Review: Destination 4 (Southern Vietnam)

Vietnam is a well-established favorite of mine, food-wise, so I had high expectations. There was less blindly blundering into new taste experiences, and more of me marching around looking for some obscure street stand I last saw four years ago (usually unsuccessfully, though I did find the same two ladies churning out papaya salad in Lê Văn Tám Park!). There was also more of me complaining that the price of street smoothies has nearly doubled (from $.50 to $1) and about the mysterious disappearance of mangosteen, but overall I reacquainted myself with the things I most love about Vietnamese food: nothing is ever served unadorned by at least 8 different kinds of vegetables, or without the requisite bowl of fish sauce.

New dishes/ingredients tried that I’d never tried before:

 
Hearts of palm:
OK, I’ve probably had these before in salad, but these were braised like jackfruit when it’s trying to be fake meat, and looked like they were going to chew like shoe leather, but fell apart in the mouth pleasingly

Tonkin jasmine buds:
These were stir-fried simply with just a little bit of garlic at the extremely upscale Victoria Hotel in Châu Đốc. The dining room was full of raucous Australian seniors on a tour eating a fixed-menu meal, so we ate on the balcony overlooking the river and got covered in mosquitos as I savored these crisp buds, which tasted just like tea.

Green banana soup:
This was full of tofu and perilla leaves in addition to the bananas.

Conch:
It’s possible that an elderly Vietnamese gentleman fed me conch off a toothpick once at Cafe Artist in Garden Grove CA. However, if that was a different kind of snail, then this was my first time eating conch, which is a slender, coiled mollusk so sizable that it was served cut into four pieces inside its shell, after being drenched in fish sauce and grilled. After I ate the pieces, I drank the fish saucy juice!

Vietnamese olives
These sat in almost every market in the section with the fruit, looking like velour-covered pebbles. I had no idea what they were until Châu Đốc, where they were also displayed peeled and marinated. Oddly, the marinade was sugary.

Dried persimmon
Set in stacks in the Đà Lạt market, the kind we sampled, the one in the open that flies were landing on, was sweet and had a great bite to it. The one we bought, the shrink-wrapped one protected from the elements, tasted like bark when we opened it at home later.

Salted duck egg cakes
Like a sponge cake filled with cold, rich egg yolk. The version in Vũng Tàu tasted like cornbread. The version in Saigon randomly had some soft cheese under the yolk.

Stingray hot pot
I did my research about local specialties and walked into this restaurant asking for this dish in well-accented Vietnamese, which (naturally) made the waiter think I was at least halfway fluent. This was unfortunate, as the combination of my bad listening skills and his thick Southern accent made me unable to understand phrases as simple as ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘How long have you been here?’ Bemused, he left us alone after we tried hard to communicate, but not before instructing us to give the rays time to sit in the bubbling tom-yum-esque broth. Stingray is something I have had once before barbecued at a high-end restaurant in Denver, and I didn’t like it. Here, it was the same dark, meaty, white-fleshed fish, but went much better with the tangy soup and accompanying (of course) fish sauce to dip it in. The broth also contained okra, bamboo, the usual millions of leaves, taro stems, and banana blossoms.

Best city to get seafood:

Sorry, Saigon, but: Vũng Tàu. The aforementioned stingray hotpot, the fact that we were able to buy three fresh crabs off the street for $10 (and that was probably the tourist price), the bánh khọt with perfect firm shrimp dominating the rice cake, the unlisted grilled fish place we found on a deserted corner after driving around in circles looking for a pre-researched grilled fish place, where the owner told us he’d been open for only ten days.

Meal that was delicious and maddening in equal parts:

Lá Dong Riềng Restaurant offered turmeric grilled sturgeon for nearly $10, and I can’t recall ever having had sturgeon, so I thought I’d try it. What came out was a half-palm sized – total – four slices of sturgeon, brilliantly yellow and blackened crunchy with garlic. It was perhaps the most immediately gratifying thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, tasting like a perfect mix of chả cá Lã Vọng and my mom’s potato latkes. Five bites and it was over, leaving me raging for more but not wanting to blow $100 on sturgeon. I still kind of wish I had.

Breath of fresh air:

The vegetable pizza at the above-mentioned Victoria Hotel. This accompanied the stir fried Tonkin jasmine buds, and was in fact the reason we were there, having seen a promotional sign from the street promising a whole medium-sized pizza with eggplant, zucchini, carrots, real mozzarella, and all sorts of rare-for-Vietnam toppings for ‘just’ $4. The first menu they offered mentioned nothing about the promotion, and we felt almost bad about asking, given that we’d just been ‘monsieur’ and ‘madame’d to a white-tableclothed, scallop-napkinned table and served starter bread with pumpkin butter, but we decided to soften the blow by also ordering the jasmine buds and some wincingly expensive fruit juice. By the way, the pizza was big enough to feed both of us for dinner AND breakfast the next day.

Weirdest misunderstanding of vegetarianism:

The man in Đà Lạt who, when informed that my companion was a vegetarian, quickly swept the bowl of broth away, removed the two ground pork balls, and replaced it. Normally, the word ‘chay’ – a close translation of ‘vegan’ – is understood at least and revered at most.

Weirdest misunderstanding, period

In Hà Tiên, I ordered salty lemonade (chanh muối) from a couple ladies with a cooler sitting in front of their house. What I received was a small plastic baggie – maybe the size of two of my thumbs – filled with sweet vanilla yogurt (yaourt). Have any two sets of words sounded less alike?

Worst place to eat delicious, fresh, cheap, street crab

In your hotel room. Because even if the proprietess hands you a pestle to crack the carapaces and legs, and forks to dig the meat out, and plates for all this mess to land on, your hotel room will still smell like crab for the rest of your trip, even if you open the windows during a big lightning storm. However, this is your only choice should you choose to indulge in the pleasures of theVũng Tàu fish market, and you should, for this is where we saw the freshest seafood on offer in all of Vietnam. Still-wriggling multicolored shrimp tried to escape out of colanders filled with water as their vendor constantly recaptured them and threw them back in, at least 8 different varieties of crab were stacked with claws and bodies bound, snails bubbled in vats – not bubbled from being boiled, bubbled from breathing – and red snapper as big as my thigh lay piled with bright eyes on ice.

—

I may have enjoyed Vietnam, culinarily speaking, a tiny bit more when I ate meat more frequently and enthusiastically, but this trip allowed me to sample its vegan side, and I still believe that Vietnam would be a great country in which to be vegan. Aside from the beginning-and-middle lunar month days where lots of restaurants turn vegan, the dedicated vegan restaurants have multiple-page-long menus filled with 10 ways to cook eggplant, 25 salads, 50 ways to cook jackfruit, 100 ways to cook tofu, and, of course, perfect fake-meat replicas of all the meat dishes at surrounding restaurants. This makes American mainstays like Veggie Grill look like they’re just not trying.

