The reputation of Golden Deli, the San Gabriel Valley's most famous house of Vietnamese pho and banh hoi, is such that a trip there feels like an important cultural undertaking. If you come at dinnertime, be prepared to stand around in the parking lot for 20 minutes or more. Once you make it inside, you'll understand why it's worth the wait. Just $5.25 gets you a big steaming bowl of deliciously seasoned broth with noodles and thin, cooked beef that's somehow far better than the lesser, more expensive versions served at Vietnamese restaurants around town. Purists will opt for the soups with beef tendon and tripe, but there's no shame in leaving out the entrails' connective tissues. If it's too hot for soup, go for one of the banh hoi dishes: cold vermicelli noodles topped with chives and your choice of beef, pork or egg rolls. When you leave you aren't just full and happy, you feel like you've completed an exercise in self-improvement.

Of all the well-documented marvels of the San Gabriel Valley, perhaps none has inspired as much devotion as the Vietnamese noodle shop Golden Deli, a sticky-table joint with an unmistakable scent: sweet, sharply garlicky, with faint overtones of fish sauce, roasted coffee and burnt spice. Why is everybody waiting outside in the mini-mall when there are identical restaurants within a few minutes' drive? Because Golden Deli has the best cha gio - fried Vietnamese "egg rolls" - in the observable universe, and its fans will do anything for a crack at the burnished, bubbly deep-fried cylinders.

This no-nonsense room serves egg rolls that spell bliss, especially the phan cha gio: perfectly crisp rolls that you wrap in lettuce like a delicious gift and garnish with fresh mint and basil. The pork sandwich with cilantro and hot green peppers makes a killer lunch.

There is a line outside Golden Deli most of the time, a clutch of stragglers willing to brave the hot midday sun...the exemplary pho, the Saigon-style hu tieu noodles, or especially the crusty golden spring rolls, four inches long and as thick as a fat man's thumb, crudely rolled in a manner suggesting rustic abundance rather than clumsiness, and perfectly, profoundly crisp. Golden Deli has a long and complicated menu of delicious and ultra specialized noodle combinations, but it is difficult to contemplate a meal without an order of these spring rolls.