Cajun Pressure Cooker Recipe

The Orient perfects an

The restaurant business has always taken a cue from Fats Waller : "Find out what they like and how they like it, and let 'em have it just that way." Even the famed Italian Gardens, at 11th Street and Baltimore, included fruit Jell-O and ham-and-Swiss sandwiches on its dinner menu in the 1970s.

Ten years ago, the National Restaurant Association reported that three cuisines once identified as "ethnic" — Italian, Mexican and Cantonese Chinese — had been so fully absorbed into the American palate that they couldn't be considered foreign foods anymore. Reaching that point took more than a century.

The dishes of Vietnam , on the other hand, are a more recent import. I've loved the pho bowls, the bun dishes and the hu tiu noodle soups that I've tasted over the past two decades. But I never saw a Vietnamese restaurant until nearly a decade after the Vietnam War. The oldest reference I found to Vietnamese cuisine being served in America is a Craig Claiborne restaurant review printed in The New York Times on August 15, 1961. Claiborne calls Viet Nam, a little café on Amsterdam Avenue, "a poorly air-conditioned, unpretentious place with an interesting cuisine, moderately priced." He goes on: "It is reputedly the only Vietnamese restaurant in America."

Fifty years later, it's nearly impossible to find a moderately large urban area without a Vietnamese restaurant, and that includes the Kansas hamlet of Lawrence , where Nancy Nguyen has been serving the dishes of her homeland for 15 years at the Orient, a storefront restaurant at 1008 Massachusetts. Until two years ago, her place was next door, at 1004 Massachusetts, but she turned that location over to her son, Ted, so he could open a combination saloon and seafood restaurant called Angler's.

The Orient's current incarnation is a long, narrow space with an unremarkable décor. There's a happy, fat Buddha near the entrance — Nguyen's husband of 51 years, Tho, lights sticks of incense near the statue every morning — and the tables are made of simple blond wood. The dominant piece of art, if you can call it that, is a big illuminated sign perched just above the Buddha's head, advertising Oh Boy Chicken, Nancy Nguyen's latest venture. And not just any chicken: It's all-American fried chicken.

Nguyen, who loves deep-fried bird (it's called ga xao in Vietnam, she says), dusts marinated chicken pieces in rice flour before putting them in a pressure cooker with hot fat. The result: very moist meat, with a crispy, feathery light crust. And because the flour is rice, the dish is gluten-free.

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