Da Lat, Aside from Rain

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.

Urban/Rural Expectations

As we hung over the railing of the bridge crossing the Bassac River, taking pictures of houses on stilts, temples on stilts, all kinds of boats tangled in the clumps of riverweeds that floated along with the current, and, of course, groups of men in boats taking pictures of us as we took pictures of them, a conical-hatted lady wandered past with a stick over her shoulder. In the basket on one side of the stick was a handful of baguettes; in the basket on the other side was a heaping pile of fermented shrimp sauce, spotted with little orange tails. This was so picturesque that neither of us reacted until she was the equivalent of half a block away. “Wait,” I said. “I actually really want that.” We chased her down, and she was all smiles, squatting right at the edge of traffic, throwing everything in her arsenal onto the sandwich: the paste, some pork belly and skins that came out of nowhere, the omnipresent pickled carrot and daikon, way more chilies than we needed. I ate it slowly for the next three hours, wondering how jellylike fermented shrimp could possibly taste cleaner and fresher than the snakehead fish I’d been eating ostensibly freshly pulled from the Mekong.

Rural Vietnam reverses my expectations about food and cities and rural areas: the provincial capitals and population centers serve up lackluster leftovers that taste like they were made from ingredients no one wanted at the local market. Overcooked, filmy-eyed mackerel, vegan Buddhist soup, spiced with a spoonful of MSG right in front of me, razor clams tasting vaguely of mold – and overall it’s all served with a scowl. But as soon as we get outside the city center and into the villages, ladies crouch by baskets of fish bright eyed and sometimes still gasping, old shacks vibrate with the aroma of freshly-baked bread and stuff their baguettes with head cheese, pork belly, and thick, chunky pate, tiny shops advertise fresh durian crepes, the mangoes are plentiful and cheap, and everyone’s all smiles and no English, ready to help anyway. If they’re drinking beer at 11am, as was a family of four whose house was separated from the river only by a handful of wooden beams and was only accessible by a bridge made of logs, they will thrust their hand out the door with a cold beer in it and demand that you take it. If you’re on the beach with them a few miles from the Cambodian border and they’re eating pork loaf, and sesame cake on a tarp while singing karaoke on a portable machine, you’d better get ready to eat pork loaf, and sesame cake too. And if you tell them you’re a vegetarian, they’ll have a nice green orange and a bunch of rambutan ready for you!

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…

Authenticity

If you run an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, authenticity is gold. Foodies strive for it as an ideal placed somewhere beyond ambrosia or the fountain of youth.

You see this all the time in restaurant reviews:

“I’m from [country], so I know [country-ese food], and this place [does/doesn’t] measure up.”

“I took a trip to [country] last year and this place’s [specific regional dish] is [exactly/nothing] like what I had in [specific region].”

“This place is the best [country-ese food] in town, aside from my grandmother’s cooking, of course!”

It also crops up in how people automatically discount Chinese restaurants full of white people. (I’m not judging; even as a white person, I do this.) Also in the tendency to disparagingly remark that one’s sushi or luleh kabob or panang curry or whatever is being made/assembled by Mexicans. (I AM judging this. I think it’s racist. Don’t extend your judgment of the authenticity of food to a judgment of the authenticity of a person.)

Why are we so obsessed with authenticity, even sometimes over flavor?

I started considering this question way back in 2012, when I had mì quảng in Huế, Vietnam, for the first time. This was not the first time I’d had mì quảng; I was introduced to it in Orange County. So for me, I found myself in the odd position of comparing my Vietnamese (Huế-ian) mì quảng served right off a local family’s back porch, to the ‘ideal’ of Ngự Bình Restaurant’s mi quang. Obviously, the mì quảng from the source – Huế – was more authentic, and should have served as the anchor of reference.

Here’s the thing, though, and this is where cognitive dissonance started creeping in – I didn’t like the Huế version as much. It was just not as flavorful or complex. The noodles were white, rather than the turmeric-sunny yellow I was used to, and the shrimps were tiny, red, and a little mealy. The crackers, usually sesame filled, were airy and tasted like puffed rice, and the pork meat was tougher and seemed unmarinated.

But in terms of authenticity, it scored an A+. I was nowhere near the tourist areas of Huế. I was in a field, actually down an alley, having followed a handwritten cardboard sign that said ‘My Quảng’. I was on a Vietnamese family’s porch while women crouched nearby peeling and chopping vegetables and pounding fish into paste. It was a hundred degrees and my whole body was dripping with sweat. The only sounds were the sounds of peeling, pounding, motorcycle horns, and bugs buzzing. And of course, I was squatting on a miniscule plastic stool.

But Ngự Bình’s mi quang tasted better.

You’re probably thinking, “well, maybe this wasn’t a good restaurant, and you could have found a better incarnation elsewhere.” Undoubtedly that is true, although I have to say I ended up trying it three or four more times in different areas in Vietnam and still liked the Little Saigon versions better. But it doesn’t matter. What’s ‘better’? What is the incarnation that’s the most true to form? What is the version that stays true to the original? Do we just choose the one that tastes the best and is from the closest area to the region it’s supposed to be from?

Do we then discriminate against versions that have improved upon the original, as measured by terms as simple (and yet unmeasurable and indescribable) as ‘tastiness’?

I’m not talking about fusion cuisine here, which is alive and kicking and maybe even dominating and spreading, so it’s clear that combining ‘the original’ with ingredients and twists from wholly different areas of the globe is totally fine with foodies. I’m talking more about the ability to source a wider variety of vegetables and herbs in California and thus being able to combine fresh mint and banana flower and cilantro and lettuce and green onions and turmeric and chilies in one bowl. Even if that’s not always possible in mì quảng’s home country, should California do it? It may be making it less authentic by carrying it further away from the source, but it’s sure tasty.

My opinion? I’m glad we do it. I’m glad cooks take advantage of their location and connections to make their dishes taste even better than the version they grew up with or remember. I’m as guilty as anyone of comparinglocal versions of foreign dishes to their ‘home’ counterpart, but that’s usually because I’m trying to paint an evocative picture of what the dish is like when you order it where it ‘lives’. Putting taste aside, it’s an utterly different experience eating, say, lamb hand-pulled noodle soup in a scorching, noisy, side street of the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an and eating lamb hand-pulled noodle soup in a sterile, almost banquet-hall-like second-floor restaurant above a grocery store in suburban Los Angeles. The second setting isn’t interesting. We all know what that’s like, and even though that is what the reader will be literally experience should s/he choose to heed the reviewer’s call and go to the restaurant, s’he’d rather hear about what it WOULD be like if s’he were in Xi’an.

