The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters · American Public Media

810: Đặc Biệt with Nini Nguyen and The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen with Yevhen Klopotenko

·50 min·4 clips

Nini Nguyen's solo trip to Vietnam at 28 made her Vietnamese American life suddenly make sense.

Francis Lam opens by saying the show is returning to an episode from last year. He frames it as a conversation with chefs whose food carries real stories about what it means to them. The conversation stays with the details. It settles on a Vietnamese sauce built from five ingredients: garlic, chili, sugar, the acid from lime or vinegar, and fish sauce. The real difference comes from the ratios. For banh cuon, the sauce stays lighter and more subtle. For a vermicelli bowl with grilled meats, it turns louder so it can stand up to the noodles, bean sprouts, and cucumbers. The guest says the sauce should almost hug the bowl. It is the kind of detail that makes a pantry staple feel like family practice. The sauce also shows up as something made in large quantity, since a grandma makes gallons of it and it lasts forever. Francis Lam then turns to rice paper. He notes how much attention it is getting online, but the conversation stays practical. The host asks about the dry sheets, their thin round shape, and the quick dip in water that turns them into summer rolls. Those rolls can hold vegetables, noodles, shrimp, or grilled meat, and the wrapper becomes a chewy skin around the filling. The conversation then shifts again. A grilled rice paper snack gets a close look, made without soaking first and topped after an egg is cracked onto it. It is described as a late-night snack or after-school snack sold by vendors outside, cooked on a charcoal grill. The show keeps coming back to the way a single ingredient changes when the ratio changes, or when heat and texture change with it. That pattern lets technique, memory, and appetite sit in the same sentence without strain. By the end, the episode feels like a guided walk through food that looks ordinary at first glance and is full of inherited method once the questions start.

As heard by us

Fish sauce ratios and rice paper give the episode its most vivid, grounded moments.

The episode stays close to chefs whose food is tied to personal meaning, and that focus gives it a practical, unshowy feel. Its most grounded passage is the Vietnamese cooking detail: a five-ingredient sauce of garlic, chili, sugar, acid from lime or vinegar, and fish sauce,…

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Why you'd press play

You get fish sauce ratios, rice paper, and a grandmother who makes gallons to keep in the fridge.

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