THANG LONG

Our bike ride was rained out last Saturday so Stavros and I decided it was a good afternoon to go to the movies and visit our all-time favorite place: Thang Long. It’s the one and only Vietnamese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at (Notice I said “eaten at” and not “been to.” More on this later*.) and I think it is the bomb, as does Stavros, and we are wiling to overlook a number of indiscretions that would place any other restaurant on our permanent “DO NOT CALL” list.

It started to rain on our way there and was steadily spitting down by the time we arrived. I was completely starving, like the kind of starving where every McDonald’s billboard drives you mad with food-lust and the idea of Kentucky Fried Chicken sounds really good. We pulled into a parking place near the front door and I leapt out of the car.

“AAAHHHHHH!”

I was just reaching for the door when I heard the wail bleat from a very aggrieved Stavros. I turned around and he was grimacing and limping around on the sidewalk in front of the car. “Oh, Stavros! Love of my life—what happened?” cried I.

“I twisted my fuckin’ ankle!” he said, and continued his cockeyed walk around on the pavement, trying to alleviate the pain. He moved off the sidewalk and into the vacant parking place next to ours, and at once a car pulled into the space, forcing him back onto the pavement at a rather rapid clip.

“Goddamn it. What’s wrong with my fucking feet?” he asked God, or perhaps he was talking to me. He was referring to the fact that a few weeks earlier, he sustained a mysterious injury to one of his feet—I forget which, it was either the right or the left—that caused him great distress and inconvenience.

We briefly contemplated a later trip to CVS to purchase an ace bandage, came to no conclusion on the topic, and entered Thang Long.

Normally there are only a few tables occupied and we have our choice of seating, but on this day, every booth on the South wall—my preferred location—was full as was the “mezzanine,” (a one-step-up row of tables facing the front window) which is my second choice. The host, a diminutive Asian with possible birth defects, led us to a table on the North wall, and I knew this wouldn’t do. As we know from experience, these tables are unsuitable for all but the most obese persons, as the backs of the benches are approximately 3 ½ feet from the tabletop. So if you don’t have to accommodate an enormous midsection, you must perch on the very edge of the seat in order to reach your food, which hurts my back and also is just generally uncomfortable. Plus it seems kind of windy on that side. Nonetheless, we gamely slid into the booth and just as gamely slid right the hell back out and pointed to the one open table on the North wall that was unoccupied. Yes, I know I said earlier they were all full, but that’s because, frankly, I wasn’t counting the one at the very end of the row because it’s right next to the kitchen and I don’t like it. We walked over to the table, and to our waitress’s confusion, I did not sit, but stood scanning the tableau behind me for a miracle opening. Stavros was already seated on the side facing the front of the restaurant and so finally I surrendered, feeling he’d already suffered enough recently without me dragging him from table to table.

I took my seat and noted the grimy Plexiglas behind him, separating us from the lower 2/3 of the kitchen’s swinging door and whatever was stacked on the bottom shelves of the rack affixed to the wall. I could see some plastic containers stacked haphazardly and a few empty jars. Nothing in this place is too clean so it doesn’t really bear inspecting and with this in mind, I tore my eyes from the dripping hand towel on the top shelf and opened the menu.

“What are you going to get?” I demanded of Stavros immediately. “Are you getting the Hue?” Hue is some kind of spicy beef soup and Stavros orders it every time we eat there.

“Yes,” he said, and I briskly replied, “Alright, maybe I should see if they’ll let me get that one soup in a big bowl. I wonder if it comes that way, or just in a cup. Then we can get that salad, the one with bean sprouts. That seems like it would be enough. Or maybe I could get that one thing, the one with the noodles. We don’t want leftovers. They’ll rot while we’re in the movies. What do you want? Do you want some of the noodles? Maybe I should get that and a cup of the soup. Do you like that salad?”

I kept up this prattle for a good ten minutes until the waitress arrived. I believe she is the matriarch of Thang Long. She is always our waitress. I think a family owns it, and they are the only people who work there. Anyway, she stood at the table, pen poised over her pad and an expectant and slightly mocking look on her face as always.

“Well,” I told her, closing my menu, “After much deliberation, we’ve decided to get what we always get,” and I recited not only my order, but Stavros’s too, as at some point I had made the unconscious decision to steward our luncheon experience due to his injury.

“Wait.” She was confused. “C75 plus Hue? You want crunchy roll?”

“No. No crunchy roll,” I tell her. “Mine comes with one. You can have it.” I direct this last comment at Stavros, who was feebly attempting to protest and break into my dictatorial dictation of our menu.

I think Stavros was beaten down by his ankle pain because he capitulated and allowed me to issue further commands to the waitress. After she read back our order in an obviously annoyed tone, she retreated to the kitchen and I sat back and sipped water, occasionally allowing my eyes to drift around the area behind Stavros. There was a bicycle leaning against the wall next to the restrooms. Whose is that? I wondered, visions of a steamy Asiatic marketplace forming in my mind. Chickens flapping amid the teeming crowds of sweaty brunettes in gray sweatpants and flip flops. Asian men on bicycles wearing those big round straw hats transporting miscellaneous carcasses in baskets hanging from their shoulders.

“Hue. Chicken soup. Salad.” The waitress returned and I was jolted from my reverie. She slammed the bowls on the table and walked away. I noticed Stavros’s soup was a small size, what they call a “cup” at Thang Long.

“You just got the cup?” I asked.

“Yes, this is why I wanted my own crispy rolls,” he said patiently, stirring his soup.

“Oh.”

I felt kinda bad. Poor guy hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise during my attempt to control some portion of our experience. Sitting in that lame booth that was rejected by all other persons in the restaurant had really left me feeling at loose ends.

The rest of lunch passed without incident as I stuffed wad after wad of beansprouts and cabbage and noodles into my piehole. The tabletop before me was scattered with debris. Stavros ate his soup with his usual delicate good manners, and gracefully accepted my crispy roll without complaint as to its singlehood. Finally, we folded our napkins and got up to leave. As I was standing at the cashier’s desk (manned by the matriarch), Stavros limped over to the wall of reviews from local papers.

I took his arm to leave and once we were out, he told me that one of them hadn’t been particularly flattering.

“Located in a derelict strip mall sandwiched between a pregnancy center and a shuttered fast cash shop, Thang Long is best when you stick to the simple fare,” he recited from memory.

Okay, so at this point I should also mention, as a testament to how good this place really is, review be damned—on one of our first trips there, I found what was unmistakably a pubic hair in my “C75.” And we still went back.

* Last fall we noticed a storefront under construction in Clawson promising the imminent arrival of “Da Nang—Authentic Vietnamese Cuisine.” We waited months for them to open. I was in contact via email with the owner. Finally, two months overdue, they opened and we drove down one Saturday afternoon. First, it was overclean and smelled of construction. Not food. Paint and wood and cement. Secondly, there was virtually nothing on the menu but beef, which I do not eat. And third, it was about twice or three times as expensive at Thang Long. We slipped out without ordering anything and drove to Thang Long at once.