Last week after Jeanette Tran-Dean and David Hollinger told me about their two-great-tastes-taste-great-together moment in the creation of their cassava quesadilla with corn ice cream, I went out in search of the ancestors of the signature dish of their Guatemalan-Vietnamese pop-up Giống Giống.
I figured with the abundance of Filipino sweets in stock at Seafood City, that would be the place, but no dice. But I did find a solitary plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray with three thick slices of banh khoai mi nuong all by itself on a shelf at Tai Nam Food Market, 4925 N. Broadway in Uptown. They are dense, chewy, almost fudgy in texture, and also not very sweet.