Sometimes I think authenticity is so highly prized because we’re all trying to turn our backyards into mini-vacations. We want to feel, even though we just drove a little way up the 405, like we’re ‘there’, wherever ‘there’ is. We want to close our eyes and have traveled thousands of miles. And we’re willing to fool ourselves a little to do it.

Ốc Lá Lốt

Consider these two summer days in Sài Gòn, one year apart.

1.

I’m perched on a two-foot high plastic stool at a restaurant that’s half dining room, half sidewalk, festooned with plastic shell buckets, and just across a few streets from the narrow alleys of Sài Gòn’s touristy Phạm Ngữ Lão district. The shouts offering taxis, motorbikes, passport photos, buses to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, iPhone cases, and marijuana have faded into the background and have been replaced by the ever-present din of constant honking. Not even honking. So constant as to be one, droning, multi-tonal hum.

I’m new to Southeast Asia, so my ears still register this as alarming, rather than white noise. Also, I’m eatingplatefuls of snails, which just became my favorite food about 24 hours ago. Coconut snails. Blood cockles. Spotted, leopard-print snails.

Julian is ambling across the street, camera in hand, parting the sea of motorbikes by what looks like magnetic repulsion. He stops in the middle. The middle of the street! He raises his camera. Are you kidding me, Julian? The middle of the street?

Click.

2.

I’m way outside Phạm Ngữ Lão this time, miles out, in the very local Bình Tân district, walking aimlessly, deftly avoiding potholes, uneven sidewalk edges, and space-invading motorbikes. Since I’m white and I’m not hefting a giant backpack and I’m not at the bus station that serves points south and Cambodia, I don’t fit into this picture at all. I fit in even less because I’m angry, storming down the street after a fight with Julian, looking neither right nor left at the shops, parks, homes, or street stalls around me.

At some point, I arrive at a T-junction. Directly in front of me is a never-ending whirlwind of helmets, wheels, brushed plastic, and exhaust. Directly in front of THAT is a lady standing at a trio of grills, all covered with little cigar-looking blackish-green things. Surrounding her are buckets of vegetables, vermicelli, and what I gather are raw versions of the cigar things, looking a much brighter green and more like tamales in that state.

The smoke from her grills overpowers even the exhaust: caramelizing meat and some kind of pungent leaf. Suddenly drained of all anger and filled with the singular desire to try whatever is happening on the far side of the street, I find my way home, retrieve Julian, bring him back, and sit down on another two-foot high plastic stool. Then we await whatever happens to people when they sit there.

—

I’m in the U.S. now, albeit in perhaps the best place in the U.S. to approximate Vietnam – the greater Los Angeles area – and finding either snails or anything wrapped in betel leaves is not easy. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumble upon a restaurant that serves ốc lá lốt – snail sausage wrapped in betel leaves: a combination of the two most potent Vietnamese food-memories I possess.

When we walk in, the lady at the front takes one look at us and runs away, into the kitchen. The young waitress who follows her back out in a minute says cautiously, “How may I help you?”

“Well… we’d like to sit down and order food?” Suddenly, my social script interrupted. I don’t even know how to be at a restaurant.

She’s embarrassed because they don’t have an English menu. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, but she doesn’t really believe me. “We have pork and broken rice…” she says, trailing off, before I see what’s on the wall behind me and laughingly, stumblingly order the snail in betel leaves.

Without the frenetic, honking drone and the pouring sweat and the two-foot high plastic stools, it’s hard to approximate urban Vietnam. Chả Ốc Gia Huy is about as close as it gets. The kitchen is open and aromatic, divided from the eating area only by a tiny counter. The menu is an afterthought, jumbled onto one laminated page. Workers at the next table mix cha and load leaves with the mixture, rolling them up as deftly as any cigarette-rolling hipster. Their workspace takes up one out of three of the available tables in the restaurant, and puts the laborious process on display for all to see. It makes eating the result all the sweeter. Sometimes, you DO want to see how sausages are made. There’s something about looking at the raw sludge of filling and the bright green vegetation, separated and in bowls, while biting into a sweet, caramelized, crackling bundle of umami and marveling at the power of fire and spice.

What cements the mental teleportation, though, is their bún mắm, an anchovy-laden, muddy-looking broth filled with shrimp, pork, fish balls, and vegetation. On another visit, my dad took a spoonful and immediately said, “I’m back in Ha Noi.” From behind the counter, the waitress, a different one this time, peeked at him drinking the last dregs of the broth from the bowl and smiled. Not twenty minutes earlier she had been trying to convince us that bun mam was perhaps not the best choice for our American tastebuds. I’d heard it before from the guy at Ha Tien Quan and heeded the warning about as much this time.

No Expectations I: Bún mắm at Hà Tiên Quán

Walking down the street in Saigon, you'll see signs for dishes virtually unknown in even the most concentrated Little Saigons in the U.S.

Bún mắm. Bò lá lốt. Bún nước lèo. Bánh khọt. Bột chiên.

Bún mắm in particular is everywhere. It's always listed at the very top of noodle restaurants' menus, breaking the bank compared to everything else at around 40000-50000 đồng ($2-$2.50).

I never tried it in Vietnam. It was too big a gamble! The translation of "bún mắm" is basically just "noodles with sauce" or, if you want to take an educated guess, "noodles with fish-paste-like sauce". I didn't know what that meant. Was I about to pay a whole $2.50 for a bowl of just sauce-drenched noodles?

It sounds completely ridiculous now, but you do get accustomed to foreign prices very quickly. You recalibrate your parameters of acceptability. I definitely sulked for a good few minutes once when my (equivalent of) $4 duck noodle soup in Bình Tân district turned out to be less than impressive because, gasp, the price point; gasp, the disappointment!

I didn't try bún mắm until I got back to Los Angeles, and I tried it at a wonderful place called Hà Tiên Quán in San Gabriel. In order to punish myself for being so stingy and unadventurous in Vietnam, I didn't even look at the English description. I ordered it blind. The only clue I got was from our waiter (and later, I discovered, the owner), talking to one of my companions about it while trying to convince her to get her hủ tiếu with deer instead of beef.

"Don't worry, deer soup you can eat no problem, even if you never had before, but the bún mắm, like she's getting, it takes... a little getting used to!" He turned to me. "You had it before, right?"

"Yep," I lied through my teeth. I didn't want him to make it any milder for my benefit, or tweak the ingredients to make them more American-friendly. I didn't really think he would do this, but I wanted there to be no chance. I wanted him to think I ate bún mắm all over the place, that I ate it in my sleep with my eyes closed.

