I realise I am kind of resurrecting this blog from the grave having not updated it in a long time (did that sound like I’m blogging as a dead person?). However writing these words while back in the UK for a few months, its amazing how nostalgia spurs you into action, making you appreciate things that you didn’t consider the value of before. This post has been itching to fly for five months and was only completed today. There’s so much good food on the Hanoi streets and I would be stupid to ignore it any longer. Lets eat.

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You wont find a fitter sea critter fritter.

Vietnam is a land of cakes, yet not all of them are sweet.

You may have noticed that lot of Vietnamese dishes are preceded by the word ‘Bánh’, to which ‘cake’ is the closest translation. The word is not used exclusively for dessert dishes as is normally the case in the West. other examples include Bánh cuốn, Bánh mì (more on these later) The featured dish today is a ‘Bánh’ of the shellfish kind: shrimp cakes, a cake that Hanoians can be justly proud of.

A drive on my motorbike up a left-turning on Xuân Diệu road (a.k.a. the ‘Beverly Hills’ of Hanoi) leads to a more sedate bank of West Lake complete with a temple and a long line of Bánh Tôm joints. When they all group together like this, you know you’re in a good place. Maybe Milton Friedman was right, such intense competition in a confined area has usually meant higher quality.

Choosing a good place to eat is always a difficult task when there are so many stalls selling the same thing. I normally walk past the closest restaurant to the most popular road leading to the area. Those places do well enough with passing trade and as such do not need to maintain loyal customers through the quality of their food. Of course guidebooks will tell you to go to the place most popular with the locals, but that doesn’t account for change. How do customers manage to leave the complacent and overrated places behind if they are the ones people are always told to go to?

Crunchy and chewy

I digress. Rocking up with a friend, we choose the one with the right combination of friendly staff, cleanliness and furiously eating people. We order several and eat them with dipping sauce, coriander and wash it down with a beer. The fritters are fried with the shell still on… Crun-chewy. There are still those who try and take the shell off while eating these, but I would also bet good money that the same people watch this programme.

After a hearty pit stop at the fried crustacean station, stroll outside, gaze at the lake view and sigh. You’ve just found the quietest spot in Hanoi.

Also check out Piklet & pie’s amazing feature on the same dish.

Address: Close to Phủ Tây Hồ, Bến Nhật Bản street, Tây Hồ district

Price: 6,000 VND per cake

Above, picked chilli. Below, rendered pork fat in dried chilli.

I’ve been dying to write about Vietnamese food from the other cities aside from Hanoi and a recent trip to the above places gave me this opportunity. This is more exciting as Hanoi is incredibly homogenous in culinary terms. If you love your Phở and Bun Cha then you’re in heaven, these places are absolutely everywhere. If however you like a multitude of choices for your evening Vietnamese street food then options are pretty limited as far as capital cities go.

My inner child was definitely in a sweet shop as a drove into Hue and Hoi An. These cities on the mid-eastern coast are known for their Royal cuisine – small dishes named after and appealing to men and women of repute from days gone by.

We arrived into Hội An at an awkward time –  Tet (or Lunar new year) celebrations were in full swing, and half the residents of the town had left to be with families in the outlying provinces. As such, eating options were limited and the place seemed populated by equally bemused tourists walking through what looked like the unopened Asia section of Disneyworld. Looking for something to sustain us as we prepared to traverse the Hai Van pass on the three hour bike trip to Hue, I stumbled upon a Cao lầu place off a main street and walked in.

Cao lầu can you go?

In Vietnam, if you’re remarking about ‘going out for a Cao lầu’, you’re going out to have an expensive and privileged time. Such was the high status given to this dish in previous times. I received initial bad press about Cao Lầu – that it was greasy and had given my girlfriend a bad tummy. But those fears dissipated as I tucked into my first bowl. Tender slices of pork belly melted alongside mint, coriander and beansprouts. But the noodles themselves were the standout performer – nutty and udon-like, their rough texture clung to the densely-flavoured broth and had just enough bite to satisfy. I destroyed the bowl in two minutes before ordering another. Prior to paying, the owner said I was đẹp chai (handsome). As far as I could tell from the bill, this self-esteem boost didn’t form part of the bill.

