Closed Boise restaurant’s egg rolls still in demand — and you can learn how to make them

Cooking instructor Marti Miller asked for a show of hands asking how many of her students had eaten at the old Vietnamese Restaurant at Franklin and Curtis roads.

Nearly every hand at a recent Boise schools community education class went up.

Miller beamed.

Her mother, Nhu Lofstedt, operated the popular restaurant for nearly a quarter-century before she died in 2000. The restaurant was later sold in 2002 to Dat and Hien Vuong and their partner, Kim Li, who ran it until the building caught fire in 2010.

“It makes me feel really good that people appreciate my mom and remember my mom. She’s gone but not forgotten,” Miller said.

The popular eatery, set in a strip mall behind what was then a 7-11 store on the corner, attracted a long stream of patrons who ate Nhu’s egg rolls, spring rolls, soups and stir-fried dishes. It was the first Vietnamese restaurant in town and may have been the first Asian spot that didn’t feature a Chinese menu.

At the evening class, held at Timberline High School, Miller taught a group of about 20 students how to make cha gio — Vietnamese egg rolls. They were the most popular item sold at the restaurant. Customers at eight out of 10 tables ordered cha gio, according to a 1996 Idaho Statesman story.

Unlike Chinese egg rolls, which are wrapped in a skin made from flour and eggs, the Vietnamese version gets wrapped in a paper shell made from rice. That makes them thinner and lighter.

Miller’s recipe combines ground pork, shrimp, jicama, onions, carrots, wood ear mushrooms and bean thread noodles, along with eggs, salt, pepper and sugar.

The dried wood ear mushrooms and bean thread noodles, found at local Asian markets such as the Asia Market on Fairview Avenue or the Orient Market on Emerald Street, get soaked for 10 minutes in hot tap water. They’re combined with the other ingredients and rolled up in the rice paper, which is dipped in water to soften, and then fried in oil.

The rolls are served hot with an easily made dipping sauce. It uses fish sauce, made from fermented anchovies, which scares off many cooks because of its strong fishy smell. However, when combined with other ingredients, it loses the unpleasant aroma and adds a flavorful complexity to the sauce and when used in other dishes.

When she cooks, Miller, who works as a civil engineer for the state of Idaho, doesn’t use precise measurements. She told the students to feel free to improvise.

“What I put here, you can adjust plus or minus. It doesn’t have to be absolute, like baking,” Miller said.

Besides the egg roll and spring roll classes, Miller also taught community education students recently how to make won tons and won ton soup. She plans to repeat those classes and add a couple of new ones in future sessions.

Miller was born in Vietnam and spent the first 10 years of her life there before her mom sent her and her sister and brother to Seattle for schooling as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War heightened.

Her father had been killed a few years earlier, a casualty of the war. Her mother found work in a laundry and met Gunnar Lofstedt, an engineer with the Boise-based Morrison-Knudsen Corp. They married and later left South Vietnam, right before the fall in 1975.

Nhu found a job with Grasmick Produce in Garden City and obtained Asian vegetables then unknown in Idaho. She began selling some of those items from her living room to new Vietnamese immigrants and later opened a small store that led to her opening the restaurant.

Boise resident Connie Spofford said she was glad to learn to make the egg rolls her family had enjoyed for years.

She said Miller provided excellent instruction and she enjoyed hearing about Nhu and her background.

“The instruction was good. It was well organized and it certainly tasted good,” Spofford said.

“It was our favorite restaurant. We always ordered these every time we went. Once in a while we didn’t order anything else,” Spofford said.

Micki Butler of Boise had taken an earlier spring roll class from Miller. She came back for the egg roll class and brought her daughter, Stacy Kral.

“Marti always has the most hands-on instruction and that’s how you learn,” Butler said.

Kral said she also enjoyed that part of the class.

“We actually got to do it ourselves and then sampled the food. There was even enough leftovers to take home,” she said.

This story was originally published June 7, 2016 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Closed Boise restaurant’s egg rolls still in demand — and you can learn how to make them."