He bought it.

I could smell it as it was being carried towards me, from behind my back way across the restaurant. It smelled like a sunny warehouse full of busily fermenting jars of anchovies. In a good way, if you can imagine it. Not rotten anchovies, not fish-market-at-closing-time, not even the nostril-assaulting funk of lutefisk - just anchovies fermented exactly the way they're supposed to be.

For the smell, the broth itself was surprisingly clear. It was the mound of ingredients that gave the bowl its colorful effect. A bright purple eggplant, thickly cut with a browned skin and oozing center, stuck out of the top like a birthday candle. Twists of soft fish floated airily past the rice noodles, while big old crispy pork belly slices - the kind that are higher than they are wide and let you see the whole cross section of flesh: crisp skin, the thin fat layer right beneath, then the tender meat closer to the bone - held court around the edges. Sprinkled over the top were skinny leek slices, giving the thing a festive air.

I took a picture, but it was after I'd already demolished most of it, so thanks, Alex P. of Yelp, for having better self-control than I!

Sometimes tastes are less concentrated than smells. Jackfruit, for example, can stink up a whole city block, but in your mouth it's just a vague suggestion of foot-sweat, rather than a mouthful of it. It mostly tastes like not-quite ripe mango mixed with pineapple. Another example is yak butter tea. It smells straight-up like freshly deposited vomit, but if you breathe out while bringing it to your lips, it morphs into an only slightly funky chai.

The bún mắm broth was not one of these types of foods. It tasted exactly like it smelled, a bloom of fish and ferment. I loved it. Each bite was an adventure. The front of my tongue explored the sour notes from the lime I squeezed in and the back explored the settled concentrate of the anchovies. Every dip I made with the spoon unearthed some vegetable or sea creature or another. I lived for the crunch of a surprise piece of pork skin or a some pork fat that was masquerading as a noodle.

Is this what bún mắm tastes like in Saigon? Was I turning my nose up at paying a mere $2.50 for this wonderment? Or is the chef at Hà Tiên Quán just extremely good at her job?

I'll never know. Well, not until the next time Vietnam beckons me back.  Could be next week.

Snacking across Asia, part III: Vietnam and Cambodia

(... continued from Part II.)

Oftentimes in Vietnam, the lines were blurred on what was a meal and what was a snack.  Fully 90% of my meals took place planted on an ankle-high stool in a street somewhere, cost less than $2, and took only a few minutes out of my day while I slurped up the fist-size chunk of noodles or wrapped odds and ends in lettuce, basil, and mint leaves.  Were these meals or snacks?  Sometimes I ate five of them a day, but was that because of their diminutive size or my Vietnamese food gluttony?

Another peculiarity of Vietnam was that its best snacks were often technically drinks.  On every heat-drenched corner was a maze of stands selling rau má (pennywort juice), nước mía (sugarcane juice), nước ép (fruit juice) and sinh tố (fruit shakes).  The sinh tố was where things could get wild, making use of fruits as diverse as durian and jackfruit, mango, tomato, pineapple, squash, kumquat, soursop, avocado and sapodilla (a fruit I knew only as the Vietnamese 'sapoche' until this very second, when I looked up the English translation).

Keeping this in mind,

1. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Sinh tố

Making sinh tố is far from an exact science, and the proportions vary slightly by stand, but the recipe for a Vietnamese smoothie is, roughly, as follows:

Scoop edible portion of fruit into blender
Grab can of condensed milk; glop a ton of it into the blender on top of the fruit
Grab sugar jug and make it snow on top of the fruit and milk
Add ice
Blend

Even though I watched this process at least 50 times over my four weeks in Vietnam, and fully expected every time that my smoothie should taste like sugar and milk, it magically never did.  It always tasted like someone liquefied and concentrated my favorite fruit and put it directly on my tongue.  Durian shakes were appropriately stinky and retained a nice bit of custardy texture, while the jackfruit versions thankfully cut out their hint of slime.  Avocado shakes made my American palate forget that avocados were meant for guacamole and savory dishes, not sweet ones (I told a smoothie-hawker once that Americans ate avocado only with salty things and she laughed so hard she knocked over a whole pineapple she was about to slice).  I don't like sapodilla much, so it was entirely appropriate for me to think that the shake version tasted like rotten avocados.

Sinh tố was, if not the centerpiece of many photos, at least in the background, fueling the photographer.

Sinh tố in the southeast of the city 

Sinh tố at Chợ Lớn market

Sitting behind a sinh tố stand in District 10

Sinh tố in Phnom Penh

Where the Phnom Penh sinh tố came from 

2. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: "Bánh Mì"

Bánh mì (sandwich) shops are almost as omnipresent as sinh tố stands, but I was surprised to see them pop up from time to time in Phnom Penh.  The Cambodian version, name unknown (as Khmer script is all loops to me) was half the size, coated with fiery red sauce and a heavy, pudding-like paté that tasted almost fermented, and had crunchy pork skins scattered across the top instead of head cheese.

3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: banana-filled rice

This five-cent snack came from a griddle full of its twins run by an old lady sitting across from the Chinese Embassy.  Unadulterated, nothing but a grill-blackened pad of rice surrounding a lava-hot, sticky flow of ripe banana.  I'm surprised the rest of the tropics haven't caught on!

4. Everywhere: Quail eggs

They come hardboiled; they come as balut.  They come wrapped up pretty in little quail-egg-sized bags, tied with a ribbon.  A ribbon!  Inside the ten-egg packet is an even smaller packet of chili-spiced salt that is stapled closed.  Their vendors cycle through the street and wend their way between tables at seafood, barbecue, and hotpot restaurants.  I'd stop them on the sidewalk on my way home, hand them the equivalent of 25 cents, and go home with a bag of eggs to painstakingly peel and eat sprawled out on my hotel bed.

5. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Bánh chuối

Down the street from our last hotel was a tiny grocery which we never entered.  We never entered it because its bakery was outside, and it had perfect round spheres of blackened banana pastry all ready for us to order from the sidewalk. The proprietor would slice a big fat triangle of jiggling cake-pudding hybrid into a plastic bag at night, and it would warm to breakfast temperature in the hot room by morning.

Ốc Đào: Worth the hype

As long as I'm reviewing Hồ Chí Minh city restaurants that have expanded their fame to international levels (see: Bánh Xèo 46A), I may as well stay on that path and divulge that the place I will miss the most isn't a hidden gem, or an unassuming street stall, or totally inaccessible to tourists or anything.  It's even another Bourdain-vetted place.*

Ốc Đào.

