Duke of Mountain Deer

Luc Dinh Ky

9812 Bolsa Avenue, Suite 100 

Westminster, CA 92683

Editor's Warning: The following review contains such words as "pastiche" and "bricoleur".  Who ever says "pastiche" in conversation?  What a jerk.

It's 1:30 in the morning and the party has degenerated in the worst possible way. Looking around you realize that when the police come around again to break this thing up, you won't want to be at the after party with any of these people. Someone has put on that Queen song for the second time and the white people are on the dance floor, elbows flying, knees bending in an uneasy syncopation. It's time to make your early exit. Grab your jacket and pretend like you're headed out front to answer a phone call or maybe smoke a cigarette. Once you're at the car, there is only one place to go -- up the 405 to Luc Dinh Ky, where every one knows your name, or at least knows what you want: Luc Dinh Ky house special rice noodle, size large, soup on the side. 

This is a proprietary noodle soup, found, as far as I can tell, nowhere else in the Bolsa-Brookhurst food supercomplex known as Little Saigon. Come to Luc Din Ky on any night from 12 to 3 am and it's packed with grandparents, nuclear families, club kids and employees from other Vietnamese restaurants. For the great majority, they are here for one thing: the house special noodle soup. The soup itself is pork based, a clear, porky concoction that is simple and rather indistinct. This is because the soup serves to merely moisten the noodles, served separately in its own bowl. The noodles are flat rice noodles sitting in a delicious sauce, a kind of sweet-savory brown gravy. Buried in this mixture of soup and sauce is a pastiche of good old noodle soup standards -- thin slices of BBQ pork, one or two steamed shrimp, fish cake, steamed chicken thigh, a hardboiled egg, fish ball, fresh, crisp choy, green onions, fried garlic -- all things to all people! 

The miracle of Luc Dinh Ky's noodle soup lies in the unexpected juxtaposition of disparate and seemingly arbitrary components. This is, for lack of a better term, a poststructuralist noodle soup. The soup is over there, the noodles are here. From spoon to mouth, we, the bricoleur, are confronted with any number of tasty permutations -- noodle, soup, fish ball, green onion; noodle, no soup, shrimp, choy; no noodle, soup, fish ball, fish cake, garlic, etc. etc. To heave everything towards the realm of the absurd, we can observe that there is no single soup here, nor is there a single soup-maker; but only the unfolding drama between hunger and freedom, between the soup-eater and the materials at hand. Each trip to Luc Dinh Ky becomes an engagement with the idea of sustenance on two levels -- the material (the question of what kind of soup you will have) and the existential (the question of what kind of soup-eater you want to be). 

In brief: Luc Dinh Ky is the only place where this guy goes for soup.

Update: Luc Dinh Ky, as excellent as it is, is no longer my favorite spot in Fountain Valley. The new spot coming soon!