Vietnamese Street Food: Cơm Bình Dân - Typical Rice and Side Dishes

When it comes to Vietnamese street food, there’s a meal called cơm bình dân, which means commoners rice and curry, and it’s about as basic and filling as you can get. More details coming soon.
There are all sorts of different delicious street foods to eat when you’re in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), from snacks to sweets to piping hot bowls of steaming noodles. And as much as I love to slurp down bowls of hot noodles, I’m actually really a rice man, and there’s nothing I normally enjoy eating more than dishes along with rice. Luckily, in Saigon, there’s a Vietnamese street food called cơm bình dân (com binh dan), which actually translates to commoner’s rice and side dishes, and you’ll find it all over the city, especially are street food stalls, and especially during lunch.
Just link in Thailand, Malaysia, or parts of India, one of the main restaurant types is one that serves a spread of pre-made curries, which sit out and wait for customers. When a customer arrived, he / she, get’s a plate of rice, and typically the food is served directly over the rice, a selection of different dishes that look good. Alternatively, if you’re looking to order bigger sized portions, you can normally get side dishes, with a separate plate of rice, and since I was quite hungry this day, that’s what I decided to get. On this day that we made this video, we were actually just walking around the neighborhood streets of Saigon, not too far from our hotel, and we were hungry. I had eaten plenty of bowls of noodles, and I was in desperate need of a rice meal, so that’s why we stopped here.
There were about 20 different dishes available at this cơm bình dân restaurant, many of them the major typical dishes that you’ll find at this sort of Vietnamese street food stall throughout the city. There were some fried fish, some curried fish dishes, quite a few stir fried items, and some soups as well. I really enjoyed the beef when I was in Vietnam, so the first dish I chose was a sauteed beef dish, thin sliced of beef, fried with bell peppers and onions. It was quite good, the beef was tender and salty and it went well with the rice. The next dish Ying and I chose was a sauteed squid dish, the squid was fired with tomatoes and cucumbers. It was quite plain, yet it was good, mostly because of the fresh and soft squid. Ying also got an order of a piece of fish, which tasted to me like some kind of tuna, as it was firm and meaty. It was kind of plain, but perhaps cooked in a little bit of soy sauce and sugar to make it slightly sweetened.
By far, the dish of the meal for me was a piece of tofu, which looked like it may have been deep fried, which was stuffed with minced pork and then doused in a thick tomato sauce. It was kind of like meatballs and spaghetti, but with the extra bonus of tofu wrapped around the pork meatball. This was easily my favorite dish of the meal, and it went so well with my plate of rice, and the other dishes of this very normal cơm bình dân meal.
Cơm bình dân is the most basic of all Vietnamese street food meals, it’s very popular especially with those looking for a big filling meal, and it’s especially known as a workmans, or working class meal. When I was in Saigon, I enjoyed many meals of com binh dan, and each place served a similar variety of dishes just like this.
You can go to thousands of street food restaurants serving com binh dan throughout Saigon, but this restaurant is right off Vuon Chuoi on So 2, in Ho Chi Minh City.
Music in this video is from audionetwork.com
Video produced by Mark Wiens and Ying Wiens: &
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