Its address is a uniquely Saigonesque maze, including not only the implication that the place is in an unnamed alley off the main street, but is tucked away on one of four branches of the alley (A, B, C, and D) that are completely unlabeled.  Passing by about fourteen nail salons, a bunch of domestic doorways with curious old people peering out of them, and some too-interested dogs, I thought for sure we were going the wrong way.  But we weren't.

My waiter, the nephew of the owner, said he waits on foreigners all the time.  He's the designated foreigner-waiter because of his good English.  As I sat down for the first time, the fluttering of menus and giggling surrounding me dispersed in the same direction - to go get this guy, Linh, an enthusiastic twenty-year-old who immediately squired me to the cooks' area to look at all the snails.  Big coiled oblong snails, tiny flat snails, corkscrew-shaped snails, leopard-spotted snails, striped snails.  Not to mention the splayed salty flesh of oysters, mussels, scallops, and clams.

After I'd made my choice, we sat down together and I tried to help him learn the English names for the dishes on his menu.  It was nearly impossible.  The Vietnamese have a different name for every species of edible snail, whereas we... well, we hardly have a mental concept for an edible snail in the first place.  I was able to translate 'mussels', 'scallops', and 'lemongrass' and that was about it.  (As a bonus, I eventually ordered all the things I translated!)

---

The first night, chosen right from a living lineup:

Ốc bông me: snails in tamarind sauce

These snails were rich, slickly orange and sweet-sour, punctuated occasionally with candle-waxy stubs of pork fat.  The snail flesh resisted pulling with toothpicks, and it was a joy the few times one came out in one perfect piece, curled inner coil and all, whole and ready for swishing in fish sauce, spearing with rau răm, and dragging through chili-lime paste.

Sò điệp mỡ hành: scallops with peanuts and green onions

As many scallops as I've eaten in my life, I never knew they came in such a picturesque shell.  When I saw their scalloped edges, a lightbulb burned suddenly in my brain.  That's why they're called scallops!

Smaller than I'm used to, and tougher, with a texture more like a firm white-fish than the silky smoothness of raw scallops or the striped firm flan texture of scallops on a barbecue, these were a wholly new scallop experience to me.

---

The second night: ordered confidently from the menu after some internet research and translating:

Chem chép mỡ hành: mussels with peanuts and green onions

Though these mussels had the same preparation as the scallops the first night, they had a much stronger flavor.  Apart from a ring of snapping rubber, the flesh was yielding and full of ocean.

Note the appearance of green mango spears in the upper left-hand corner: I finally caught on that the roving bands of snack-toting women had things to offer other than baguettes and packets of 10 quail fetuses.  (3 or 4 quail fetuses would have been fine; 10 is pushing it.)

     Ốc hương xào sả : leopard-spotted snails steamed with lemongrass

Usually snail flesh itself doesn't taste like much: it just serves as a vehicle for flavor.  This type of snail has a distinct taste: fishy, kind of froggy even, with a bouncy texture.  Since steaming with lemongrass is not a hit-you-over-the-head kind of preparation, the dish needed the natural flavor of the snails to come through.

Also, rambutan had appeared by now (upper right).  It was placed without comment next to me by a smiling older waitress.  Grateful, I dug into them with my hopelessly greasy fingers.  Like little sponges, the rambutan skin soaked up the oil, cleaning my hands better than any towel.

---

Expensive by Hồ Chí Minh City standards, each meal cost me the stunning sum of US$5.

Had I had another month there, I would have returned six or seven times.  Enough to sweep their menu.  Enough to extract snails from their shells blindfolded and armed only with one dull safety pin.

-----

*I may generally shy away from famous places, but if I'm going to culinarily follow someone around Vietnam, it's Anthony Bourdain.  Anyone who has the kind of credentials he does, and the connections to eat with, and at, the sweethearts of the food world, and still calls Vietnam his favorite food place, choosing to move to Vietnam for a year... that person might just be my tastebud twin.

Pole-vaulting over Vietnam's culinary bar

Vietnam's culinary bar is already set astronomically high, but it still manages to give me a meal that pole-vaults over it every so often.

Or, as it happens, an entire day full of such meals.  Enter August 31, 2013.

I. Cơm hến

When a business gets popular in Vietnam, it often spawns a menagerie of copycats.  Hotels featured in the Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide have twins popping up in the surrounding streets almost the instant the guides are published, hoping to draw patrons on name recognition.  In Quy Nhơn, a by no means touristy beach town between Đà Nẵng and Nha Trang, a hotel called Lan Anh had no less than 5 different 'locations' around town.  One even made sure to have a copycat Barbara's Backpackers next door, for maximum believability!

The reason I bring this up is that the restaurant I aimed for at lunch on August 31, a central Vietnamese specialty restaurant called Quán Nam Giao, was completely encircled by other Huế-style restaurants, touts-a-waving.  I disdained them, thinking it was another copycat phenomenon (this style of food isn't terribly common in HCMC) but apparently I was actually walking through HCMC's Little Huế.  Whoops!

I'd feel regretful about missing out on this great enclave but for the fact that I don't think any of them could have beaten what I had at Nam Giao.

Cơm hến is already one of my favorite dishes.  A well-delineated mix of baby clams, fresh taro stem and sour starfruit, various strong herbs, and crushed peanuts and sesame seeds over rice that looks a bit like Vietnamese chirashi might look.

 This doesn't mean it's easy to impress me merely by serving it to me.  I've had in its birthplace of Huế and I've had it at Quan Vy Da in Little Saigon, a restaurant that can do no wrong with any dish it tries.  It isn't easy to live up to either of these standards.

Nam Giao surpassed them.

I've never understood how certain flavor combinations were discovered.  Who first paired clams with mint, or taro with starfruit?  And then why would they have taken nuts, of all things, and crushed them on top?  Every ingredient is so different-tasting that you'd think your mouth wouldn't know what to do with the confluence, but this particular combination meshed so well and so smoothly that I wouldn't blink an eye if I were told it had just grown naturally on the Cơm Hến Tree.

II. Gỏi đu đủ

Nothing I've eaten out of a plastic bag in a park has ever been this good.

Those aren't noodles.  They're green papaya spears.  And those aren't leaves (well, not all of them - some of them are mint, I think), they're sweet beef jerky slices.  And that isn't mere orange oil, that is flaming-hot-pepper lava!  It'll soak the sesame crackers and turn them into fire-cakes.

Once I got used to maneuvering my chopsticks through the bag's narrow neck and getting bites with a little bit of everything, I was able to enjoy the sweet caramel char on the beef fighting with the papaya's sourness until it was all washed away in a wave of lingering spice.

(Thanks to Joe and Hai at eatingsaigon.com for directing me here - I never would have found these ladies on my own.  They stand at an unmarked stall on a busy corner not IN the park, but across the street from it.  Rough Google location here.)

