Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table

by Graham Holliday

The method I used to get the red-chili-pepper-paste-strewn food experience I craved in Korea, and the ones I would later love even more in Việt Nam, was what I called the “Four Questions Theory” of food exploration. It’s a concept I have tested with hotel staff, travel guides, colleagues, government ministers, journalists, diplomats, lawyers, bankers, and students. In fact, as I became more and more obsessed with seeking out Vietnamese food experiences, I tested my theory on every single Vietnamese person I met in Việt Nam and abroad. It goes something like this: Me: I’m not sure where to go for lunch. I want to eat Vietnamese food. Is there anywhere you particularly like that you could recommend? Vietnamese response: Oh, for sure. You must go to the [insert name of a big, fancy-schmancy hotel, serving Western, “Asian”—whatever that is—or worst of all: the abomination that is “fusion cuisine.” Invariably, there’ll be an “authentic street food stall” snuck away in one corner, replete with a pristine three-wheeled cyclo taxi and a bored-looking woman in a conical hat. The air-conditioned restaurant will be almost entirely deserted, apart from some sad traveling business type, struggling with the slop on his plate as he simultaneously tap-tap-taps at a laptop. Total cost, with drinks: $50–$100. Fun factor: zero.] Me: Hmm. I’m not so keen on eating in Western hotels. I’d like to eat Vietnamese food. You know, real Vietnamese food. Do you know a good place, a place that you lik...

Every expat (and a few funky Vietnamese) were in the habit of describing anything Vietnamese with the prefix “Vina.” “Vina-nosh” was used to indicate Vietnamese food. A hot chick was a “Vina-babe.” An argument with a hot chick was a “Vina-drama.” A cool male Hanoian was a “Vina-dude.” And on it went. It was, of course, a prefix borrowed from the Vietnamese themselves. Main cigarette brand: Vinataba. Ceiling fan manufacturer: Vinawind. Steel company: Vinasteel. Milk: Vinamilk.

“Look out for the women walking around with two bamboo baskets attached to a pole and slung over a shoulder,” said Chris. “But steer clear of the meat and shellfish in the afternoon.” “Why?” “The heat. You dunno how long it’s been festering in the sun.”

THERE ARE BLUE plastic stools and there are blue plastic stools. If you’re lucky (or in an actual brick-and-mortar restaurant), you might find yourself on the almost-comfortable variety, at almost-normal chair height. It might possibly even have a back to it. More commonly, you’ll find yourself on a “croucher.” Tolerable for a short time, but comes with an osteopath’s warning for loiterers. Then there are the “ultras.” You really don’t want to find yourself on an ultra. Commonly found surrounding a two-basket mobile vendor, they can be blue, red, yellow, or white. They are small, very small. Uncomfortably small. Annoyingly small. Bone-creakingly awfully small. Ultras, per Chris’s recommendation, are the price you pay if you want or need to go and eat at a double-basket street vendor. And on Hàng Trống Street, that’s what I had to do if I wanted a nibble at Mrs. Nhung’s fried tofu lunch on the pavement midway along the street.

Nhung would keep topping up my plate with a fresh supply of tofu, which she cut with a snip-snip of her scissors, as and when it was ready, until I groaned “No rồi,” signifying, “I’ve had enough, I’m stuffed, I’m satisfied, and I cannot possibly eat one more morsel.”

Try as she might, this virtually English-fluent woman hadn’t been able to translate “sá sùng” to my satisfaction. “It’s kind of a worm. It comes from the sea.” “An eel?” “No.” “A sea slug?” “No, no . . . Ôi giời ơi,” she sighed in Vietnamese, using the oft-heard expression used to signify exasperation at, well, everything. Kind of like “Oh my god,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Oh, for crying out loud, you have GOT to be kidding me,” all rolled into one. She took me to the market around the corner to show me the bag of dried worms, with the label “sá sùng” stuck on the outside. “They’re very expensive, these ones. They make sure there’s no sand in them.” I was still none the wiser. Only years later, after copious amounts of research and countless dead ends, bad leads, and just plain wrong turns, I discovered that, in English, “sá sùng” means “peanut worm.” Any wiser? No, me neither, though I do now know that peanut worms live under the sand and are harvested at low tide.

