Kim Fay, who lived in Vietnam for several years and literally wrote the book on Southeast Asia – To Asia With Love: A Connoisseurs Guide to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam – tipped me off to this strip-mall Vietnamese spot on Little Saigon’s eastern fringe. In case you didn’t know, Little Saigon is Orange County’s quarter-million-person-strong Vietnamese enclave, which started in Garden Grove and now unofficially involves Westminster to the north and west, Fountain Valley to the south, and Santa Ana to the east.

Pho Tau Bay L.T.T. specializes in bánh cuốn, delicate steamed rice paper cakes that are folded around fillings and topped with a variety of ingredients. This is a branch of the Ho Chi Minh City restaurant of the same name, located at 433 Ly Thai To (L.T.T.). The grandmother runs the Saigon original, so when the daughter and granddaughters opened the Little Saigon offshoot in 1997, they already had a built-in customer-base of homesick immigrants. Framed photos of the Saigon original line the wall, with rows of motorbikes parked outside and Grandma preparing bánh cuốn.

I knew I must order menu item #4, since it utilized every possible ingredient. Since a small order was only $5.75 and a large order was only a dollar more, I ordered a large #4 ($6.75), bánh cuốn filled with ground pork and black tree ear mushrooms, topped with crispy fried shallots and pork floss, fluffy shredded pork. The plate was rimmed with two varieties of supple Vietnamese mortadella. The meal came with a little plate of crunchy bean sprout salad.

Alice, one of the granddaughters, said what separates Pho Tau Bay L.T.T. from the other bánh cuốn spots in Little Saigon is that they make all their steamed rice pancakes to order. They don’t offer the egg yolk-filled variety, like in Hanoi, but it was still a great spot. There was a long list of pho dishes on the menu, but when I return, I can’t imagine ordering anything but bánh cuốn.