III. Bánh xèo

Just around the corner from the gỏi đu đủ goddesses lies a much-lauded bánh xèo restaurant: Bánh Xèo 46A.  I'm pretty sure Anthony Bourdain popularized it, and as leery as I am of places famous food dudes have popularized (they almost always go rapidly downhill afterwards), well, it's bánh xèo, so...

I really wish I had included something for scale, but let's just make clear that if I stepped on this pancake, only about 3/4 of it would bear the footprint.  (And I wear size 11 shoes.)

A crackly outer skin, like seared paper, narrowed to impossibly thin widths at times, making it impossible to believe it held so much meat and so many vegetables together.  They leave their shrimps' skins on, so it gets even more crunchy when you ensnare shrimp in your lettuce scoop.  That's fine, because the pillowy pork fat leaves your teeth something rich to sink into afterwards.

Lots of people tell me they find bánh xèo too greasy, and I always wonder if they're eating it wrapped in, and stuffed with, vegetables and herbs, like you're supposed to.  Most Vietnamese herb 'accompaniment' places are bigger than my head, and Vietnamese people will finish them, right down to the last leaf.  If a dish isn't completely veg-i-fied with each and every bite, you're not doing it right.

I now proudly note that not one green speck of lettuce, mint, fish-mint, or basil remained on that plate after I was done cracking bites off this giant's-foot-sized pancake.

And not more than ten drops of nước mắm remained in the sauce bowl, either.

As we were leaving, I saw the kitchen.  It was like a mass bánh xèo production assembly line run by one sweating woman.  Stacks and stacks of these pancakes were balanced on a few aluminum platters, ready to be run out to the rapidly filling restaurant, while she flipped and filled at least 6 more in the three frying pans that surrounded her.  While the menu technically has about 20 items, nobody really looks at it.  It's a safe assumption that everyone will order the bánh xèo.

Frogs in Vietnam, frogs in Cambodia

I. Frogs in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City)

In District 1, just to the northwest of the Phạm Ngũ Lão backpacker district, a sign shouted, "CHÁO ẾCH SINGAPORE!" at me from across the street.

"Singaporean frog porridge?" I said to Julian with a question mark in my voice, like he would know,  Frog porridge didn't sound familiar.  I thought it was more probable that I was getting my diacriticals mixed up, like always.  

But I was pretty sure, at least, that the sign didn't say "hello frog" (chào ếch), so we went in and sat down.

Yep, frog porridge!  Or rather, frog hot pot with a bowl of porridge on the side.

Beyond the cliché "it tastes like chicken!" I never heard much of a description of frog meat before I ate it on this trip.  I had no idea what to expect.

Allow me to elaborate: it does taste like chicken.  It tastes like chicken that's been crossed with eel.  And it's slippery and tender and encircled with tiny veins that look like tiny rubber bands holding the meat on the bone.

This particular frog was chopped up and marinated in a thick, syrupy sweet soy sauce that dripped tendrils into the porridge like honey into Cream of Wheat when I mixed the bowls together.

---

II. Frogs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)

The frogs in Vietnam were relatively unadorned, and retained enough of their original shape, texture and flavor that they were unmistakably frogs.  The Cambodian dish, on the contrary, was so heavily stir-fried and coated in all sorts of spices that the meat serving as a vehicle for all that spice was practically irrelevant.  Tiny bones flexed and crunched, but that was the only clue.

In a raucous outdoor restaurant that had only beer and Fanta as refreshment options, I ordered something called 'Hot fried with frog', knowing it could be absolutely anything.

Like most of the mystery Cambodian stir fries I had, it came out liberally coated in lemongrass, an assortment of green leaves and herbs, and wildly spicy red chili specks.  This was the better frog dish by far.  It had a bar wings sort of feel, a carefree application of flavor, made to meld with alcohol.  I came very close to wishing I was a drinker.

Instead, we managed to flag down a wandering vendor who was studiously ignoring the table of foreigners and got him to sell me a baggie of hardboiled quail eggs.  Dragged through the tamarind sauce Julian had on his boring vegetarian noodles, they were the perfect accompaniment.

Quận Bình Dân, Part 2

...continued from Part 1.

One of the best things about Bình Dân district was how friendly, open, patient, and just plain kind everyone was.  There was a fairly significant language barrier even after my four month crash course in Vietnamese, as the audiobooks I used featured a Hanoi accent, and everyone in HCMC (obviously) has a southern accent.  I could talk to people, but as soon as they delightedly exclaimed that I knew Vietnamese and started chattering back to me, it became clear that I couldn't understand a word out of their mouths.

This didn't deter the people in the neighborhood.  Every morning and evening when we came walking down our small side street, everyone waved and said hello.  And the day we left, unsteadily toting our suitcases down the uneven gravel, people spilled out their doors to say goodbye.

A group of ladies a few storefronts down from us had a sinh tố (fruit smoothie) operation running early morning to late evening, and they always stopped what they were doing (gnawing corn on the cob and gossiping, usually) to fix us strawberry, durian, avocado, mango, sapoche, or passionfruit drinks for $0.60.

Another thing that would happen regularly is that a random English-speaker would show up at the most opportune times and lend their services.

In the local market, chợ An Lạc, I wanted to buy some candied ginger, but didn't know how to convey the concept of 'half-a-kilo'.  No worries, a college student showed up behind me from out of nowhere and negotiated the transaction!

Down the street by the park badminton courts, I wanted to buy a cheese bánh mì to fortify myself for a bracing game of hot and humid badminton.  But I had forgotten how to say 'cheese' (it's not a common ingredient in Vietnamese cooking).  Not a problem!  A worker selling New Year mooncakes came running across the street to translate.

At a restaurant advertising cơm gà Hải Nam in giant yellow letters, the English menu had 50 items, none of which were Hainan chicken.  A waiter rushed over to point out that this was actually a category of dishes, and that I could choose from duck, pork, chicken, intestines, or any combination thereof and order it Hainan style.  Then he apologized for his poor English.  I couldn't tell him he was being ridiculous because my mouth was full of melting pork fat and wonderful ginger sauce.

(Bottom dish) $2.75

There was only one exception to the 'exceptionally friendly' rule.

In a surprisingly spacious area for a place that served only one dish, bánh xeo, I sat down one table away from a group of boisterous men who were getting unabashedly sloshed at 4:30 in the afternoon.  Accustomed to respectful curiosity from everyone that I'd met, I remained open to the possibility of civil conversation when one approached me.

This was not to be the case.  He sat with his face three inches from mine as he slurred Vietnamese questions at me.  When I didn't understand them (I could understand most questions spoken at a clear, slow pace, but Drunken Slurring is not a dialect my course had covered) he would smack my arm or leg with his hand and repeat them in exactly the same way, but louder and more spitty.  The owner of the restaurant looked on with detached amusement as his friends roared with laughter and pointed fingers.

