Vietnam

Pho Phu Quoc aka PPQ Restaurant: 1816 Irving Street, San Francisco, CA 94122; tel. (415) 661-8869

I DO NOT NATURALLY GRAVITATE toward Asian food; my home base, or basin, is the Mediterranean. Still, we live in a pluralistic society, and we eat occasionally with friends more broadminded than I. (Not a difficult achievement for them.)

So today we lunched in San Francisco, there to catch up with an old friend expatriate to Paris these last several years. He likes Pho Phu Quoc, so there we were.
Since I don't eat shellfish with legs, not even if the legs are removed — no shrimp, lobster, crab, nor freshwater relatives like crayfish — I couldn't join in on the shrim rolls. (I don't know the linguistic reason that Asians tend to drop final consonants.) I had roce bee row, a little gummy but okay; and what seems a quite nutritious cabbage slaw with peppers, scallions, carrot, and chicken meat. The others had cold pasta with stuff in or atop it, and seemed quite happy.

Blue Moon wheat beer (Belgium)