When it was time, I hauled my bike out of Bart's van and crossed the river into Brighton-a kind of small Irish panhandle that sticks way out to the west of Boston proper- then followed back streets and sidewalks due east until I was in Allston, part of the same panhandle, but scruffier and more complicated. For example, here lived many of the Asian persuasion. If you judged from restaurants alone, you'd conclude that the Chinese dominated, that the Thais were catching up fast and that the Vietnamese ran a distant third. But I don't think that's true at all. The Vietnamese are just more discriminating when it comes to starting restaurants. The Chinese and the Thais, and for that matter the Greeks, print up menus automatically as soon as they get into the city limits; it's like a brainstem function. But the Vietnamese tend to be hard-luck cases to begin with, and they have a fastidious, catlike attitude about their chow. Maybe they got it from the French. To them, Chinese is gooey and greasy while Thai is monotonous-all that lemon grass and coconut milk. The Vietnamese cook for keeps.

Hoa's location was awful. In Boston, where landlords are as likely to carry gasoline cans as paint cans, all other buildings like this had long ago been reduced to smoking holes. It was a solo Italianate monster that rose like a tombstone beside the Mass Pike, facing Harvard Street. Parking was no problem, though there was some question as to whether your car would still be there when you got out. The inside was bare and bright as a gymnasium, containing a dozen mismatched tables with orange oilcloth thumbtacked onto them. The decor was beer signs, depressing photographs of old Saigon and framed restaurant reviews from various newspapers, favoring phrases like "this Pearl is a diamond in the rough" and "surprising discovery by the Pike" and "worth the trip out of your way."