I put up with this for exactly three minutes before I grabbed my food and took it to a faraway table. 

Since I ate at lightning speed to escape this situation, and I didn't take photos lest Drunken Man grab my phone and use it to slap my arm, I have little to say about the food other than that it sustained me long enough to walk to the bò lá lốt I wrote about in my last entry.  It only cost $1, though.

Quận Bình Dân, Part 1

I spent my first 12 days in Hồ Chí Minh City in one of the the outer districts: a far cry from downtown and the backpacker areas.  Bình Dân has the highest population of any district (as well as the highest migrant population) but aside from a few nods to its west bus station, it's not mentioned in any tourist guidebooks.  It's skirted over even on websites dedicated to mentioning things about HCMC districts, meriting two entire sentences.

I wasn't so naive as to expect quaint, undiscovered gems to burst from every picturesque corner, or to return singing the praises of the 'real, unspoiled' HCMC.

What I expected was open friendliness mixed with curiosity, neighborliness, and merely decent but extremely cheap grub, and for the most part, this is exactly what I got.

(Links on dish names below lead to an approximate Google map location of where I ate them.)

The first day, snakehead fish porridge (cháo cá lóc) eased me gently into what I remembered best about Vietnam: its ability to stuff more flavor into things than has any right to be there.  The porridge's deceptively oatmeal-like exterior yielded to waves of pepper and caramelized onion as well as seemingly more fish than could physically fit in such a tiny bowl.  In case my tastebuds were bored, sliced limes, three kinds of chili sauce, salt, sweet soy, and hoisin were of course provided.

$1.25

That night, after watching groups of shirtless, sweating men play đá cầu in the park, I approached a man with a cart whose tiny sign said "Bún riêu cua, 12000".  What he brought out about 8 seconds after I ordered it had marinated tofu, fish cakes, a glistening blood cube, plenty of crab cake shreds, a plump tomato, and a biting tomato-seafood flavor, almost like cioppino.

$0.60

Good broken rice (cơm tấm) is a tough find in Vietnam, because the name is applied to every stale-riced, soggy-porked buffet languishing on the street.  My rule is if there is no one cooking any meat at the stall, I don't stop.  This particular stand had no less than twenty grilling porkchops on a knee-high grill by the gutter, plus a bonus line full of old ladies.  Old ladies know exactly what they are doing, so I joined it.

One old lady's grandson graciously helped me order, and I joined the throngs pressed knee to knee at the metal tables behind the cart.  The egg cake relied heavily on noodles and mushrooms rather than Little Saigon's pervasive pork, while the bi was as powdery, savory, and wriggly as I could have hoped.  The fat, candy-red lạp xưởng sausage tasted like strawberry sugared meat candy, which I wasn't feeling, but the highlight was absolutely the fresh-grilled pork chop, whose salty crust broke to veritably ooze meat juice wherever it was bitten.

$2.00

Last year's HCMC highlight was snails.  I hadn't realized, though, that snail/seafood restaurants popped into existence every night on nearly every corner of the city, downtown or not.  Addresses which at lunchtime were barred, deserted, and dusty transformed upon the setting of the sun into sprawling lots of tables and fish-tanks.

The first snail place I saw in my neighborhood was modest: just a woman throwing molluscs in a wok and a little table set up with about a platter's worth of each species. I stopped to check it out; an eager old man hobbled up and took my arm. "Ốc Hương," he barked, waiting for me to repeat after him. When I did, he moved my hand, and his, to the next bowl. "Sò Điệp," he asserted. "Nghêu. Chem chép. Ốc mỡ."  And so on.

When he had named all the varieties, he seemed satisfied that I was now well-schooled in the art of shellfish.  He shook my hand, said 'Bye!' and was gone, which surprised me, because I had thought that he worked there!

Feeling nostalgic for last year, I got the blood cockles, which she threw in the wok almost as soon as I uttered their name.  They came to the table coated in rau răm leaves, which stuck to the firmly closed shells.  Blood cockles are one of the only varieties of shellfish that don't open when cooked.  You need some serious fingernails to dig their stubborn shells open.  Here, their color wasn't so shockingly red and the texture was slightly more raw oyster than clam.  I also had to discreetly drop a few bad ones on the floor.  Overall, though, it was a happy reunion.

$2.50

My second snail restaurant was fancier, a lot covered in corrugated iron.  It had chairs with actual backs.  A skinny cat sharpened its claws on a stack of Heineken boxes and the waitresses giggled at my side, occasionally saying things like "Rice!" or "Chicken!" when I got to the relevant page of the menu.  No thanks, ladies - I am here for snails.  Bring me a big plate of ốc mỡ with garlic and onions!

And they did, but they also brought out a plate of seafood fried rice that I definitely did not order.  No matter.  The snails were mealy at certain ends and rubbery at others, but I swear you can put that lime-salt-pepper mixture on anything and cover it with garlic, cilantro, and rau răm and it'll be delicious.  Also, a platter of trứng cút lộn?  There's no better feeling than having waitresses watch you expectantly, waiting for you to gag on an unexpected baby duck beak, and instead ending up watching you pop three in a row.

$3.50 for the snails alone, $6 for the lot

To be continued...

Saigon's first surprises: Lảu đầu cá hồi and bò lá lốt

Even before I started studying Vietnamese seriously (even before I could say any more than 'hello' and 'thank you'!) I could read Vietnamese menus.  I had no alternative if I wanted to travel deep into Saigon - or even many of the U.S.'s Little Saigons.  

Vietnamese restaurants don't make splashy plastic molds of their dishes and stack them in display cases outside, like they do in Korea or Japan.  They also don't generally like to translate their menu items like they do (with often hilarious results) in China (cephalomappa belly burst, anyone?).

So I learned to distinguish my gà from my cá, my rau from my trái , my bún from my mì, and more.  I recognized the shape of the words even when I couldn't get my mouth around them, and used my pointing finger to the best of its ability.

I've been doing that for over two years.

Imagine my surprise, then, yesterday, when I came up short against a restaurant whose menu was like French to me.

I rocked on my heels outside, squinting at the board that listed its specials.  Nothing was familiar.  Diacriticals danced around collections of vowels.  Patrons clustered around steaming hotpots glanced curiously at me, while waiters enthusiastically motioned me to come inside and have a seat, but I balked.

