It took a honeymoon trip to Vietnam -- and some fish-sauce-marinated steak frites -- for Richard Le to rediscover the food of his youth.
Le was already dreaming of opening a Portland food cart, but Matta wasn’t really born until he and Sophia, his new wife, visited his uncle’s house in Saigon, where a bite of deeply flavorful steak and fried potatoes brought memories of the version his grandmother cooked for him growing up in San Jose, California.
Before that trip, going out for Vietnamese food had meant banh mi sandwiches or pho, the ubiquitous beef noodle soup. The kind of homestyle food made by his family, who fled Vietnam after the war, was a fact of life, not necessarily something worth celebrating.
“It was just this surge of memories that I had forgotten about, because I guess I had domesticated myself,” says Le, who first visited Portland as a breakdancer. “So I started to really figure out my family’s recipes, what I enjoyed as a kid.”
Last fall, Matta took over the former Filipino cart Bibingka, setting up shop next to Gumba and Fine Goose at The Whale pod (named for the mural that graces the eastern wall), one of the city’s best pound-for-pound collections of carts. Specials change day-to-day, from caramel-scented braised pork belly to fried shrimp, heads and all (Le will encourage you to eat them whole). Most days, you’ll find Sophia Le frying fluffy green pandan doughnuts glazed with coconut, iced coffee kissed with condensed milk and goi ga, a chicken salad with fried shallots and chicken skins, cabbage and a bouquet’s worth of parilla, mint, basil and other herbs.
“As a kid, I was not about it, because I just wanted to eat cheeseburgers and fries,” Le says of goi ga. “But now, yo, the level of flavor you get from all those herbs? It’s incredible.”
There’s still room to dial in some of these recipes. A little extra treble -- in the form of lime or other acid -- might help brighten up the good caramel and fish sauce bass notes. But Le’s second-generation rediscovery of his family’s food already seems to point a way forward for Portland’s Vietnamese restaurant scene. Instead of a hundred restaurants serving the same frozen-in-time menu of sandwiches, rice dishes and beef noodle soup, a new crop of indie carts and pop-ups -- and, eventually, restaurants -- could highlight the less heralded homestyle corners of the cuisine.
“There are thousands of Vietnamese dishes that are unknown to the public eye,” Le says. “I wanted to showcase the food that doesn’t get the spotlight.”
5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, noon to 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 12 to 3 p.m., 6 to 8 p.m. and 9 to midnight Saturday; noon to 8 p.m. Sunday; 2314 N.E. Alberta St.; 971-258-2849; mattapdx.com
-- Michael Russell @tdmrussell
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