*FOOD FEELS POST*
This is Bun rieu. It's a Vietnamese rice vermicelli noodle soup with tomato broth and topped with crab meat. Sometimes the place you're at will sneak in some tasty crab cakes with it ;)
For many people, it's a delicious bowl of noodles. For me, it's a soul dish. It's soul food.
This dish saw me through my loneliest and worst days at college. Acting and musical theatre students typically spend 10 hours on campus (Mon-Fri) sometimes 12 or more if we need to stay back and rehearse a dance routine, song project or scenes. Sometimes we workout till late. (ArtsEd students and grads, you guys are heroes)
Tensions would flare, egos would clash and exhaustion was never far. At the end of a long week , we would head back to rest, sometimes work and prepare for the next week ahead.
Being far from home for long periods is never easy and rainy British winters were shit. So I would end up at this cozy little Vietnamese restaurant usually alone & exhausted on a Friday night or weekend.
I would almost always order that same broth of noodles. The sip of broth would warm my belly. Then the slurping of noodles reminded me of my mother and her love of laksa. Also the 🦀 cakes were just God damn delicious.
After finishing the bowl to the last drop, I would find the vigour and strength to take on the world again, until next week ;)
Years later, I find myself in Singapore looking down at another bowl of bun rieu. For some reason, this dish doesn't exist in Malaysian Vietnamese restaurants so my heart popped when I saw it on the menu.
It was like seeing an old love, up close. She doesn't recognize you, but you see her clearly as a plethora of emotions you can't place whirl inside of you... That and she has more tomatoes in her broth..
One slurp and I felt like the grouchy food critic from Ratatouille eating his soul dish.
I saw myself back in my uni days... At a table with a single bowl. Alone, content, healing.
I forget how much we take food for granted. It's so easy to indulge, to mass order and waste. Sometimes we forget that all we need is just a normal bowl of something.
So I'm curious
What's your soul dish?
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