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February 19, 2005

Photo by Andrea Walker

Sophie and Eric Banh, from the celebrated Monsoon restaurant in Seattle, will prepare a Vietnamese menu at the James Beard House in New York.

Local chefs preparing feast at NY’s Beard House

By Lee Bedard
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

A select group of New Yorkers is about to get a taste of what Seattleites already know and love: the imaginative cuisine of Monsoon, Eric and Sophie Banh’s Vietnamese bistro on Capitol Hill.

Monsoon will prepare and serve the Feb. 19 Tet Celebration dinner at the James Beard House in New York.

Exactly how they were chosen is still a mystery to chef and proprietor Eric Banh, but he is ecstatic over the opportunity to feed some of the nation’s leading gourmands. The guests will pay between $90 and $115 each to sample Monsoon’s five-course menu, with hors d’oeuvres and wines accompanying each course.

“Will we lose money? Sure. But I hope I will be feeding some important people, because I want them to know about Vietnamese fine dining,” Eric Banh says. He will close Monsoon so that he and sister Sophie, accompanied by valued employee “Auntie” Chin, can cook for the New York dinner. Chin is a specialist in hand rolling dumplings, an art form that is customary in Vietnam but little known to Americans because such intensive labor is prohibitively expensive.

Losing money is a certainty for whoever wins the honor of cooking the Beard Foundation dinners. The Foundation is currently the center of a controversy over whether or not it spends millions each year on its main mission, developing new talent in the fields of cooking and writing about fine cooking. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has brought 14 indictments against a former executive of the Foundation, alleging that since the chosen chefs must provide the food, the Foundation’s funds have been misspent. The executive has resigned and a mass resignation of the board of directors was to have followed, but has been temporarily delayed.

The James Beard Foundation was started by Beard’s friend and chef extraordinaire Julia Child, after Beard’s death. While she brought French cooking to the American masses, Beard preceded her in raising American cooking from its early 20th-century plainness to a recognized cuisine. It was to honor Beard and expand fine cooking of all kinds that Child and others organized the New York-based foundation. It is headquartered in the Greenwich Village townhouse that was Beard’s home. Beard was an Oregon native.

Banh is far too busy with his preparations to worry about Foundation politics, however. He has had generous help from his colleagues in the food community to pay the enormous expenses of shipping some 200 pounds of fresh food and necessary equipment from Seattle to New York.

“I’m shipping everything but the oils,” Banh says.

For their money, the Beard guests will taste three hors d’oeuvres: la lot beef (grilled flank steak wrapped in leaves), crispy Dungeness crab and shrimp-stuffed spring rolls, and grilled Monterey squid stuffed with duck and dried shiitakes.

The three hors d’oeuvres, part of the required menu a chef must offer, are good examples of the fusion cuisine for which Banh has become acclaimed in the West. He came to Seattle to assist sister Sophie with her restaurant, following a stint in a business career in Germany. He got hooked on German wines, which are well represented on Monsoon’s list of 164 wines. Three wines, one a Josef Leitz Rudesheimer Klosterlay Riesling, will accompany the hors d’oeuvres.

The road to the Beard townhouse in New York has taken the Banh family from their roots in Saigon to Canada, where their mother ran a restaurant.

Eric Banh discovered early on that the food he knew at home was not matched anywhere else. His quest now is to show American eaters what they are missing if they know only the more modest Vietnamese cuisine of pho.

Monsoon, housed in a small building on 19th Avenue East (right across the street from the popular Kingfish restaurant, which features southern American specialties), has been open since 1999. It has garnered rave reviews from Seattle media, including The Seattle Times and Seattle magazine. Sunset Magazine, the self-proclaimed arbiter of all things “western,” named it America’s best “neighborhood” restaurant in 2001.

With the expansion of his neighborhood to West 57th Street in New York, where the late James Beard lived during his years of being the leading exponent of fine American cooking, Banh takes another step in a journey that almost ended in despair in 1999.

“I swear to you that I was so desperate in 1999 that I almost returned to Canada,” Banh says. With real estate prices going stratospheric and no great pool of capital, the Banhs thought they might have to abandon the dream of a Seattle restaurant. They had already had some success with the Lemongrass Cafe in Alberta. Sophie had become well established in Seattle upon graduation from North Seattle Community College’s culinary program. She had worked with Roy Yamaguchi at Roy’s in the Westin and at Wolfgang Puck’s Obachine.

When the small Capitol Hill space came available, Eric vowed they would make a go of it.

A year later, food writers and restaurant critics, including Nancy Leson of The Seattle Times, were enthusing over the cognac la-luc cubed filet mignon.

Banh has searched everywhere for the freshest ingredients in an attempt to recreate the freshness he experienced on returning to Vietnam.

Lamb, for example. The Beard diners will taste grilled lamb chops with braised Chinese mustard greens. But the lamb is not the “New Zealand lamb” familiar to discount-warehouse shoppers. Instead, his lamb comes from Anderson Farms of Oregon, just one of the specialty purveyors whose output makes its way to Monsoon.

“Without a lot of help from my colleagues, I could not pull this off,” Banh says.

The full menu for the Banhs’ Feb. 19 James Beard dinner is available at www.jamesbeard.org/events/2005/02/016.shtml.

Lee Bedard can be reached at scpnwan@nwlink.com.

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