To the French, it’s an
idee
fixe.
English speakers will better recognize
it as that cognitive siege-state wherein a lone idea, endowed with protean
potency and power, occupies the mind with unmitigated singularity, and at the
exclusion of all else.
That’s
right:
I’m talking about
obsession.
In a lifetime already crowded with perennially
and seemingly intractable fixations (Hubig’s Honey Pies, mayonnaise, and Elvis
Presley, thin and fat, just to name a few), I am, at this writing, consumed
with but one obsession—a simple, single object of my now-greatest affection, which
presently reigns utterly and totally supreme: the bread of New Orleans baker,
Dong Phuong.
You read that right, boy-o:
the fluffy white stuff.
My first encounter with the bread of Dong Phuong—now over a year
and a half ago—happened by happy accident when I picked up a roast beef Po Boy
from the Adam’s Street Grocery in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans.
Of that first encounter, I’ve written before
here (click on the hyperlink, yo).
But I haven’t eaten
their bread since.
Why?
Because I don’t live in New Orleans; I divide my time between Chicago and Washington, D.C.
So not being
able to routinely (if ever) consume the baked wizardry of Dong Phuong—a much-desired
daily habit that life in the work-in-one-place food industry is necessarily
wont to impede—has produced a constancy of craving that time and distance has
made worse.
How so?
Because in an eating career devoted to assiduously
paying attention to what food I manage to cram into my own gob hole, I have yet
to encounter better commercially produced bread anywhere in North America.
Not in New York.
Not in San Francisco.
Not even in those fabled and wood-fired ovens
of Pleasanton Bakery in Traverse City, Michigan.
So when a recent opportunity to visit my
brother, Brian, in his New Orleans home presented itself, I jumped at the
chance.
But this visit to New Orleans
would be different than the last. Because on this visit, I would not merely just
eat the bread of Dong Phuong.
No, no.
On this visit, I would travel to the bakery itself, that culinary
progenitor of the best baguette in America.
I would go, as if on pilgrimage, like some acolyte before an oracle, and
see where all that magic was made.
And I
would buy bread.
And I would eat and eat
and eat.
So I went.
Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery sits roadside, along Chef Menteur
Highway, in the Village de L’Est, or Versailles (read:
“Little Vietnam”), neighborhood of New
Orleans East.
The sheer banality of that
sentence belies the hugely significant fact that New Orleans East saw some of
the most savage devastation wrought upon Orleans Parish by Hurricane Katrina in
2005.
We are talking an ass kicking of
biblical proportions.
Of the 95,000
residents who lived there before the storm, only 65,000 of them have ever made
it back.
The destruction to which those survivors
first returned must have seemed nearly apocalyptic in scope: a dystopian,
almost lunar landscape, with trees totally denuded of their late-summer
foliage, and the detritus of modern Gulf life—fishing boats, corrugated out buildings,
school buses—scattered here and there (even atop one another) as if by the whimsy
and caprice of an enormous (if highly incensed) child at a game of jacks.
It was, for New Orleans East, total Armageddon.
The levees failed, spectacularly, as we now
know, and the low country of New Orleans East—haplessly situated between the
high ground of Lake Pontchartrain and the way-way-lower marsh and swamp lands
to the extreme-eastern part of Orleans Parish—filled up with storm water like
one enormous and highly-toxic fishpond; you remember the images, because, well,
how could you possibly forget.
Electrical power wasn’t fully restored to New Orleans East until late-2006.
By 2007, still less than half of the
pre-Katrina population had returned, and those who had were then remanded to
occupy that living third-ring-of-hell that was federally-mandated subsistence
inside those fucking Bush-issue FEMA trailers.
To now consider that De and Huong Tran (the bakery’s
husband-and-wife owners/operators since its 1985 inception, and whose own 1980
immigration from Vietnam yet bears the whiff of post-war diaspora) should
decide to rebuild their bakery among such almost-impossible-to-comprehend
devastation is something nearly beyond our power to wonder.
That this tiny bakery on the edge of
America’s latest and greatest wasteland would rise up through such unspeakable
ruin only to then produce what is easily among the best, commercially available
bread products in the American South is unlikely in the most extreme.
But rebuild they did.
We went to Dong Phuong in the morning.
We went on Easter Sunday.