“Tết hasn’t been as much fun since they banned fireworks, after the local authorities set off a twenty-foot-high rocket,” Lâm lamented. “The explosion could be heard all over Hà Nội,” he added, flicking through a small scrapbook full of photographs. “Some houses were badly damaged.”

“We couldn’t grill it or roast it back then,” said Hương of her early-eighties teenage years in Hà Nội. “We lived in a very small apartment on the ground floor. If we had grilled the chicken, the neighbors would have smelled it, got suspicious, and informed on us. We had to contain the smell, cover the pot completely, cook it slowly, and close all the windows and doors.” Another friend, a secretary called Lý who worked for an import and export company, told me the same story. “We had money, a villa, and we lived in a rich part of Hà Nội, but we were rationed like everyone was back then. The only chickens we ever ate were sick, old, or had died naturally. You didn’t kill a healthy chicken. It was too valuable.”

Just one woman helped Nga at her stall. She’d do the menial tasks: clear the decks, wash the plates, and sling the leftover noodles and fish sauce into the gutter. If Nga had to shoot down the alley to grab a new fix of meat from the grill and the helper was busy, a regular customer would take over the helm, dish out the food, and handle the cash. I got talking to one woman who took over the helm one day. I asked her what her job was. “I’m an accountant. I work in a small office just around the corner. I’ve been coming here for years.”

Work, too, was better in Korea. The people were fun, odd, interesting, and tough. To quote P. J. O’Rourke, “They don’t like anyone who isn’t Korean, and they don’t like each other all that much, either. They’re hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards.” Or, “The Irish of Asia.” Everything worked in Korea. In Hà Nội, everything was broken. Once repaired, things would work for a short time until they broke all over again. And the food. Oh, the food. I adored Korean food.

Bún chả is a northern specialty, and here I was taking this French-Lao Việt Kiều, with a southern bias, into uncharted territory. After her six-month stint in Sài Gòn working for a Francophone education project, a remnant of a faded empire the French refused to believe was over, Sophie’s job had moved north. She’d only been in Hà Nội for a month or so. Her mother had been more disappointed about the move north than Sophie was, and I found out some years later that her mother had given her one piece of advice (really more of a threat) before she headed north. “Whatever you do, don’t bring back a Hanoian.” This advice was not uncommon among a diaspora community that had known war.

What was the point of cooking at home? Street food was always readily available. We were surrounded by the stuff. Not only that, but it was actually more expensive to cook at home than to eat the same stuff out on the street. Last, and most important, we simply couldn’t match the food on the street with anything we could rustle up at home. We weren’t good enough cooks, and we didn’t have the time. Vietnamese food, most of it, involves a lot of preparation. Sometimes it’s cooked quickly, sometimes it’s cooked for a long time, but in either case the preparation is always lengthy. And sometimes the cleanup operation is just as lengthy, too.

I had done the fresh cobra blood thing, eaten a still-beating heart, drunk snake bile, ingested snake bones and snake penis whiskey, the whole seven, eight, nine courses. It was more of a challenge than a pleasure—a rite of passage for the dumb twentysomething in Việt Nam. However, my only residing memories of those evenings (five or six in total, I am ashamed to say) are as follows: First and foremost, the look of utter horror on Nghĩa’s face as our group of eight foreigners proceeded to get stupidly wasted, blood pouring down our faces, like amateur thespians doing Dracula, badly. Nghĩa, one of my first-ever students, the one who had first thrust a uterus in front of me, had recommended the place in Gia Lâm (“It’s better than the famous one. There are more animals to choose from”), but he didn’t touch a drop of the crazy juice all night. He drank a single bottle of room-temperature Heineken beer. Second, the shakes. The morning after one of these foul, debauched nights, I woke up shaking. Not the DTs. This was different, something new and unexpected. It was as if someone had lit a fuse inside my arteries. They were on fire. I drove down to Mạc Đĩnh Chi Street to meet Frank, my motorbike-riding instructor. “Oh, you’ve been poisoned,” he said nonchalantly, like a bush doctor brushing off a patient with an inconsequential crocodile bite. “What snake did you eat?” “A cobra. A big one,” I replied, the shock of what he’d said only just beginning to sink in. “Have you spoken to...