The motorbike drive up to Huế got such a good press in Top Gear – the presenter described it as ‘the best coastal road in the world’. It certainly was dramatic – the mist at the top lent the mountain an apocalyptic feel. And driving on cliffs while looking down into the sea made you wonder which car advert you were inadvertently in. It was an exciting drive, but the glamour quickly faded as rain fell on the potholed lanes past the mountain and we swerved to avoid blasthorned coaches, deep mud and lethargic water buffalo.

Four hours later, we arrived into Huế shivering and delirious. Before visiting the Forbidden city the next day, the Bún bò Huế in my stomach was the perfect tonic to the damp and grey weather.

The real thing.

I confess I’d already eaten this in Hanoi. But as always with these things, there’s no substitute for the real thing. the noodles in pork and beef broth were good enough but the beef meatballs put the dish on a next level. It was also served with a side condiment of pieces of rendered pork fat (similar to pork scratchings) covered in dry chilli.

A good final meal of the holiday. Heck, a good final meal.

On our last day in Đà Nẵng before flying back to Hanoi we couldn’t leave without trying Mì Quảng, a dish we had seen on street stall signs all the way from Hội An up to Huế. As a regional specialty it represented well. Bone-in stewed chicken with dense broth on noodles with bean sprouts, shallots, peanuts and interestingly, rice crackers to top it off. The side condiment was a sweet chilli jam I’ve not encountered before in Vietnam. And yes, it was delicious.

The holiday was beset by non-food-related illnesses and other mishaps, but the food was one of the highlights of the trip. For most of my life I’ve lived in cosmopolitan cities where world food was easily accessible.

But sometimes its best to meet food in its natural habitat, made by those who have no clue (or interest) on how to make anything else. You can’t get more authentic than that.

Spending my first holiday period away from the wind-chilled city of Manchester, I decided to visit some friends in Kuala Lumpur over the festive season. This culminated in a mammoth food-and-alcohol-fuelled Christmas day. Not so different from the Western Christmas experience then.

Actually, in other ways, it was. There is something immediately novel (and then disconcerting) about seeing images of Santa everywhere whilst nursing a sunburnt neck. On one muggy Malaysian morning I woke up to a Bhaṅgṛā version of ‘Jingle bells’. Another time, I walked through one of K.L.’s many malls in air conditioned comfort and serenaded by carol singers at every turn.  Surely ‘White Christmas’ can only work when sung through icy breath?

The country is made up of Chinese, Malay and Indian races who have lived with each other for long enough to teach the West a thing or two about multiculturalism. Where else would you see a Chinese girl eating a curry with a wonton soup starter? Or a middle-aged Chinese lady arm-in-arm with a middle-aged Indian lady? These people might as well be nodding their heads to Salif Keita on the way to an Jay Chou concert. In this country, even I look racist.

And as to be expected, this also means that the food is amazing. I was lucky enough to attend bunch of open houses on Jesus’ birthday. An open house is a day-long opening of your house to guests, with a large platter of dishes on display. The idea is that guests are free to come and go as they please, lending a more informal slant to proceedings when compared to the dinner parties we’re used to in the west. On a bonus note there isn’t a Norah Jones cd in sight.

Walk into any over 30s dinner party in England and Norah Jones will be on the Ipod speakers. FACT.

How was the food? Malaysian curries are typically drier than their Indian counterparts which means their flavour is often more concentrated. This consistency means eating with your hands (as most Malaysians do) makes a lot of sense.

I wolfed down Beef Rendang (a curry cooked with coconut milk), Nasi Lemak (a dry fish curry with rice wrapped in banana leaf with peanuts and boiled egg) and very oily chicken curry.

Nasi Lemak: My Favourite

I had so much food that the day eventually became a culinary blur, myself  being dragged from house to house, food placed in front of me and before I knew it my mouth was chewing. I wasn’t complaining – it was like being forced line-after-line of pure uncut cocaine by smiling Malaysian mothers. Only the occasional reggae version of ‘Silent Night’ interrupted the sound of eating.

