Take Argyle Street west off the Lake until it hits North Broadway and you'll be in Southeast Asia.
Two terrific markets bookend that stretch of Broadway ( 4000-5000 North Broadway ) . Tai Nam Food Market ( 4925-J N. Broadway, 773-275-5666 ) is heavy on Vietnamese foods, but also stocks a raft of other Asian spices, canned goods and fresh fruits and vegetables. ( The dreaded durian is here: fresh, frozen, pureéd and liquefied. It's so ugly, it's like looking at Medusa. )
What's nice about this market, especially for non-Vietnamese cooks, is how it lists so much in both Vietnamese and English. So, if a recipe calls for rau ma ( pennywort greens ) , a common enough ingredient in Vietnamese cookery, English readers can find it.
And, should you be in the market for spot fish, milk fish, black pomfret or live blue crabs--about anything with fins or gills--they're here, too. It's probable that fish is fresher at an Asian market than anywhere else but the shore, the turnover is so unremitting.
Asian markets are also the places to buy spices such as coriander seed or dried chiles. True, you get a lifetime supply of coriander seed, but it's also both inexpensive and imperishable. And these markets are certainly the right spot for Asian cookware--woks, steamer baskets, long-handled utensils, rice cookers and the like.
You might even wish to shop here for everyday groceries: 5 pounds of large, unsalted cashews cost just $13; the oxtails are meatier than what's at Jewel; and the butcher cuts up pork in enormous variety ( $1.40-$2.35 a pound ) .
A few paces away is Thai Grocery ( 5014 N. Broadway, 773-561-5345; 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily ) . Here's the place for holy basil and good quality curry pastes. But best of all, way in the back, the proprietor's wife cooks eight different Thai specialties each day, loads them onto jasmine rice and charges you $4.50 for the privilege.
One day, the kitchen turned out slices of pork with shiitake mushrooms and hard-cooked eggs; small Thai eggplants with true bamboo shoots, long beans and lots of chile flakes; more eggplants with fish balls in a green curry; spicy, boiled and roast duck; a fiery beef red curry; and banana leaf wrapping sticky rice soaked through with coconut milk and custard. This is the kind of Thai home cooking that you wish a restaurant could deliver.
In between these two Southeast Asian markets is a smattering of mostly Vietnamese restaurants.
Check out Chez Catinat ( 4949 N. Broadway; 773-769-5880 ) for the special Vietnamese soup called pho ( pronounced, sharply, fuh ) , a beef broth-based, meal-in-a-bowl.
At 4941 N. Broadway, it's Monaco ( 773-878-8811 ) , a mostly Vietnamese joint with some Chinese dishes ( mucilaginous chicken stir fries, for example ) . The high point here are the several noodle soups that use egg noodles in various permutations, or rice vermicelli noodles in the same. You can also find bun here ( down, boy ) , the Vietnamese cold noodle dish that's commonly topped with grilled meats and bunches of vegetables. ( You will also find surly service. )
Next door to the Tai Nam Food Market is Pho Hoa ( 4925-G N. Broadway, 773-784-8723 ) where all they serve is pho, albeit nearly 20 turns on it. When you eat here--pho, by the way, is the quintessential hangover cure--all you need to worry about is selecting the cut of meat you want in your bowl. The rest is just a pile on: sliced jalapeños, lime juice, mint, cilantro, mung bean sprouts and splashes of pepper sauce or vinegar.
New Saigon ( 5000 N. Broadway, 773-334-3322 ) advertises "Cheap Eats" on its front window, but most entreés run $8-$15. The cheapest - and, for the money, the best - eats on this block are at Thai Grocery, a few doors away.
Furama Chinese ( 4936 N. Broadway, 773-271-1161 ) does Mandarin and other Chinese; Palace of China ( 4953-55 N. Broadway, 773-275-2388 ) specializes in Szechuan and other Chinese.
For dessert and Vietnamese style breads, check out Ba Le French Pastry and Restaurant ( 5018 N. Broadway, 773-561-4424 ) . Vietnam is an Asian oddity in that its occupation by France gave it a bread culture like none of its neighbors. At Ba Le, voilá: baguettes.
For $1.35, Ba Le lets go of a fist-sized pain au chocolat with buckets of dark chocolate. And $7 brings the diamond-shaped brick called banh tet: sticky rice sweetened with coconut milk and wrapped around long-cooked pork. Yummy.
