More than any other cuisine, my life has been shaped by Vietnamese food. I first tasted phở when I was in high school, at a neat local restaurant called Chez Trinh, and I fell instantly in love. Here were the flavors and textures I didn’t know I’d been longing for: the pungency of fish sauce, the aromas of cassia bark and Thai basil, the slipperiness of rice noodles. It was all I wanted to eat. Just a few years later, about to graduate from college, I made plans to move to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, in Vietnam’s south, where I hoped to do something, I didn’t know what, but to eat well while I was doing it.

Right away I began to see (and taste) what a diverse cuisine I’d stumbled into. Restaurants were not the all-purpose, noodles-rice-bánh-mì-and-everything-else affairs they’d been in the U.S. Instead, many specialized in single dishes, like phở, or sets of dishes — noodle soups more broadly, or grill-it-yourself barbecue — or revolved around specific ingredients, like crab (always being picked clean from shells by legions of restaurant owners’ children) or goat. I ate fried eggs with pink bacon and flaky bánh mì for breakfast, broken rice with caramelized pork and water spinach for lunch, and grilled shellfish in a converted garage for dinner — and in between I snacked on soursop shakes, little pots of tart yogurt, and iced coffee thick with condensed milk.

This was Saigon (people still called it that), so the flavors were maximalist: sweeter, with more herbs, more accoutrements, more everything. But here and there were hints that Saigon was not the only game in town. On one main strip you could get bún chả, a Hanoi-style dish of grilled pork patties floating in a tart fish sauce with a side of rice noodles. Next to the main market was a popular spot for delicate food from Huế, the old imperial capital in the center of the country. Occasionally, I’d find a place for bánh cuốn, a rolled rice noodle, more typical of the north, that was stuffed with pork and mushrooms. Once a friend brought me to a restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Hoi An, a quaint central town, and I fell in love with cao lầu, whose thick rice noodles have a uniquely springy texture.

Over that first year in Vietnam, and on dozens of trips back in the 30 years since, I’ve traveled widely and never stopped discovering new foods. In Sadec, the Mekong Delta town where the French novelist Marguerite Duras lived as a child, I found a restaurant serving seven (!) varieties of sour fish soup, a southern staple I’d thought was a standard. In Danang, I saw that snail restaurants used Thai basil as their default herb, whereas in Saigon it was rau răm. In all these decades, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of a cuisine that seems to blend every ingredient and technique, every flavor and influence, every possible delicious thing humankind has ever invented.

Which is why I’m overjoyed to have chef Nhu Ton — of New York’s renowned Bánh Anh Em — as our podcast guest this week. In a city where, until fairly recently, most Vietnamese restaurants had identical menus, she’s been pursuing a vision of the food of her homeland that is at once reverent of its kaleidoscopic traditions and representative of her own personal experience, growing up in the open-air markets of the Central Highlands, traveling the length of Vietnam, and finally coming to the United States to study, live, and cook.

“We honor tradition,” she told me, “but it doesn’t stop us from being creative.”

Okay, now go listen to the podcast! It’s my favorite so far, and the most meaningful to me. And maybe also to you?

For Halloween, I performed my annual tradition of visiting family in Houston, an incredibly diverse city of immigrants and amazing cuisine, including some of the best barbecue in America (Corkscrew, Blood Bros, Briskey & Rice, Truth). Somehow I didn’t get barbecue this time, but we did manage to eat at our favorite restaurant in the city, Belly of the Beast, from James Beard Award winner Thomas Bille, and a place my brother discovered, Nem 249.

Belly of the Beast opened in 2020, and chef Thomas continues to elevate the food in creative and delicious ways: Hokkaido scallop toast with crème fraîche and Kaluga caviar; baked snow-crab hand roll with brown butter mayo; lamb barbacoa over hummus (so good it could be its own dish). Chef surprised us with mid-course appetizers — his classic tuna tostada with uni and buñuelos with Iberico ham, both incredibly tasty and refreshing. We followed with the tender beef cheek mole, the dish with which Thomas recently — and deservedly — Beat Bobby Flay. Lastly, our tres leches cake was one of the best items on the menu, moist with a passionfruit meringue and toasted whipped cream.

Nem 249 is a newer Vietnamese place about 10 minutes from IAH airport, and in a city full of the country’s best Vietnamese food, Nem 249 is a fantastic addition. We had the pork sausage summer roll, with a hot egg sauce / dipping soup that perfectly complements the rolls, plus charcoal-grilled pork with rice vermicelli and seafood egg noodles. Love this place!