From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published November 27, 2007 Kim Son Gretna: 349 Whitney Ave. (at West Bank Expy.) 366-2489 Lunch and dinner seven days. AE, MC, V. Vietnamese. It’s been eighteen years since a friend introduced me to Kim Son, and thereby to Vietnamese food. The memory of that night remains vivid. Not only was the food different from anything I'd had before, but it touched a lot of poles in my sensory apparatus. It was amazingly fresh. A lot of it carried a substantial pepper component. And many of the ingredients were familiar local favorites, but they tasted entirely new. Now that Vietnamese food has become so common that it turns up even in mainstream places (Emeril's Nola, to name one), I feel naive when I recall that night. But we all were then. Although Vietnamese people arrived here in large numbers in the early 1970s, their early efforts at opening restaurants were mostly unsuccessful. New Orleans has always been slow to accept new cuisines, and much slower then than now. The Vietnamese restaurateurs didn't give up, however. They just shifted their menus. Many Chinese restaurants operated by Vietnamese people would open in the 1970s and 1980s. Kim Son was the first of them to attempt to sell their native cuisine to the population at large. To be on the safe side, they kept a substantial menu of Chinese dishes. But the entire range of Vietnamese cooking was also there. And an adventuresome diner soon found himself confronted by big bowls of beef-broth-based soup, noodle dishes with grilled meats, claypot-baked and salt-baked dishes, and concoctions involving ingredients and presentations for which there were no English words. Kim Son was looking a little worn before the hurricane, but like many restaurants it took the opportunity afforded by the storm damage to perform a substantial renovation. It's not a grand restaurant, by any means. (What male customers may remember most about the physical plant is the ingenious device that operates the urinals.) But it's comfortable and pleasant. The best way to start any Vietnamese meal is with the appetizer rolls. They're filled with shrimp or pork or both, plus sprouts, cilantro, carrots, and other fresh herbs. The wrapper is the same thin, stretchy rice paper that gets crispy when fried for egg rolls, but they don't cook them after assembly. The dipping sauce is a light, mildly peppery, sloshy affair with carrots and a few other things floating around. You can fill up on these things, but don't--split an order at least two ways. Soups dominate the Vietnamese dining scene around town, and they number large on this menu, too. I have always preferred the seafood soup to the beef-based pho--so much so that I find it impossible to come here without getting at least a cup of it. Although the primary flavor spike is red pepper, the pineapple component makes for sweet heat--a favorite flavor of mine. All the food at Kim Son seems impossibly inexpensive, but that’s especially true of the noodle dishes topped with grilled meats: beef, pork, shrimp, chicken, whatever. They’re stunningly good for such simple concoctions. But you can get all the above in most Vietnamese restaurants. What sets Kim Son apart is its array of  “salt-baked” dishes. These are misnamed. They’re not especially salty, nor are they really baked. Instead, the preparation is a stir-fry with a lot of pepper and garlic. Any seasoned New Orleans eater will find the Vietnamese salt-baked crabs easy to appreciate. They're crab quarters in the shell, and they’re as irresistible as they are messy. The same process is applied to scallops, shrimp, and squid, all of which are similarly delicious. They also have salt-baked lobster, using very large lobsters and charging prices in the $30s--a long way from the other numbers on this bargain of a menu. Another major specialty here is claypot cookery. A special porous clay dish is used to cook various foods in the oven, thereby both roasting and steaming them. The claypot process works best with fish, but the claypot chicken is such a personal favorite of mine that it’s tough not to order it every time I go. The chicken in this case is on some noodles in a sauce flavored with Southeast Asian curry. It’s light, convincingly spicy without being insane, and incomparably delicious.                                            The menu goes on to include a great many other adventures. One of particular interest is the beef dinner that will keep you entertained for quite awhile. Beef is a big deal in Vietnamese kitchens, and they have many ways of preparing it, most of which will be new to you. At least one of the courses in the beef dinner will puzzle or even repel you. But there’s so many different tastes that it won’t be a problem. The big surprise: beef fondued in vinegar, which takes the prize for tasting better than it sounds. Perhaps the fact that Kim Son was my first Vietnamese restaurant enhances its goodness in my mind. There is no question that, like all other ethnic restaurants, its longevity has caused it to adapt to local tastes, surely to the benefit of what some perceive as authenticity. But good is good, and great is great, and Kim Son still is. One more thing that comes up often: this Kim Son, named for a sacred mountain in Vietnam, is not connected with the chain of the same name in Houston. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.