Phở has no place on the poncey tables of nouvelle cuisine restaurants that play chamber music, nor in the “ethnic” section of the Hilton breakfast buffet. It’s the single-dish spots like Phở Thìn, not seven hundred yards’ walk from the four-star Hilton Hà Nội Opera Hotel, that had that vibe nailed through the floor. The beauty of single-dish specialization is a point worth laboring, so I will do so again, and not for the last time. If the place you’re thinking of eating at serves only one dish, looks like it hasn’t seen a lick of paint since Hồ Chí Minh popped his clogs, and is still in business, then the likelihood is that people eat there in numbers.

I had a flash of how I had felt, once upon a distant time, about eating on the street for the first time. It’s just not something you dive into, free of inhibition, shedding all cultural baggage like you’d wipe clean a table. You needed to ease yourself in.

She picked up her basket, pulled up a seat next to us, and asked, “Would you like some trứng vịt lộn?” She opened the basket to reveal a set of eggcups, teaspoons, some herbs, and a dozen or more large white duck eggs. Specifically, duck fetus eggs. Trứng vịt lộn is one of the more feared dishes in Việt Nam, because, well, it’s disgusting—unless consuming the crunchy bones of a visibly half-grown fetus appeals to you. While it does, in fact, appeal to many, many Vietnamese, this dish turns the stomach of most visitors like a tumble dryer on turbo-spin mode. Like the Philippine dish balut, a rising foodie-hipster favorite, it’s a shell with a bit of egg, a bit of half-grown duck, some feathers, a beak, and veins. It’s a gross-out on a par with tiết canh, raw duck’s blood in a bowl with chopped peanuts, which I’d had once. It had been like eating a nosebleed. A huge one.

It’s “Chí,” not “Em.” Chí is the more respectful term for females; Em is not respectful, and has an unpleasant under-meaning, as if the person using the term could do whatever he wanted to the “Em.” Sophie was never ever addressed as “Em” in Sài Gòn, not once in all our six years. God forgive the poor Hanoian male who would ever call her “Em,” which they did, constantly. Hanoian males address every young (or not so young, but reasonably attractive) female as “Em.” Advice to Hanoian males: you want to piss off my missus, just carry on the way you are. The wrath will be swift, and straight to the nuts. I knew one expat who had recently relocated from Hà Nội to Sài Gòn and was told in no uncertain terms to clean up after he’d chucked his tissue and lemons on the floor. He was just following Hà Nội tradition, but the staff was not amused. The shouts of “Em ơi”—think of it like aggressively snapping your fingers at a waiter—didn’t go down too well, either. While he wasn’t ejected from the establishment, it was clear he wouldn’t be welcomed back, either.

Sài Gòn has two seasons: wet and dry. It’s always hot, and sometimes very hot. This changes the way you appreciate phở in the south. It’s never a dish to simply warm you up. It’s something to savor.

I’d never put herbs in a phở before in my life. Sophie had never not put herbs in a phở in her life, until she moved to Hà Nội. She had a smug, “After all these years of you inflicting that Hà Nội crap on me, I’m gonna show you what’s what” look on her face. I knew I was beaten before I took my first taste. I wasn’t beaten by the surroundings. I never took to them. I like my grubby wee back alley joints. However, I was realist enough to know it all comes down to the food, and Phở Hoa Pasteur, on that day, in September 2001, blew every bowl of phở I’d ever had previously clean out of the soup vat. Sorry, Hà Nội. I know you won’t like this passage of my book. We had some great times together, but on that day I dumped you for that prize-winning bitch down south.

One of the most striking differences we’d noticed as a mixed-race couple in Sài Gòn compared to Hà Nội was the daily lack of stares and pointing. We weren’t so odd after all. We were almost normal. People ignored us. I recalled how we’d previously dealt with the situation in Hà Nội. “She’s beautiful,” said one of a group of young men in a watch shop talking about Sophie. “Yeah, she’s Korean,” said another. “She can’t be Vietnamese,” said the third. This is the thing when you’re a foreigner—or not really a foreigner, but a Việt Kiều, and you understand the lingo, but people think you don’t. The Vietnamese, and Hanoians in particular, have no shame in talking about you right in front of your face as if you don’t exist.

