still an intimate restaurant.
In the basement is a small seating area laid out as efficiently as the cockpit of a fighter jet; above it, at the top of a staircase, is an even smaller seating area sharing a room with a window-facing dining counter, the kitchen and a bar. The cocktails that roll off that bar, like the gin-and-celery duet called the White Tiger, are much more sharply drawn than the drinks at restaurants with twice the space and four times the budget.
Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