As my blog indicates, I eat everything.  But I don't generally make complete shots in the dark.  Doing so has historically resulted in (for example):

- globs of fish paste and lettuce

- a pile of raw beef

- noodles with a pat of butter-cheese on the side

So my translation app and I suffered through some permutations of definitely-not-at-all-what-they-meant (metal oil slab chicken, crib wheel noodles, property of horn fish) before I finally remembered that I knew how to say 'head', and ordered something with the word 'fish head' in it:

Lảu đầu cá hồi.

It came out a deceptively small bowl of mostly green, the okra and bamboo hiding in a forest of morning glory.

But underneath, in the depths?

Salmon head galore!

The broth was almost tom yum, with a decidedly sour undertone to its sweet-and-citrus light broth.  The okra had nearly all its slime coaxed out, and its seeds wafted under the cheekbones of the salmon, whose flesh wedges dislodged with one mere poke of a chopstick.

Healthy hotpot for one!

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That night, I set off in search of a dish recommended my by a Vietnamese penpal (Hi, Thủy!): bò lá lốt (beef grilled in betel leaves).  My frankly pathological geographical memory served me well in this search: I'd briefly glanced at a stall selling this three days before while taking a random walk, and for some reason remembered the exact intersection I'd seen it at.

The stand was nothing more than a 3X1 foot counter with a hot grill wobbling alongside.  But the smell... it filled the block.  Duck porridge, broken rice, and phở stands had their scents summarily overwhelmed by the aroma of fatty beef melting and sizzling inside their leaf wrappers.

I ordered one order, thinking I would get a five-leaf skewer of wraps, but what was carried to my table was this:

Just out of frame on the right is a MASSIVE plate of herbs - almost bigger than all the rest of it put together

 Ten crackling sausages of beef.  Ten cigarette-shaped green-black betel leaves filled with beef.  Sweet soy with chilies.  Crab paste softened with peanut sauce.  A bowl of noodles tossed with chunks of pork skin and fat.  And of course, enough herbs, lettuce, sour starfruit, and cucumbers to feed a whole army of discerning rabbits.

As helpful onlookers crowded around, trying to make Julian the vegetarian understand that he needed to dip his beef into his crab paste, rather than pick fastidiously at the bowl of noodles, trying to rustle them free of the pork pieces, I grabbed my rice wrappers and dug in.

Vietnam loves its leaves.  It occurred to me as I was masticating like a gorilla lounging around beneath banana trees that I was essentially eating beef wrapped in a leaf (betel), covered in three more leaves (basil, mint, and saw-leaf), all placed in another leaf (lettuce), and stuffed in rice paper.

I guess that's how I always manage to feel so healthy and vibrant after eating platefuls of the fattiest, oiliest, most flavorful meat while squatting precariously on plastic stools!

Dê bảy món

Vietnamese restaurants are big on serving 7 courses of things.  By far the most common '7 course' set is 'bò 7 món', or, literally, 'beef 7 ways'.

I decided to try it with a twist.  7 courses of goat: dê 7 món.

7 full courses of goat, or any type of meat, is risky business.  Done wrong, it can easily be a heavy, plodding march of meat, a lunch that leaves you yearning for a fruit smoothie and a nap.  It's a wonder churrascaria parking lots aren't littered with the wrecked cars of peacefully slumbering patrons.

Fortunately, undoubtedly owing to some chef-ly sleight of hand, the courses at Binh Dan Restaurant are neat, small, and sufficiently herb-garnished that you somehow never get the feeling like you're slipping away into a meat-coma.

"You want it with everything?" our waiter/owner/general helpful hoverer asked, slightly doubtfully, as I ordered the dê bảy món.

"Yes, everything," I said, nodding.

"All the dishes, too?" he continued.  "Even the blood?"

"Yes, everything," I nodded more, exaggeratedly, like a broken puppet, hoping that my enthusiasm and openness would translate.

"Even the normal sauce?" he asked.  "I can bring you different sauce if you don't like it."

"I'll like it," I said - and with true confidence this time, because every time someone in a Vietnamese restaurant suggests I'm not going to like a certain sauce, I know exactly what sauce it's going to be.

Well, one of two things - mắm nêm or mắm ruốc.

No, not chocolate: don't make the same mistake I did.

Both are unassuming little purplish brown piles that pack an extreme fermented-seafood punch to the face - even the amount that'll fit on the end of one chopstick will flavor a few bites to excess.

While I admit that the first time I had it I thought that they had accidentally left normal fish sauce out in the sun for a couple weeks and secretly feared I might die in the next few hours, I urge you to keep trying it: the appeal nuzzles its way into your tastebuds eventually.

Anyway, the waiter finally took my word for it that I wouldn't run screaming from his restaurant at the sight of blood or the smell of fermented seafood paste, and withdrew.

When he reappeared, it was time for the goat onslaught.

Course 1, goat sausages and barbecued goat made with goat fat, came smoking out to our table like a concentrated grill, releasing that summery greasy charcoal scent in clouds.  The sausages lay sizzling in pools of their own fat, while the sesame seeds lining the curls of goat meat showed a slight tan, but no burn.

Just as we were starting to get the feel for grilled meat, imagining ourselves in a park or a night market or a dive bar, Course 2, a cold wobbly pudding of raw goat blood, liver slices, and peanut showed up, adorned with one sprig of cilantro.  Our friendly waiter popped his head over the counter again: "You eat it with lime juice and mint... it's better that way!"

The pudding had the slightly shocking texture of cartilage-adorned Jell-O, and the refreshing, clean finish of the freshest sashimi.  Paired with the sausages, it served as a citrusy, cool palate-cleanser.

Veggie plate, noodles, fish sauce, sesame crackers, sausage and grilled meat, blood pudding

Course 3, a boat-shaped curry of cumin-yellow goat pieces and onions, melted into my vermicelli bowl, leaving the noodles sunny and spicy, topped with so-tender-it-dissolved-under-my-tongue goat meat and springy intestine slices.

To trickle into the spaces in our now rapidly filling stomachs, the next four courses were stews: a spicy, curry-heavy soup laden with skin-on slices; an impossibly rich, silky broth with a layer of glistening oil on top; a slightly darker stew with a centerpiece of flower-shaped tripe; a nearly black potion rumored to contain Chinese herbs for comfortable digestion.

Courses 5 and 6: 3 and 4 disappeared before my camera made its way out of my bag

I was charmed by the innovative nature of the first three dishes and comforted by the hominess of the next three, but the herbal concoction sat strangely with me.

A woman from the next table had been eyeing me ever since the first spoonful of goat blood went into my mouth: she approached.  "Where did you learn to eat this?" she exclaimed, then went on to explain that while this place was good, the meal was miles better in Vietnam.

Alas, the transition from stuffing-my-face-face to talking-with-strangers face took so long that she was gone before I had the chance to ask her where in Vietnam, I implore you, where?!

Damn.