Welcome to The Strip Club, highlighting Austin’s destination strip malls. Where else can you buy an abacus to calculate your bill? Watch dried scallops get neatly arranged into a gigantic glass jar? Buy jewels to dazzle the masseuse at your postprandial foot rub?
As a rule of thumb, you can’t go wrong eating near a fresh market, and Chinatown Center – anchored by MT Supermarket, the largest international grocery in Central Texas – is no exception. This is Austin’s OG Asian food hub, a place where you can eat on the cheap before and after loading up your cart with MT’s hard-to-find supplies like shredded fresh green papaya, Thai pea eggplant, and perilla.
Well-trafficked Pho Saigon, Korean Grill, and Baguette House serve their purpose, but Bep Co Tham – KN Kitchen is our top destination. The experience starts with the people – kind and generous Ho Chi Minh City immigrants Kenny and Kelly Nguyen – and ends with the food, which is undeniably fresh and well prepared. Start with the bánh bao kp with char siu BBQ pork, two open bao buns stuffed like a bánh mì sandwich with pickled carrot and daikon, cilantro, cucumber, and fresh jalapeño. The bun is just the right amount of sticky, and not too bready. Delectable. Alongside the bao comes a carousel of homemade condiments: chili oil, sambal, pickled jalapeño, and their eyebrow-raising pickled garlic, which we suggest they sell by the jarload.
One surefire litmus test for any Vietnamese restaurant is the quality of their cold cut sandwich. The bánh mì thp cm (combo bánh mì), featuring house-made pork patty, pork head cheese, and pork belly, all rough cut and swimming in mayo, nestled inside a perfect baguette roll, is best in show at this strip mall ripe with competition.
As you might imagine, cuisine in Vietnam is considerably more varied than what you typically find around here, so I always scan menus for deeper cuts, and the Nguyens don’t disappoint, with their signature min xào cua st c bit (stir-fried crab and vermicelli with special sauce), a hot stone bowl filled with copious fresh crab meat and glass noodles mixed with pickled carrot, cilantro, bell pepper, and oyster sauce. The dish gives off a lovely seafood aroma with more than a hint of sweetness, just like Kelly, who learned to make the dish from her mother. I love this kind of comfort food, and I’m turning into a regular. They also sell “Handmade Goodness” at the counter, including panna cotta gruel, pomelo pudding, and salted egg roll cake. The only downside to Bep Co is that it’s closed on Thursdays and Fridays.
Next door at a Chinese ceramics and classical furniture exhibition clearance sale, I attempt to run a cost-benefit analysis for matching $13,800 marble dragons on an extremely large wall-hanging abacus, but it’s framed under glass – and I thought I could count on you.
Chinatown Center is flush with bubble tea shops, jewelry stores, and several nail supplies, one of which is emanating a chemical odor so strong it prevents me from even entering. Overwhelmed, I head to Lily’s Sandwich (now in its 18th year), featuring a full selection of bánh mì, uncommon items like gi vt (duck salad) and hn xúc bánh tráng (baby clams with rice cracker), as well as pre-packaged bánh cun – a dish I adore for its thick, gooey rice noodles filled with ground pork, alongside pork cold cuts, vinegary cucumber, mint, and nc chm. Turns out it’s even better on the opposite side of the parking lot, at Uncle Phan’s Fresh Tofu, alongside other hard-to-find dishes like canh bún (water spinach noodle soup), bún mm, (fermented fish noodle soup), mì vt tim (braised duck noodle soup), and bún u mm tôm (noodle & tofu with shrimp paste). Community vibes are strong on this end of the strip mall, as a group of Vietnamese veterans of the American War (as it’s known elsewhere), often gather in front of Phan’s to drink cà phê sa á, smoke ciggies, and shoot the breeze.
Adjacent Baguette House can’t compete in the sandwich department, but I do recommend their savory Franco-Viet paté-stuffed pastries and cm cháy, a dried rice cracker snack flavored with fish sauce and chilies.
The opposite side of the mall leans more Sino, as First Chinese BBQ is your stop for Peking duck and Cantonese fare, while at Hang Fung, an apothecary offering “Chinese Herbs, Tea, Ginseng, Delicacies & Gifts,” a woman behind the counter is stuffing dehydrated scallops symmetrically into an enormous glass jar. She’s making retail art, and I have to admit, it’s visually satisfying, but I’m curious what the mollusks are used for, and she tells me people put them into various soups “to make them sweet.” There are various other dried products, including lemon sticks, plums, lotus seeds, and something called “olive liquorice,” which tasted terrible, but also probably cured me of some disease I didn’t know I had.
Run-on-named Taste of Home Handmade Dumplings offers said dumplings organic, served steamed, boiled, or fried (or frozen to-go), in various iterations including pork with shrimp, pork pickled cabbage, lamb cilantro, beef celery, and fried crawfish with fresh pork. I order lamb cilantro, fried, and they arrive piping hot with the slightest bit of cornstarch lace around the edges providing some crunch. They’re super juicy on the inside, and I devour them while also digesting their heavy-on-the-Coldplay mixtape.
The back half of the menu consists almost entirely of American-Chinese hits like General Tso, beef broccoli, kung pao, and sesame chicken, but the last page advertises “Chef’s Recommended Dishes”: chicken stew with mushrooms (which I’ll be back for) and pot pork, a pyramid of heavily breaded, fried free-range pork tenderloin coated in a sweet-and-sour sauce that reminds me of a Chinese buffet I ate at one time off a highway in Kentucky. Slightly disgusted with it and myself, I stop eating it halfway through, but then find myself pounding the lukewarm leftovers barehanded on the drive home. MSG for the win.
Chinatown Center
10901 N. Lamar Blvd.
This article appears in November 29 • 2024.