Beef Rendang

Thosai (rice flour pancake) with Prawn Sambal, Coconut Chutney and Coconut Rice

Indian sweets make a common appearance at open houses.

Christmas day formally ended at 6am at a Christian household amongst a hazy backdrop of whiskey, Bhaṅgṛā and The Bee Gees. But that’s another story for another time.

Dig in.

A slightly unusual dish this time.

Hanoi is a city that adapts to the seasons. As it enters Autumn, the temperature drops to bearable levels, people dust off their winter jackets, and double denim makes its annual comeback.

But no more evident than in changes in food. Delicious smelling fried banana, taro and sweet potato stalls start competing for space on the already packed pavements. And despite the temperature remaining a balmy 21 degrees C, Men wrap up warm and forsake the usual iced coffee with condensed milk (Ca Phe Nâu Đá) in favour of hot lipton tea. Who needs a calender?

It was around this time that a Vietnamese friend invited me to have Chả rươi as it is in season at this time. ‘What is this?’ I enquired. The strain was visible on her face as her elementary English struggled to find the euphemisms and tact needed to convince me of its merits.

After a few of her words and some googling, here’s what I found out.

Chả rươi is the meat of a type of worm found close to the shore, particularly in low-tide conditions. They are only available for a month at this time of year, and stalls often pop-up specialising in this before disappearing for the rest of the year. The worms (sometimes referred to as fly eggs) are often cooked into an omellete or mixed with ground pork into a patty and fried.

Is your mouth watering yet?

Chả rươi

Here we had the former mentioned dish with a side of herby salad and a dipping sauce. You know what? It wasn’t that bad. At first it was difficult to taste the difference between the egg and the rươi, but then I realised that it was because the worms tasted so pork-like that my brain assumed there to be pork present.

We ate just off the corner of Hàng Rươi, astonishingly this street was so well known for the dish that the authorities named the street after it. Heck, that’s like eating a burger on Burger Street in the states (if such a place exists, this was the only one I found).

If you’re living in Hanoi and of a strong mind and constitution, then I urge you to try it before it disappears for another year. It could be too late to try this dish for another year but if you’re interested then check it out on the address below, the late bird might still have time to catch the worm.

Price per small omelette:  10,000 VND

Location: look for the stalls on the corner of Hàng Rươi and Hàng Lược.

A highly-addictive white substance popular with the youth.

My dad was a Chinese restaurant chef in Manchester in the early Nineties (hopefully you’ll have a mental image of garlic frying to the sound of M People). If you’ve ever had Cantonese food in the West, you’ll know that the food is both gloopy and delicious. But not tasty in a ‘these ingredients work really well together’ kind of way, but more that you can’t physically stop eating and you don’t know why. Its the same feeling you get when eating certain types of potato crisps, that tingling in your mouth after you’ve finished the family-sized bag alone in your room. The snack-guilt realisation that this bag has replaced one of your daily meals. Your stomach a pit of dehydrated-potato despair.

My dad’s food owed its shiny thick sauces to the widespread use of cornstarch and its savoury addictiveness to Monosodium Glutamate (or MSG for short). It’s a flavour enhancer by trade, which presumably means that it will make water taste more watery when added.

My mum never really used the stuff – she said it was for cooks who couldn’t cook. And so opened the gulf in culinary relations between my parents. One side of the wall was the additive-ridden and chilli spiked, where go-go girls armed with a mysterious white substance would show you a good time before running off and leaving you with a slight headache. The other side used humble ingredients intelligently but simply, paying more attention to the balance of different textures and flavours. The result was honest homely fare.

From this description it is obvious as to which school I subscribed to. Which is why I was excited when I learnt the words ‘khong me jing’ here which means ‘no MSG’. It’s an additive ubiquitous in Hanoi – shops here sell piles of the salt-like grain alongside sugared milk and instant noodles.

