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Vietnamese Street Foods in Easter Basket Colors

Want to fill your picnic basket with maximum color and flavor? Try the Song Que Deli. Choose from a 30-foot rainbow of freshly wrapped fruit, sweets and hard-to-describe meals in colors seldom seen outside an Easter basket. So just what is that pretty yellow, orange and white dish? Or the green-wrapped block? The white puffy sandwich that looks like cauliflower? If you said yellow bean, shrimp and rice cake or sticky rice and shrimp wrapped in banana leaf, or puffy dough with pork and a quail egg then you are indeed Vietnamese street food smart.

This Virginia bakery offers an array of colorful choices.

Owner Ly Lai helps customers pick the best.

Than Tran encourages visitors to taste Vietnamese shrimp.

Visitors pause to consider choices in this small but bright shop.

We stumbled onto Song Que while scouting for the upcoming Great Sub Chase. Listener Eric Becker said we really should go to the Eden Center and try a Vietnamese sub sandwich. Sub number #8 is the most popular for good reasons. Tasty bits of pork covered with crunchy onions, pickled radish and carrots, splashed with cilantro, spiced with a long strip of jalapeno pepper and wrapped in a crisp French bread roll for only $2.50. Let them know if you prefer not-so-spicy without the jalapeno peppers. Chase the sub with one of many cold bubble drinks with little "bubbles" of tapioca that require a large straw. The coffee bubble drink was especially good. They also make a fresh-squeezed sugar cane drink with a dash of orange that is not quite as sweet as it sounds and a nice change from the everyday iced tea or lemonade.

Owner Ly Lai was most helpful in explaining the many dishes to the WAMU "westerners," but the place often gets jammed and leaves little room or time for chit-chat at the counter or around the three tables. We need a road map for this street food, the kind typically cooked fresh by street vendors in Viet Nam.

Ly Lai's mother, Than Tran, came out of the kitchen just long enough to insist that we try the fried sweet potato and shrimp. Mothers sure know best. She had cooked more formal food at the family run and highly praised Four Sisters Vietnamese Restaurant that is just three doors away before joining daughter Ly Lai (one of the four sisters) when she opened Song Que two years ago.

We passed out some Crummy points mostly because of the location in a shopping center, one that remains vibrant despite some rough edges and closed stores. And just going through the wild intersection at Seven Corners has to cost at least one Crummy point. Small price to pay for a bubble drink and a tasty rainbow lunch.

(Donovan Kelly, our Crummy But Good restaurant critic, will be discussing how a perfectly good science writer turned crummy at the Rust Library, Leesburg, VA at 2:00 on May 17. He will also be signing copies of his book "Quest for the Holy Grill: 50 Crummy But Good Restaurants within Rambling Range of Washington, DC."