Restaurant Review: Mam Serves the Most Exciting Vietnamese Food in New York

Bun dau mam tom, the lunch that Hanoi lives for, is almost always bought on the street and often eaten there, too. Like many Vietnamese dishes, it is assembled by the individual diner from a somewhat flexible roster of components. Fried tofu and pressed cold bricks of rice vermicelli are indispensable, as are cucumbers and branches of green herbs. Sausage and cooked pork may make an appearance. But the point of the dish, the nucleus that the other ingredients orbit around, is a fermented-shrimp sauce called mam tom. Mam tom is the color of a day-old bruise. It has the insistent, nostril-permeating odor of old seafood left in some back corner of the fish market where the cats always seem especially agitated. Imagine scraping the anchovies off a couple of pizzas and leaving them out on the counter for the summer, and you have a good idea how mam tom smells. Even in Vietnam, mam tom is divisive. The dish it anchors, bun dau mam tom, is not loved everywhere in the country, let alone abroad. It is, however, enjoying star treatment in New York City as the main focus of Mam, an evolving Vietnamese kitchen on the Lower East… Read full this story

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