Most Phở here is converted to the chemical. As you order a bowl of noodles, MSG is added to your bowl as they pour the beef broth over the top. So the next time I had it on the street I used my newly-learnt words and sat down accomplised, triumphant as the lady nodded her understanding and furnished me a steaming bowl.

The broth was delicious. The beef stock oozing flavour, combining with star anise and fish sauce to form the tight rhythm-section of your favourite song. Like music to my mouth. I finished the bowl with zest and looked forward to reclaiming my romantic view of Vietnam as a place of delicious traditional food made from natural ingredients.

As I went to pay, I noticed that the same lady who served me was busy ladling large spoons of a salt-like substance directly into the beef stockpot. There was MSG in there all along. Her face was expressionless as money exchanged hands, and I walked away wondering which other of my favourite dishes here have also had the equivalent of steroids pumped into their perma-tanned arms.

Not an English motorway station in sight.

A quick one this.

In a bit of a rush between a 12-hour-day and drinks I stopped off to grab a few quick bites at the side of the road on my main street of Đội Cấn. I had driven by this stall several times on the way to work and thought the same thing every time. They look like Cornish Pasties, an English hand-held snack of meat and potatoes in a pastry thick enough to withstand accidental blows whilst stuck in a harsh English coal mine.

Called ‘pillow cake’ in Vietnamese, these pastries were made from a thinner dough akin to an Indian samosa. Maybe the Vietnamese mines had better conditions in those days. Either way I appreciated the lightness of the pastry with this much oil involved. It was filled with pork and glass noodles and probably other things but they were long gone before I had the chance to inspect the contents my mouth. Comes served with the mint and the lettuce and the spicy dipping sauce and your own saliva.

Where: Close to the corner of Đội Cấn and Liễu Giai.

How much: 6,000 VND each.

My early experiences of Asian vegetarian food revolved around going to the local Manchester Buddhist temple in my teens. A hive of activity, the temple was a regular gathering spot for the Manchester Vietnamese community and housed two communal kitchens where volunteers cooked for up to a hundred people. The food was normally excellent. But at one particular religious event, every plate I tried turned out to be meat-free. And it wasn’t in an obvious way – every dish dressed smartly like it was about to infiltrate a brando-sponsored banquet. The most reviled was the battered wheat protein that looked like chicken nuggets to my youthful eyes, but in reality tasted like deep-fried plastic.

A devotee of the triple religion, Mum explained that it was customary on certain days to eat only vegetarian food. Presumably this was done as an expression of virtue and self-restraint but as a devout carnivore, my own experience was more of confusion, deceit and misfortune.

And that’s how I left that issue. Of course I was to eat tofu and other vegetarian-geared products afterwards at university but these foods were clearly marked in trendy packaging, marked with words that I could actually read.

It was therefore with trepidation that I approached my colleague’s suggestion of Cơm Chay as a post-work dinner. I wasn’t up for sampling more unfulfilling slop.

Luckily, I’ve discovered that when you are aware of what you are eating, you normally tend to enjoy it. The food was excellent. The ‘beef’ in ginger (see top picture) was so good it tasted better than most beef cutlets at my local English supermarket.

So good that I dragged a fellow blogger there (who was also a fellow sceptic) to try it out for herself. Unfortunately, the second visit to the same restaurant was a more disappointing experience. Lukewarm food coming out superstitiously early is never a good sign. My fellow diner did however find the ‘pork skewers’ particularly good.

Still, devoid of lies and religious baggage, I’m sold on the wheat-protein delights. Fellow westerners, drop the hippie misconceptions about soya-based food and give it a go. Do you see what an open-minded meat-eater I am?

Where: 79A Tran Hung Dao, Hoàn Kiếm

How much: 120,000 VND

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ear-to-tail cuisine.

I often get caught out in the monsoon rain wearing only a T-shirt and sandals. It normally means a wet end to my day, which loses out a swirl of American sitcoms and sickly sweet Vietnamese snacks.

Not this time. Out on Ngoc Ha market as God began sobbing, I took shelter under an unassuming gazebo which housed what looked like a salad stall. Deprived of vitamins from my love of Bún chả (more on this later) I had made flirty eyes towards this exact stall the day before, promising myself I would get more acquainted with it when I had a chance.

