Suong Tran's "I'm Here" was a greasy spoon Vietnamese restaurant in Madison, WI. The menu was legendary with over 500 items. We even kept a menu with annotations, so we could keep track of what we had tried, and what we liked.
Photo [above] sampling of I'm Here's Legendary Menu. Look for #22! {Feel fre to click on it for a closer look!]
In the 1990s, I'm Here had a food cart on Capital Square. [The food cart still seems to be operating. Hurray!] I used to get lunch from her regularly. She had the absolute BEST fresh-squeezed lemonade! And I liked her fried rice. Back then I wasn't adventuresome enough to try other dishes.Later, when my future husband and I went on our first "not-a-date," we discovered that we both appreciated the cuisine of I'm Here. He knew of it as the restaurant on Park St., and had never seen the food cart. He's the one who introduced me to #22, Bun Bi Cha Gio, which soon became my all-time favorite item on the menu. It's a Vietnamese salad of julienned cucumber and thick (beefy) soy bean sprouts topped with rice noodles and a vegetarian egg roll cut into 3/4-inch rounds with tofu bits and toasted peanuts on top with fresh mint and basil. All this is accompanied by a mystery dipping sauce. It's the perfect combination of hot and cold, sweet and salty, light and fresh.
Back to the story ... Christian and I went to I'm Here quite often. We loved the food and the ambiance. It was never crowded. In Winter, the heat was seldom on (Woe to the diner who had to expose bare skin in that frigid bathroom!). The front of the restaurant was piled high with storage items : fortune cookies, little jello-like desserts, a huge old industrial type microwave bought at auction and in need of repair. The service was even rude at times. Most of their business was take-out, so they didn't bother much with housekeeping. Most people did not dine-in there. We were unusual ...
Because we kept coming back, the Trans came to trust us as friends. My husband grew up speaking French (that's another story), the colonial language of Vietnam. The Trans were more comfortable speaking French than English, even after living in the US for 20 years. So that helped to foster communication. Suong would be trying new recipes in the kitchen and test them out on us when no one else was around. We felt really honored!
We asked her one night why the restaurant had such an unusual name. She said, "When you're hungry, I want the food to say, 'I'm Here!'" Simple as that.
One night they told us the story of how they left Vietnam all those years ago on a boat (I can't remember the details now, but it was harrowing) ... eventually, they came to the US. Dak (Mr. Tran) had been an engineer in Vietnam, an educated and professional person. But when he came to the US, the language was a barrier. He couldn't find a job. Then it hit me : how hard it is for many immigrants coming to the US--to be a bright, capable person where you came from, to suddenly held back by the language barrier. People can't see your intelligence or the depths of your soul because you can't speak their language ... Suong Tran's family came from a part of Vietnam where vegetarian dishes were common -- or was it her family's religion that offered such variety in vegetarian dishes (apparently not so common in the rest of Vietnam, or in the Vietnamese Cookbooks I've checked). So she opened the restaurant ... That was something they could do with minimal English skills.
One night, we brought my parents there for dinner. This seemed really important because my Dad is a Vietnam Vet. The Trans really wanted to meet him, too. I remember it just seemed like there was a lot of history, gratitude, emotion, smiles and STUFF to air out between them (they'd never met before) with that traumatic history even 25 years later ... The Trans brought our food. I think they wanted to sit down and really talk with all of us, but it was a Saturday night and they had other customers to attend to. I should ask my dad if he remembers that encounter ... I felt like something really important and healing had happened that night, even though I don't recall anymore what we talked about.
Other dishes we loved :
Red Bean Smoothie
Doesn't sound like much, but these beans are sweet. This was more like a dessert, or a milkshake. We would get one and share it with two straws, back in the days of young love. One night, I had really been looking forward to Red Bean Smoothie, and while CL was telling a story (or maybe he was just reading the Isthmus) and I'd been staring into his eyes, I had slurped up almost all of the R-B Smoothie. He was not happy about that, but we worked through it with a wink and a nod. ;-)
Unfortunately, I'm Here is closed down as a restaurant now. No more of that delicious food, unless we try to make it ourselves. Sigh! Here's my first attempt at making my own #22 :
Ready to serve with dipping sauce at the side. This is the recipe I worked from, slightly modified. Dipping Sauce Recipe.
Here's another shot, lest you think it's all noodles and egg roll. The greens and veggies are underneath the noodles.How did it taste? Good enough to quench my hunger. Sort of like Suong Tran's ... but not quite.
I didn't even try to make the egg rolls. The farmer's market in Oshkosh now has 2 stands where they sell Hmong egg rolls. (For those of you who don't know, the Hmong people helped the US during the Vietnam War. After the war, many Hmong people settled in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California where they could find good farmland. Today, about 1/3 of the farmers at our market are Hmong.) So a Hmong egg roll IS a type of Vietnamese egg roll. It is much easier to purchase these little gems than to make them from scratch ... They are similar, but not exactly the same as Suong Tran's ...
I'll just have to seek out her cart the next time we're in Madison. That's all there is to it!
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