Occasionally when we went out to a street restaurant, or a choked Vietnamese hangar-style number with not a foreigner in sight, and the stares began to bite, Sophie would pretend to be Korean or Japanese. Anything but Vina. I could get by well enough in Vietnamese to explain that she was not of these parts and that I’d be ordering the nosh. We would instantly get far better service. If the staff thought that we were a Korean-European couple, we figured, they also thought that we had more money and would leave a bigger tip. It also put people off the scent. Sophie would always get the same questions: “Where are you from? What’s your name? No, your real name, your Vietnamese name? How come you grew up abroad?” The implication being, her parents were traitors to the glorious communist revolution, and that she was stained with the same curse.

The Hẻm Hoà Hưng market scythed a path down one concrete alleyway, midway along Hoà Hưng. In all, the market was little more than one hundred yards long. At the entry point were fruit sellers, vegetable stands, and butchers spread out to the main street, because there wasn’t enough space along the alley itself, especially at the weekend when the chợ (market) would double in size. If you want to really discover Việt Nam, it’s here in the dungeons, crannies, and sewer pipes of alleyway markets, like that on Hẻm Hoà Hưng, that you’ll find it. Not in the big brash markets of Sài Gòn, like Bến Thành. Nor in backpacker-land around Phạm Ngũ Lão Street, filled with dreadlocked travelers eating banana pancakes, trying hard to find themselves in budget accommodations. Nor will you find it on the slick and snazzy Đồng Khoi Street, nor on any number of central Sài Gòn thoroughfares. If I could ever say I discovered Việt Nam, it was on the Hẻm, specifically Hẻm 83 Hoà Hưng, where I really got to know the food makers of Sài Gòn. Hẻm 83 was a normal market, one of a slew in Sài Gòn, but it was our market, close to home.

This is possibly the most sugary pork broth in all of southern Việt Nam, which can be explained in part by its origins. The roots of this dish stretch across the border to Cambodia, where sugar-infused soups are ubiquitous on the boulevards of Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese often call the dish Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang (Nam Vang is what the Vietnamese call Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital) to recognize the soup’s source. Chinese Cambodians purportedly brought the dish to Việt Nam. And, as is ever the way, the Vietnamese got their boots on and made it their own. What was, once upon a time, a simple, slightly sweet Cambodian pork stock noodle soup, the Vinas pimped out with an outrageous number of options: congealed pig’s blood, squid, pork, offal, prawns, caramelized shallots, lettuce. You can even have it without stock, or “dry.” (I always went with “wet” myself.) As Vietnamese cookbook author Andrea Nguyễn says, “Hủ tiếu is the extreme have-it-your-way Vietnamese food experience.” There is also a rarer variant, hủ tiếu Mỹ Tho. Mỹ Tho is a hick town an hour or two south of Sài Gòn, in the Mekong Delta’s Tiền Giang province. This version lacks the Cambodian namesake’s sweetness, but it does boast a sizable added punch in the form of a whole pork knuckle, planted like an islet in a soup sea. I prefer the Vietnamese-Cambodian style of Miss Phạm’s hủ tiếu.

When I first started visiting Miss Phạm, I’d ask for “the works,” but I soon learned to order without the more unsavory parts of the pig, or the lòng, as they’re called in Vietnamese—the intestines and crunchy bits.

Bánh xèo needed to be devoured as soon as it hit the plate. There was never any waiting for late dinner arrivals, prayers, or the shuffling of chairs. You needed to leave the civilities at home. None of the “Oh no, please, you start,” or “Oh no, please, you should try it first.” Stop it right there. Dive in. A bánh xèo pancake should be crispy on the outside and ever so slightly moist on the inside. Leave it hanging around too long and you’ve got a soggy crepe on your hands.

