Saigon, Take Three

My third time in Saigon was lighter on the surprises, but was still satisfying, providing me with all the delicious grilled shellfish I remembered, consistently good random street food, and complete chaos in every other sense.

By memory I sought out Ốc Đào, down its maze of flooded alleys, and introduced my companion to grilled blood cockles with garlic, which were less bloody than some versions but retained their slick oystery tang. Their mussels were cooked only lightly so that they, too, felt more like oysters in the mouth than like mussels, but somehow my companion, who thinks the texture of oysters is disgusting, magically liked both. We both took a leap to new territory with some big, pointy, triangular snails – somewhere between conch and cockle – grilled in sweet fish sauce. The guys at the next table had all coincidentally gone to college in the U.S. and helped us pass the time after dinner, when it poured so hard it flooded the entrance to the restaurant to the depth of about a foot, and we all had to wait for the water level to go down before we could leave

After an arduous temple tour of District 1, there was an abandoned-looking cart with ‘Bánh Canh Cá Lóc’ splashed across the front. As I expressed my disappointment about the apparent abandonment, the old woman who was squatting on the sidewalk a couple doors down selling flowers and magazines yelled a few words, and a young woman appeared and ‘opened’ the cart for business so we could eat snakehead fish udon noodle soup adorned with a bunch of tiny quail eggs.

At night, around the circle surrounding Turtle Lake, vendors were dotted, all equidistant from one another, selling bánh tráng nướng, often translated as Vietnamese pizza, but more closely resembling a quesadilla. One spread a sheet of dry rice paper with an egg mixture, grilled it, coated it with a sauce made of green onions and dried shrimp, and sold it to me for 10,000 dong, handing it over folded in half and wrapped in old newspaper. It was so hot I had to hot-potato it between my hands until I had climbed all the way up to the top of the fountain.

Little crispy fish cake and shrimp bánh khọt from a Vũng Tàu style restaurant were dwarved by the enormous leaves of lettuce they came with, and overpowered by the sprigs of fresh tarragon that were so peppery I sneezed fish sauce all over the table – twice.

On the way to the Fine Arts Museum, there was a bowl of mì quảng that was filled largely – surprise! – with cartilaginous jellyfish limbs? Tentacles?.. and tiny river shrimp that tasted like mackerel.

Just in the next alley from our Airbnb was Liên Hương, one of those vegan medicinal restaurants that lists how each dish will benefit various bodily issues and diseases (sample menu item: “green bananas, oyster mushrooms, fried tofu cooked with lemongrass, curry powder, a good deal of perilla. Quite a balanced dish, little known, tasty, full, beneficial to both the diabetic and the cardiovascular”). We ordered that and a coconut palm bud braised in a clay pot, both of which tasted nothing like anything we’d had before to compare it to. Banana soup? It wasn’t thick. Oyster mushrooms? They weren’t grilled or meaty. And the coconut palm bud had the look of a rock but the texture of slow-and-long-simmered jackfruit (or even pork). To finish it off, we had “pineapple leaf pasta, red bean, and coconut milk juice”, which unlike everywhere else in Vietnam, did not come over-sugared. We both felt energetic and cleansed after this meal, and spent no more total than the regular sit-down restaurant window of 150,000-200,000 dong (US$7-9). I would have been perfectly happy eating at this restaurant every night we were there, but it so happens that 25 varieties of sea snails exist seemingly only in the place I was in for one week, so…