Claypot Curried Catfish With Glass Noodles @ Kim Son
This city's longest-running Vietnamese restaurant has a number of dishes not often seen even in other Vietnamese places. This is one of them: a covered earthenware pot baked in the oven with a brothy sauce made with Thai-style red curry and a horseshoe-shaped steak of catfish. (It may well be Vietnamese catfish, which is something I usually avoid for trade reasons. But in a Vietnamese restaurant, it seems right.) Noodles fill out the bowl, but it remains almost as much a soup as anything else. The same fish, more or less, is made with chicken. Both versions are almost laughably cheap, yet leave a lasting impression.
