Creative Loafing Atlanta

I ask Justin if hot pot specials are being offered tonight. He mentioned them the last time I was in for lunch. Justin nods yes, and tells us the hot pot is available with beef, whole fish or alligator.

There's a momentary pause in conversation. My chums, both conservative eaters, eye me suspiciously. I've brought them to a restaurant that serves alligator?

"Just what is this hot pot?" one of them inquires.

Justin tilts his head in thought for a second, and replies, "It's sort of a do-it-yourself project."

We all crack up, but his answer is applicable for much of the intriguing but wholly accessible food served here. Com explores Vietnamese cuisine from a fresh angle for this city. Buford Highway is lined with cheap pho shops, while Nam introduced us to the fine dining adaptability of Vietnamese fare. Com links the spectrum. Nothing but the hot pot costs over $15 - and you can find plenty to snarf in the $8 range - and the small, rectangular room has a downbeat elegance. Clementine-colored walls, sunny paintings of world metropolises and comfy booths make this a surprisingly suitable destination for date night.

The DIY aspects of the meal don't kick in until entree time, but you have choices to decide upon with practically every dish. Spring rolls, salads, rice and noodle creations all require you to select a type of meat or seafood as an accompaniment. But here's a caveat: In my last couple visits, the choices have been shrinking. Duck is listed as an option, but I'm told no one ordered it (no one, that is, except food critics), so it's no longer available.

And I've been waiting impatiently to chomp on thick, fat-striated Vietnamese bacon offered atop the special fragrant rice, but apparently they've had trouble finding a supplier. Where's a South Asian butcher when you need one?

Ah, well. I'll satiate myself instead by starting with a crisp, colorful rice paper spring roll stuffed with strips of salmon and vegetables. Com's salads, another frisky way to kick-off a meal, give you a glimpse into the kitchen's modus operandi: Layer basic ingredients with garnish upon garnish until you have a motley mosaic of flavors and textures that admirably coalesce.

For your salad, you can pick green papaya, green mango or diced apple to be paired with charcoal grilled chicken, beef or pork. Or, for $1 more, you can have all the fruits in your salad and, with a little prodding, get them to toss the whole array of meats in there as well. It all gets barraged with crispy brown onion shards, a smattering of pulverized peanuts and wisps of herbs. You know how wondrous it is to bite into a burger topped with a truly ripe slice of tomato? Imagine that satisfying push-pull of summery fresh and juicy grilled depth doubled. That's what this salad is all about.

La lot rolls are the most unique items on the menu. The description calls them grape leaves - and they certainly look like something you'd eat in a Greek restaurant - but they're really betel leaves. Stuffed with (you guessed it) your choice of protein, they infuse their contents with an herbal, haunting smokiness. They meld particularly well with salmon and lamb.

Mussels and oysters are grilled in their shells and showered with the kitchen's standard grace notes as appetizers. The treatment seems to bring out the unpleasantly fishy qualities in bivalves: They're the only things I try that I really don't care for.

So let's get down to work. Bun (rice vermicelli) dishes come from the school of wrapping. Next to your plate of bun topped with, say, pork tenderloin, your server will set down a platter of verdant goodies. Pull out a lettuce leaf from the bottom of the pile, grab a cake of noodles and some meat, and blanket them with herbs (a perfumed combination of Thai basil, mint and cilantro) and a julienned daikon radish, carrot and cucumber. Fold the leaf closed and dunk the tip in nuoc cham, the ubiquitous dipping sauce made of nuoc nam (fish sauce), lime and chilies. Pow! Heady, sensory overload to the palate.

The aforementioned hot pot is merely a tabletop grill brought out so you can cook your own meat: a control freak's gastronomic dream. The beef (yes, we skipped the alligator) is marinated in a sweetly pungent concoction and cut up into thin slices. The server heats up the grill, melts a couple pats of butter, throws a few pieces of starter meat on to demonstrate, and then leaves you to it. The butter and sauce caramelizes the edges of the beef, which cooks more quickly than you might expect. Get wrapping.

The beauty of this food is that you can be a pig, eat four of those wraps and not feel the least bit comatose afterward. South Vietnamese over South Beach? That's one diet plan I think I could actually stick to.

bill.addison@creativeloafing.com