The Mild Fish Sauce, at Broken Rice

Dinner was the Broken Rice plate at Broken Rice, a yellow trailer parked off 82nd Avenue in Portland, Oregon — grilled pork over rice, which is exactly what the name promises once you know what it's translating. Com tam is Vietnamese for "broken rice," the broken grains of rice left over from milling that turned into a whole category of street food, and the cart's own sign carries both names side by side: BROKEN RICE in blue block letters across the top, COM TAM CO TRINH in red script below the window.

Milder than expected, in a good way

The fish sauce is the detail worth flagging. Vietnamese fish sauce can hit hard — sharp, funky, more than some palates want on a first try — and this one doesn't. It's mild, genuinely mild, and still does the job a good fish sauce is supposed to do for a plate of grilled pork and rice. That's the kind of detail that's easy to get wrong in either direction, and this cart gets it right.

Is Broken Rice worth the drive?

Broken Rice is part of a small cart pod off 82nd Avenue — the photo menu board taped inside the service window runs through the options, rice plates and Vietnamese iced drinks, kumquat tea and milk coffee among them — and there's indoor seating nearby for the days it's actually raining, which in Portland is most of them. The honest caveat: 82nd Avenue has a rough-around-the-edges reputation, and this stretch of it doesn't do much to argue the point. But for broken rice this good and this authentic, it's worth the trip anyway.