We four—my brother, his wife, and my
companion extraordinaire, the ever-phosphorescent X, and me—with our faces pressed
up against the glass of my brother’s speeding pickup, like a lost band of
voyagers not quite able to reconcile what we were seeing out the window—ruin
after architectural ruin, and the all-consuming kudzu wrapped carrion-like
around it—with what we knew to be the United States of America in the
twenty-first century.
Because what we
were seeing was a model of the Third fucking World, or a nearly perfect
facsimile thereof, a now-vast empire of weeds and rust, with its
post-catastrophe sorrow of not-so-benign neglect, washed up in America’s very
own back yard.
But things were different at Dong Phuong.
Entirely.
There were cars, for one thing.
And pickup trucks, besides our own.
And people.
Lots of people—Anglo and Asian alike—eating sweet and savory pastry on
the hoods of their cars.
We parked, we
four, and hurried inside.
What we
discovered within Dong Phuong itself was the incredible redolence of baking
bread, and the mellifluous sound of Vietnamese being spoken, loudly, rapidly,
in all of its sharp-tongued and atonal glory.
I know the bread-as-life metaphor is a tired old workhorse in the world
of letters, but to step into Dong Phuong—on Easter morning, of all mornings—and
slip into that proverbial warm bath that is any good bakery bustling with
activity on a sunny Sunday morning, was to very much experience something akin
to resurrection—and triumph—of the collective anthropological spirit over the
malaise of post-Katrina ennui that yet remains, pall-like, over New Orleans
East.
The bakery was ebullient with the elation
of a people who have come through slaughter, and with all their fingers and
toes.
All this happiness made us hungry.
Very.
So we ordered food.
And
just what we ordered—item after miraculous item; each somehow better than the
last—now reads like a culinary Homeric catalog of ships:
banh mi
of
thit nguoi (sandwiches of French-style
pork) and
xa xiu (Chinese barbecue
pork);
pate chaud, in pastry, of
course,
of
thit ga (spicy chicken);
banh
bao hap thap cam (Imperial steamed buns);
bia dau do (red bean cakes); and for dessert,
banh dua nuong (coconut macaroons).
And bread.
All of it with bread.
We paid almost nothing for our food (by those now-hyper-inflated
French Quarter prices), and left with our bags to then climb into my brother’s
pickup, and head back towards New Orleans proper, back through those
post-apocalyptic badlands of New Orleans East, to the shores of Lake
Pontchartrain, where we sat at a picnic table and ate under the late-morning
shade of a catalpa tree, the four of us lightheaded and happy on the
now-certain knowledge that we had just procured—and had our mouths full of—some
the greatest Vietnamese street food these United States has to offer.
There are demonstrable and deeply scientific reasons as to
why the bread of Dong Phuong is so amazingly good.
There is the matter of the high-gluten flour
they surely must use for certain breads, and how those flour proteins therein—the
albumin, globulin, and proteoses, with the attendant leavening agents—interact
with the insoluble mineral content unique to the ground water of New Orleans
East to produce a bread without peer in texture and taste.
There is also the heavy moisture content of
that just-below-sea-level bayou air to consider, and how the water in that air
interacts with—and ultimately affects—the bread dough when it’s allowed to
autolyse.
There is the (likely) use of
calcium propionate to retard the growth of molds.
There is even the matter of that harmless
variety of ever-present bacteria on the bakers’ hands that informs the bread’s
character and flavor.
The reasons, no
doubt, are all so heavily Harold McGee.
But
I choose to ignore all that.
I choose to
eschew that large and perfectly empirical body of food science behind what
makes Dong Phuong’s bread so undeniably excellent.
Instead, I choose to embrace the kind of
faith-based belief in the ephemera and fairy dust that is at the real heart of
all truly great gastronomy.
Like Santa
Claus.
Like the Easter Bunny.
Such is my belief in Dong Phuong.
The bread is just that good.
When you next visit New Orleans, do yourself (and me) a
favor:
eat the bread of Dong
Phuong.
Just do it.
I implore you.
Why?
Because
it’s now available almost everywhere in the Crescent City.
On the po boys at Adams Street Grocery.
On the pulled-pork sandwiches at the always-excellent
McClure's Barbecue on Magazine Street.
Because the when you and I should meet again on
the street, friend-o, I want to be able to whisper those two, magical little
words—
Dong Phuong.
And I want you to be able to nod and smile
right back like the culinary secret sharer you will now be.
It will be our secret handshake.
Only better.
Your links:
Dong Phuong
McClure's Barbecue
