Banh Xeo

Cincinnati has pockets of international flavor, if you know where to look. Squint your eyes downtown around lunch, and with just the right cultural array of passers-by, you can imagine, briefly, you are in a major metropolitan area.

Not far from my house is a Vietnamese joint called 'Song Long', located in one of the more exciting neighborhoods in town, Roselawn - known for the local game of Three Car Monte. The owners are a Vietnamese family with a great recipe book that recently connected with nationally-acclaimed chef Jean-Robert de Cavel to create 'Pho Paris', a much more upscale situation.

I haven't eaten at the new place. But Song Long has definite credibility. The ambiance includes fish tanks, embroidered pictures, and a faint soundtrack of high-pitched trilling. In the middle of a slow afternoon it's easy to imagine a nearby table full of hard-bitten British journalists making acidic comparisons between the Americans and colonials, or a GI saying a tearful goodbye to his girl.

Of course, there are always safe, corporate alternatives.

Speaking of which, I hope to have a post up soon about the crop of blogs that recently began through the local publishing conglomerate.

It has that faint whiff of managerial approval, as if it sat in some vice president's inbox for several weeks before the meeting was called, some ground rules were laid out, and approvals were given. But I don't want to dismiss it out of hand, since I'm sure the blogging impulse afflicts those "on the inside" of big journalism. And I like this picture.