Rising (Again) in New Orleans East- The Bread of Dong Phuong

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

What It Means To Miss New Orleans With Chef David Guas

This is the one place I didn’t want to tell you about.  The one place I wanted kept secret.  The one place I wanted all to myself.  My fellow Gen X’ers who cut their sonic teeth on the “alternative” music of our day (re:  Black Flag, Bauhaus, Joy Division) will surely recognize the impulse:  you alone have discovered the worlds’ greatest and most obscure band, and you alone love this band so much that the very idea of anyone else listening to or even loving this same band sends you into fits of near-suicidal apoplexy.  So it is with me and Arlington’s almost impossibly wonderful Bayou Bakery.  The fifteen-year-old boy in me wants to tell you that I alone am cool enough to have ever heard of Bayou Baker, let alone actually understand the cultural and culinary greatness afoot here.  Stay away, I want to say.  Poseurs need not apply.  But asking you to stay away from Bayou Bakery is akin to me, as a teenager, first discovering Boy and asking you not to listen to U2 even though Joshua Tree is soon on it’s way.  It ain’t gonna happen.  You’re going to become a U2 fan.  You and everyone else you’ve ever known.  So it is with Bayou Bakery.  One bite of Chef/Ower David Guas’ food and you’ll be begging for backstage passes.

I well remember my first visit to Bayou Bakery.  The basket of Zapp’s potato chips atop the bakery case.  The Dr. John on the house speakers.  The smell of chicory on the laughing air.  I remember, too, each of these totems of pure Crescent City gris-gris taking me on a Wildean-sized synesthetic magic carpet ride back to my beloved Decatur Street in the French Quarter.  Just the act of standing before Bayou Bakery’s chalkboard menu, surrounded by a perfect facsimile of my favorite American city, was magical in itself.  But then came the discovery of Bayou Bakery’s food.  The thrill of finding pickled eggs (made pink by beet juice in brine) this far north.  The exquisite agony of accidently snorting an entire gram of confectionary sugar off my beignet.  Not to mention the instant and abiding man-crush I felt for David Guas upon discovering the greatest muffuletta I’ve ever tasted outside of New Orleans.  It was love.  For Guas.  For Bayou Bakey.  The kind of love leaves you wanting more.  One visit to Bayou Bakery and I was hooked.  Heavy as lead.

Call me an idiot to all things culinary.  Fine.  Brand me a food professional hack.  Cool.  Tell me I don’t shit from gastronomic Shinola.  Surely a case might be made for that.  But slander my devotion to the food of New Orleans (and all the knowledge that attends such reverence) and I’ll break your jaw (lovingly, of course).  Because I’ve been traveling to New Orleans as a culinary pilgrim my entire adult life the way an acolyte worships at the feet of an oracle.  Because I honeymooned there.  Because my brother lives in the middle 9^th.   Because there is no city in North America with a richer, more storied, or more vibrant culinary tradition than New Orleans.  Nowhere else in the United States is the daily business of eating more central to workaday Americans than it is in New Orleans.  Does Chicago have anything approaching the greatness of the Po’ Boy?  Does New York have anything close of the Crescent City’s collective agreement that red beans and rice be eaten, city-wide, each and every Monday?  Does Los Angeles have anything as important to ritual or municipal pride like the King Cake?  New Orleans stands, now and forever, as the primogeniture of American culinary fusion.  African.  Spanish.  French.  Native American.  Italian.  Cajun and Creole.  It’s all still there.  Alive and kicking.  Everything that started two full centuries before gastronomic miscegenation was too cool for school and too hip to see its own feet.

So enter the 2011 advent of David Guas’ Bayou Bakery.  More than just a supremely delicious culinary destination for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Bayou Bakery is a veritable museum of New Orleans food history with a curator of living history (in the person of Guas) who has already forgotten more about the food and culture of his native Louisiana than I’ll ever be lucky enough to learn.  Conversation with Guas about the food of New Orleans is a white-knuckled joy ride at break-neck speed through such highly nuanced subjects as roux and mirepoix, tasso and file.  The dude knows his food history.  He more than knows it, actually.  He lives it.  Day in.  Day out.  That we should all be so lucky to have his job.  But lucky we are.  Because Guas cooks.  For you and me.  For all of us.  He cooks and bakes beyond what passes as merely good.  He cooks with all the proselytizing fervor of a Bible-tent revivalist intent on saving the world one lost culinary soul at a time.