Inside the car, the driver had inserted THE TAPE. I knew THE TAPE. I knew THE TAPE well. My translator, a student called Huyền who sat in the back of the car, knew THE TAPE, too. In cafés. In bars. If it weren’t for whiskey, beer, and devilish homemade spirits, when THE TAPE came on you could be forgiven for thinking you’d arrived in a waiting room halfway to purgatory. The advice I have for you, if you ever find yourself in the presence of THE TAPE, is firstly to leave. Don’t let that musical thumbprint plant itself inside your brain. You will never be rid of it. I speak as one who suffers. If, for whatever reason, you cannot leave, locate the speakers and position yourself as far away from them as possible. And if there’s a little bit of the terrorist in you, carry scissors at all times and find wires to snip. Any wires. Just make it stop. And it doesn’t matter where you are in Việt Nam, THE TAPE has legs. It will follow you. THE TAPE is a well-known commodity within the expat community. One blogger, Michael Sieburg, wrote about it. He even considered setting up a charity to aid the listening public, writing: My co-worker has decided to yet again play THE TAPE. Anyone living in Sài Gòn knows what I’m talking about. Go to a pool hall, a coffee shop, ride a bus to Mũi Né, walk into a bookstore, anywhere you go, you hear it. It’s the one tape with Western music that everyone has. Everyone. The Eagles. The Carpenters. Richard Marx. “Unbreak My Heart” . . . People here really...

“Tía tô is so easy. It survives the rain with no protection from nets or glass. And there’s always a market for it.” Tía tô (known in the west as red perilla) is commonly found on side plates at bún chả and bún ốc stalls. It’s purple and green and has a big, earthy flavor. It sparkles when dunked in fish sauce and munched with spades of noodles.

Could she, the most famous cook of Tây Ninh, possibly of all Việt Nam, ever envisage Vietnamese food without herbs? I persisted. I wanted—needed—an answer. Cô Ba considered. “No. No way. Take away the herbs and it’s not Vietnamese food anymore. Everything that goes with this dish makes the dish. The meat is secondary. It’s all about the herbs. Vietnamese food is nothing without the herbs.” Green smoke, brimstone, floating Buddhas, swiveling swords, long white wispy beards, warm Bia Hà Nội, pumpkin seeds, and nước mắm all collided inside my brain. Cô Ba had spoken. And, I agreed. One hundred and ten percent. Vietnamese food is nothing without herbs. Yes, there are intestines, wombs, half-grown duck eggs, bear-bile-injected drinks, chicken feet, scorpions, “countryside” rats, crocodiles, sparrows, squirrels, and snakes, but shock value, freakishness, and the offcuts end of the Vietnamese culinary canon all sit squarely at the fringes; they’re not the main course in this magnificent country. At the heart of Vietnamese food are herbs, not fish sauce, not offal, not the freak show menu items. The single thing that alters, distinguishes, and sets Vietnamese apart from Thai, Cambodian, Lao, or any other Southeast Asian cuisine is the presence and abundance of herbs. Simple, beautiful, freshly cut herbs, from the swamps, hedgerows, gardens, bushes, woods, and jungles of this incredible, food-filled country.

I remarked that in Việt Nam, there was always something about a male chef busy digging into a vat of mì hoành thánh with a cigarette dangling between his lips that inspired my confidence. Mr. Sơn told me I was not alone in that. “I don’t know why, but it’s usually men who cook mì hoành thánh,” he said. “It seems to be more suited to men cooking it for some reason. Customers expect to see a man at a mì hoành thánh stall.” Just as I have never seen a man serve bánh cuốn, I think it would surprise and unsettle me to see a man slopping out the flimsy rice pancakes, not that it should.

“Everything is fresh. I have no secrets to how I make a good bánh mì. The key thing is good ingredients and freshness. If Big C has a promotion on, I’ll buy from there,” she said, referring to the vast supermarket on Tô Hiến Thành Street, just a five-minute motorbike ride away. “Otherwise, I always buy from Hòa Hưng market on CMT8. Everyone knows that I never use any chemicals.” Here was yet another Vietnamese conundrum. No one admitted to using “chemicals,” meaning flavor enhancers or substitutes of any kind. Chinese substitutes were especially suspect, as was anything Chinese, in general. And yet everyone said the practice was rife. So who, I wondered, was doing it? The answer was everyone else, but not me, and not my family. Maybe that woman down the road. “My customers are all regulars. They know I choose the best meat and it’s always fresh and clean, and I only use pâté made by Vissan,” she said, referring to the meat products company based in Sài Gòn’s Bình Thạnh district.

She had a dark mark on her ankle, like a bruise, but it wasn’t. It was a “Sài Gòn tattoo”—the telltale patch of flesh that had been burnt on contact with a motorbike exhaust pipe. A rite of passage for almost every woman in a hot country who took up motorbike driving for the first time, as they were more used to (a) showing their ankles and (b) taking the rear seat on the family runaround.