On the polished stone pathway that leads to Ăn Vặt Nhà Cam, visitors to the Grand Century Shopping Mall can purchase a variety of eclectic goods.
One store inside the entrance carries extravagant chandeliers that would have complemented the furnishings in Liberace’s dining room. A few feet away from Chef Cam Tran’s newly opened kiosk, there’s a shop whose only retail products are edible birds’ nests made from the solidified saliva of swallows and packaged in jewel-toned boxes. And, directly across the hall from Tran’s bright yellow signage, a beauty store offers hundreds of facial masks and restorative lotions. The rest of the mall seems to stretch outward into an ever-expanding universe of shoppers and storefronts.
Ăn Vặt Nhà Cam’s approximate English translation is “Cam’s Snack House.” Four years ago, Chef Tran immigrated to the Bay Area from Vietnam. Her recipes are inspired by the street food she loved to eat in Saigon.
Tran started out by selling her food at street fairs and festivals in and around San Jose. Buoyed by her friends and the public’s enthusiastic response to her cooking, she decided to open her first brick and mortar restaurant in the Grand Century Shopping Mall.
To order, customers queue up at Ăn Vặt Nhà Cam’s counter before taking the food to go or sitting down at the large grouping of public tables and chairs that are up for grabs. Tran’s culinary focus isn’t on phở, bún or bánh mì, those staples of Vietnamese menus familiar to most Bay Area diners. Her distinctive approach manifests itself right away in a starter—a mango dish that tastes like a reintroduction to the fruit.
Instead of dicing it into micro-thin slices, Tran cuts her “shaking mango” (small $10.99 or medium $20.99) into large crunchy cubes. The chef makes it by shaking the pieces of green mango in a cup with a blend of salt, red pepper and sweetened fish sauce. The unripened texture is a complete departure from the softer, more pliable yellow variety that’s often served as a dessert. I ordered it without meat but Tran also serves versions of the dish with octopus, beef tendon or chicken feet.
In a phone interview, Tran said she’s making dishes that may seem exotic for the uninitiated. But for Vietnamese people, who embraced nose-to-tail dining long before it became a culinary trend, they’re delicacies.
In addition to chicken feet, Tran prepares hard boiled duck and chicken eggs. The grilled balut ($9.99), or fertilized duck eggs, are bathed in the chef’s own blend of nước chấm and then grilled over an open fire. The chicken eggs, trứng gà nướng, are also grilled and then sprinkled with salt and pepper and a dash of fish sauce.
Khô bò vat chanh ($14.99), a rice paper salad, contains shredded mango, rau răm or Vietnamese coriander, a hardboiled egg, fried shallots, tiny dried shrimp and thin slices of beef. The salad ingredients sit on top of dry, transparent sheets of rice paper. To soften it, the rice paper needs to be hydrated with a side dressing before it can be used as an edible utensil. After the beef is marinated in garlic and lemongrass and grilled, the texture is almost like a jerky. Cam’s signature oolong milk tea ($6.99) tempers the tanginess of the beef’s powdery red spice mixture.
Daisy Nguyen conducted the interview with Cam Tran in Vietnamese and translated it.
Ăn Vặt Nhà Cam, open Mon to Fri 11am–9pm, Sat to Sun 10:30am–9pm. Grand Century Shopping Mall, 1111 Story Rd., #1011, San Jose. 669.254.9155. instagram.com/anvatnhacam.sj.
