I saw Da Lat mostly from underneath a curtain of rain. And not the usual bathwater-mist tropical spray that only serves to decrease the ratio of sweat to water on your body, but big droplets of freezing rain that felt like hail on a motorcycle. For the first two days, it had the decency to rain only after 2pm like a good rainy-season city, but after that, the starting time started creeping forward slowly until it was raining at 9:30am. While I paid good money and risked my life on a scooter to get soaked underneath several actual waterfalls in the area, it wasn’t the plan to ruin all my electronics and irreparably mildew-ify my shoes. So our last two days were spent mostly holing up and listening to thunder.
Before that happened, there was a nem nướng house. Actually, there were several, all on the same block, a phenomenon common to Vietnam, where the same types of food cluster and the restaurants copy each other’s names. But this nem nướng house, Nem Nướng Dũng Lộc, was the smallest of the group, the most crowded, and smelled the best, as it was 30% filled with one guy holding armfuls of nem on sticks and rotating the ones already on the grill. I don’t normally like nem nướng that much, probably because it’s the flagship dish at the only Vietnamese restaurant all the white people know about in my hometown, but the smell of grilling pork won me over. Also, the spread was impressive: nem, fried corn, daikon, carrots, cucumbers, pickled onions, and a heaping – and, we found, refillable – platter of fresh green mountain-grown leaves and chives. (The Mekong Delta had lots of vegetables too, but I found that they tended to be bitter, probably because they were grown near/in the floating garbage dumps known as the distributaries of the Mekong River. They may be the livelihood of a region, and they may be beautiful and muddy and picturesque, but I watched way too many people throw their household trash in them, pee in them, dump gasoline into them, and otherwise defile them to want to think too hard of eating out of it too.) Anyway, Da Lat’s sweet, fresh vegetables were a welcome change, and the ratio of vegetables to grilled meat was sufficiently high as to feel like I was eating a healthy salad (dipped in thick peanutty liver sauce, of course).
Another restaurant, whose sign lauded wonton noodle soup, whose tables were filled with wonton noodle soup, and whose name suggested you’d better at the least get noodles, had a menu about 6 pages long, but, obediently, I got the wonton noodle soup. It was a compact bowl covered with tough pork slices like papier-mache, but opened up to reveal excellent soft pork wontons and clearly homemade noodles. Just while I was sitting there – and I was eating fast that day so my vegetarian companion could eat soon too – the staff brought about 20 drawerfuls (yes, drawers – like in a chest of drawers) of fresh noodles in little rolls down from the third floor to keep up with demand.
A breakfast nook whose defining feature was two ladies with takoyako-like pans, squatting outside and deftly pressing two quail eggs together in pots to make mochi-sized cakes, served a plate of five such cakes that were unremarkable until dipped in the sweet, pork-ball-infused broth. When my companion notified the water he was a vegetarian, the waiter disappeared for about 2 seconds into the back with the broth, and returned with broth sans pork balls. Magically vegetarian!
The young waiter at one snail restaurant, which (like all good snail restaurants) had tanks full of the shellfish on offer at the front of their restaurant being sprayed with water periodically, handed us, straightfacedly, an English menu, a single sheet that consisted of beef, chicken, and seafood fried rice. I looked at him like he was crazy, which he was. “What about the snails?” I asked him, gesturing at the entire side wall of the restaurant. He looked at me blankly and pointed at the fried rice on the menu again. I finally had to ask for the Vietnamese menu, which listed all the snails by name with four options of preparation of each and was about 10 pages long. I wonder if tourists walk in there and actually think that fried rice is all the restaurant serves, and the snails are all for decoration. (The food was OK, but they overcook their large snails to rubber.)
One night was so wet that it was completely impossible to go out, so we made a dinner of yellow kiwi, avocado, jackfruit, orange, and the stuffed vacuum-packed squid I got at the Hakodate airport. The squid was underwhelming (as vacuum-packed squid should be) but Da Lat fruit, like Da Lat vegetables, is spectacular. Everything grows round and fat and juicy. Even the avocado, which I wasn’t expecting much out of because huge avocados tend to be watery, was almost a meat dish by itself. The hotel owner, watching this strange dinner theater, had no comments about the airport squid, but was scandalized by us daring to put salt on avocado (instead of blending it up with sugar and condensed milk to make a smoothie). He declined a sample.
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