San Diego Tet Festival food and festivities

[mizducky]

Checked out the San Diego Tet Festival just after it opened at 4pm this past Friday, and found it really enjoyable. (For those locals who want to catch it before it's over, the Festival runs through to 10pm Sunday night.)

The festival is set up in a relatively compact grassy area in Balboa Park, at the intersection of Park Blvd. and President's Way. Arriving early as I did, I found few other attendees there, and a lot of volunteers still hustling to get things set up.

Like most festivals of most any sort, this one has the ubiquitous carnival area and booths:

But few festivals that I've been to have had these charming little cultural tableaux:

That last tableau is described in the program as representing a typical convenience store back in the old country.

Yes, I'm trying to get to the food. Alas, a lot of the food vendors were not set up yet, and at least one of those that was on-site was struggling with electricity weirdnesses:

Still, there were a few up and running, and as time progressed more came on-line. Among the things I sampled--grilled sausage:

Not pictured: the Tet specialty nem chua--little cubes of spicy, garlicky, chewy, sour pork sausage. The chewiness is from slivers of pork ear; the sourness is from natural fermentation. The cubes come individually wrapped in cling-wrap--seeing the bright red wrapped cubes laid out in a little cardboard tray, I at first thought they were some kind of candy. I really dug the taste and mouthfeel of these things.

A Vietnamese/Lao-style green papaya salad--very strong on the chile and the fish sauce, minimal on the sour or sweet:

Not pictured--another version of green papaya salad, this one milder, and garnished with slivers of liver and jerky. I love liver in any and all forms, so I enjoyed this quite a bit.

Goi cuon, bo bia:

These were kind of boring renditions, more vehicles for dipping sauce than anything else.

Also sampled a bunch of other stuff, especially when I ran into fellow local food enthusiasts Candice and Kirk. Kirk has more photos and text up right now on his blog.

Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

Edited February 10, 2008 by mizducky (log)

[mizducky]

Visited the Tet Festival again this afternoon--more crowds, and the vendors were starting to run out of stuff so no more nem chua to be found, but I still got to sample a few more goodies.

First, I had to get some more banh khot--justified it on the grounds that I didn't get a photo of them last visit. But really, they're very photogenic:

They're eggy/custardy, with bits of shrimp, ground pork, and scallion embedded in them. They are rather labor-intensive--the stallers making them had four portable burners running just for these, each with its own little eight-dimple cooking pan. But each order consisted of eight banh khot--in other words an entire panful--and each panful took a few minutes to cook, with the operator painstakingly flipping each banh khot over in its little dimple to cook both sides. And the other item this booth had on offer was coconut waffles--so they had a whole other line waiting for waffles to come off each of a handful of electric waffle irons. Definitely an instance of waiting for one's patience to be rewarded.

There was no line waiting to get some of the rice porridge with pork blood:

Their loss--this was really tasty. But I admit walking across the fair grounds in search of a seat while trying not to spill a sloshing bowl of piping hot porridge was a challenge. Maybe that's why they had fewer customers.

Oh, and wound up trying one more papaya salad variation:

This one was topped with shreds of dried beef jerky, plus some extremely fresh and flavorful basil.

[hzrt8w]

There was no line waiting to get some of the rice porridge with pork blood:

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(Wendy's lady outfit on... pounding on the counter!!!)

WHERE is the BLOOD???

Maybe not too visible... Fabulous pictures! Thank you. Very interesting!

[mizducky]

(Wendy's lady outfit on... pounding on the counter!!!)

WHERE is the BLOOD???

Maybe not too visible...  Fabulous pictures!  Thank you.  Very interesting!

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Turns out pork blood doesn't float very well. It's all hiding at the bottom. Not a huge amount, but certainly respectable for a garnish--though garnishes are supposed to stay on top, I suppose... oh well...

Glad you enjoyed the photos, Ah Leung!