At Em, the Noodle Soup Anchors a Menu (and a Marriage)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/dining/em-vietnamese-bensonhurst-review.html

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Here is a dish that brokered a marriage, that won a pledge of undying love: hu tieu Nam Vang, a Southern Vietnamese noodle soup with Chinese and Khmer roots, built on pork femurs heavy with marrow, dried squid like brittle fans and dried shrimp shrunk into briny knots.

It was the first dish that Ly Nguyen, the chef of Em in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, made for Patrick Lin, now her husband. At the bright, trim restaurant, which opened in March, she simmers and skims the pork-and-seafood stock for eight hours, tossing in the smallest nub of rock sugar, because the power of sweetness lies in knowing how much to wield. Pork spareribs grow tender in the depths. Some ingredients stay secret, as they must.

The bowl arrives crowded and green from sun-steeped cilantro and long clips of scallions and Chinese chives, the blades juicy, with a garlic sting. A slab of rib bobs on top, alongside quail eggs that house quaking yolks. Chewy rice noodles mass below, ensnaring fish balls and fat shrimp. It is hard to resist.

Ms. Nguyen grew up outside Nha Trang on the southern coast of Vietnam; Mr. Lin was born in San Francisco, the son of Vietnamese-Chinese refugees. They met in 2014 in Ho Chi Minh City, where Mr. Lin, then working as a fruit importer, had come to scout lychee and longan. “I spent a full month on airplanes that year,” he said, flying back and forth to court her.

(It’s not the only serendipitous romance in the family. Mr. Lin’s parents knew each other as children in Vietnam but were separated by war. Years later, living in France and engaged to someone else, his mother took a trip to Hong Kong and ran into her old friend on the street.)

In Vietnam, Em is a husband’s affectionate term for his wife, akin to darling. Here, on the awning, the name signals who’s in charge. “It’s her restaurant,” Mr. Lin said.

The menu may be brief, but the dishes demand close attention. Ms. Nguyen must tend to three giant stockpots, each a boneyard of pork, chicken or beef, crammed and seething, the longer the better for the collagen and marrow to leach.

For pho ga, she uses chickens with the head and feet still on, shredding the meat so each bowl gets a crosshatch of dark and white. The broth is delicate, with a controlled sweetness. Rau ram is crushed with lime, sugar and pepper into a dipping sauce for the meat, its flavor a sidestep from cilantro, muskier, leaving a faint cooling vapor on the tongue.

Customers lobbied Mr. Lin to add pho bo to the menu. Now beef femurs, neck bones and knuckles spend 20 hours in a pot, riddled by fennel and coriander seeds. The result is sweeter than Ms. Nguyen’s pho ga, despite the mob of meat: brisket and short rib, broken down from a wallow in the stock; little meatballs capable of bounce; and hunks of filet mignon and rib-eye, slipped in just before the bowl is sent to the table, ruby red and still cooking in the broth.

The house banh mi is similarly well furnished, with cha lua, pork roll steamed in banana leaves; thit nguoi, cured pork with visible pockets of fat, often likened to salami; and a house-made pâté of pork and chicken livers, the texture of clotted cream. (No headcheese, which some may miss.)

The pickles are clean and bracing. And the bread, from an Italian baker in the neighborhood, has a respectable inner loft and outer crispness, if not outright crackle.

Other versions include banh mi op la, with Vietnamese cold cuts wrapped around a roughly scrambled egg, color-blocked in yolk and white. The next logical step is a banh mi bacon, egg and cheese (here provolone, a nod to Bensonhurst’s Italian-American population), an excellent and unfussy improvement on the New York staple, with all three ingredients in every bite.

Better yet is another unorthodox banh mi packed with the equivalent of two Black Angus hamburgers. The meat has juice and punch, a touch of char and crust, and a hidden cache of fish sauce.

But what won my love was the mango shake, thickened with sweetened condensed milk and house-made yogurt (itself thickened with condensed milk). It’s the kind of drink that turns your insides to gold, that makes you feel rich just to live in New York, with all the world in five boroughs. And it makes me want to come back — even if I have to spend a full month on the subway, riding back and forth.