Take Guas’ muffuletta:  Capicola.  Salami.  Pepperoni.  Ham.  Emmentaler and provolone.  And don’t forget the essential “olive salad.”  And all of it on perfectly crusted bread.  Invented at the French Quarter’s Central Grocery in 1906 by Sicilian grocer Salvatore Lupo, the muffuletta is the signature sandwich of New Orleans.  Get this wrong and NOLA expats and food devotees will hang you by your toes from the highest branch.  And yet Guas makes a muffuletta that is beyond good.  It’s like finding faith in one’s fellow man.  And it’s also the first thing I put in my mouth after this autumn’s Hurricane Irene left me without power (and refrigeration).   The muffuletta wasn’t merely delicious.  It was soul-cleansing.  Life-affirming.  And it should give Central Grocery cause to smile that such apostolic mission work continues here in our nation’s capital, and this far north.    

Still not convinced?  Take Guas’ unbelievably delicious sausage biscuit.  The biscuit itself, in every way flaky, moist, and perfectly Southern, is reason enough to hug the stranger at the table next to you, but the sausage, made by Washington-area charcuterie maestro Jamie Stachowski, might very well lead you to finding religion, for surely by Grace alone could sausage like Stachowski’s ever be allowed to exist.  For all the yet-unmoved agnostic hard-cases, I offer Guas’ truly transcendental bacon biscuit.  It consists of just that:  three strips of smoked bacon laid inside two biscuit halves; the perfect (and I mean perfect) culinary understatement.  Because please, dear reader, consider this next sentence with the diligence and care it deserves:  the bacon is from Benton’s in Tennessee and it is the best bacon I’ve ever tasted.  Ever.  Spike my vein and you’ll find but two substances afloat in my blood:  bacon and booze.  So when I say this is the best bacon I’ve ever tasted, I mean it’s the best bacon I’ve ever tasted.  Brothers and sisters, let me hear an amen.

For the atheistic hold-outs, or those for whom the recent frontal lobotomy is now kicking in and who still don't get it, Guas offers the perfunctory Big Voodoo Daddies of Crescent City Cuisine.  Gumbo.  Jambalaya. Grits.  Collards.  Etouffee. Hot peanuts (boiled with Benton’s bacon, no less).  Chopped pork.  It’s all here.  Not some caricature of Big Easy cuisine. This isn’t food for tourists or skinny-jeaned wannabes.  No way.  This fare is the real fucking deal.  And all of it vital and popping with the flavors of someone who grew up eating the very stuff at his grandmother’s kitchen table.  Someone who grew up knowing the best roux came in non-blonde.  Someone who might jack you up for adding file to his gumbo.

I’m now of an age to know that I must eventually destroy everything I have ever loved.  Memories of ex-girlfriends.  Mix-tape cassettes of once-obscure bands.  Nightclubs frequented long ago and for whom I still pine.  I’m the General Sherman to their Atlanta.  It’s all going down in flames.  I know this.  I know, too, that, with any luck, I’ll now have to stand in a line twenty people deep every time I visit Bayou Bakery.  But that’s okay.  Because I’m now of an age to know that something as good as Bayou Bakery must not remain secret, even if that secret has been wildly popular for Washingtonians for almost a year now.  A man of my age, now graying at the temples, should be comfortable with sitting in the corner of his favorite local eatery, listening to the 80s alt-rock playlist on his iPhone, licking confectionary sugar off his fingers, and knowing, truly and deeply, just what it means to miss New Orleans.

You’ll know David Guas when you visit Bayou Bakery.  How so?  He’ll be the handsomest man in the room.  And for the love of Baby Jesus, friends, order the muffuletta.   

Your link to Bayou Bakery:   Bayou Bakery