Bon Me | Bold, Fresh, and Fun Vietnamese Cuisine

Fish sauce and rice are the building blocks of Vietnamese cuisine. Fish sauce is called nuoc mam in Vietnamese. This flavor is used widely in Southeast Asian food. The Thai version of the sauce is more pungent whereas the Vietnamese version is lighter and more delicate. There are recipes that use fish sauce dating back 1,000 years!

Never had fish sauce? Andrea Nguyen recommends sniffing dried porcini mushrooms and then sniffing fish sauce in her book Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. The smell is nearly the same! The taste of the sauce is similar to soy sauce and used much in the same manner. It is thought to contain the fifth flavor, umami, which is a full bodied meaty sort of flavor.

Fish sauce is not nearly as nutritionally deficient as ketchup which is basically sugar and tomatoes. Fish sauce is high in vitamin B and protein.  Our Vietnamese Vinaigrette is made with fish sauce — try it next time you order a noodle bowl!

Our first week is in the books!   We battled the rain and fought the chilly weather, but we had great support from everyone and we had some crazy crowds by the end of the week!  On Friday we sold everything that wasn’t bolted down.  We’re still tinkering a bit with our logistics, but after all of our hard work, it was great to finally get behind the counter and see all the eager and hungry folks ready to dig into our food.

We also had some nice press all over the place: a nice blurb on us on Thrillist, a neat piece on the Boston Metro on the trucks at City Hall, as well as an upcoming appearance on NECN with Billy Costa! Boston’s food truck craze is just beginning…

Big thanks to those who came to support us our first week — special shout outs to Justin our very first customer who came back for seconds on Tuesday and Laura who came to the truck four times in the first week!

Looking forward to some warmer weather this week.  We’ll be on City Hall Plaza Monday morning with nearly twice as much food as Friday, so hopefully we can start staying a bit later.  We’ve also got some great new additions to the menu for this week.  I don’t want to steal Ali’s thunder, so stay tuned to our twitter for the scoop!

This is exciting! We had our first blogger write and take photos about us!! We are slowly, every so slowly, going viral . . .?

At any rate, you should check out the post and the blog by Annaliese. Her blog is full of great photos and stories about food, recipes, traveling — you know, all the good stuff. Her blog is published at: http://annaliesemaree.wordpress.com/