“It seems the heavens bought us together to become one.” I said.

“Chào em.” came the reply.

Being trapped by the rain isn't always a bad thing.

In Britain, to make a pigs ear of something is to totally mess it up. ‘You’ve made a pig’s ear of my cucumber sandwich!’ is how we scolded our servants, before finishing off our tea and heading out for a spot of tennis.

In Vietnam they invert the equation.

The ear is julienned and tossed in toasted rice flour. Another product is made by pulverizing the ear and leaving it to ferment wrapped in banana leaves. Both concoctions are paired with thinly-sliced carrot, coriander and lettuce leaves and wrapped in thin rice-paper. The nem is served with a spicy dipping sauce with peanuts inside.

The result: It was like the Dillinger Escape Plan had gatecrashed a party in my mouth. There was contrasting call-and-response between cartilage-crunch and the fermented chewiness of both pig’s ears. The mellow jazz of the rice paper quickly giving way to the piquant-scream of the dipping sauce. I ate in 13/8 timing and it was good.

A few mumbles and lots of pointing later, out came these:

Two parcels of pork meat cooked with wood-ear mushrooms. The outer-rice had the consistency of jelly, making a fine contrast with the juicy interior. I have no idea what they are called. If any Vietnamese people are reading, I’d appreciate the knowledge.

Crun-chewy.

I couldn’t go without sampling the salad, which turned out to be a similar mix to the Nem but in salad form. Also delicious.

The women who run the stall happened to be very nice people who let me take enough pictures to make it look like a murder scene. I thoroughly recommend you give them a visit sometime. Monsoon weather is optional.

I didn’t plan to eat here, just played it by ear. In order to find the best food in Hanoi, you need to keep your ears to the ground. They may be made from the ears, but they certainly bought home the bacon. You can’t make a silk purse of a sow’s ear but who cares when its this tasty?

Where: 14 Cho Ngọc Hà, Ba Dinh

How much: 40,000 VND (probably includes a foreigner mark-up, but worth it.)

This isn't my classroom. There's too much natural light.

At the school where I teach, I have the provilage (or the convilage) of teaching Vietnamese people of all ages and abilities. On weekdays I am teaching adults how to say ‘pool’ instead of ‘poo’ and teenagers how to gossip about their friends. By the weekend I am trying to get a 4-year-old to identify an apple from a pear. I know of few other professions where you are required to engage with such a multitude of age groups for such a sustained period of time. As such, you are required to adapt your teaching to the audience. Getting my ten-year-olds to talk about their job is out of bounds, as is getting my adults to sing ‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes’.

I’m sure there are a hundred blogs on teaching English as a foreign language so I’ll keep this one fairly niche.

Teaching kindergarten children on some days gives me a hundred reasons to have a child myself. On other days well, what’s the opposite of giving birth?Overall I suffer from an overdose of cute. A Vietnamese person looks 16 until the age of 35. Small and cute, that’s what we’re good at until at least the mid-life crisis. By that logic and by comparison, your average South-east Asian child boasts a dangerous supply of cuteness. Just watch this video.

The teenagers? Well throw out all misconceptions you may have picked up over the years from studying alongside Chinese students. They are the same the world over. Back in my day, teenagers used to, well, not exactly respect the teachers but… well you would expect  at least the oriental students to be well-behaved. Rising through the ranks of primary and secondary school, I was this living, breathing, eating stereotype. I was a fucking angel and these Vietnamese kids are destroying all my hard work.

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On a more serious note, the more I teach here, the more I notice that Vietnamese-looking westerners have a bad reputation in the ESL (English for speakers of other languages) world. They are less likely to be hired and when they are, they tend to get lower wages than their white counterparts.  I can understand to some extent that from a teaching perspective you don’t want the teacher to be a native Vietnamese speaker, as their English pronunciation is likely to be skewed. However the primary reason for this inequality is the perception among paying parents that we make inferior teachers.

Luckily, I’m at a school where such reverse-racism is tackled in a professional manner, which has given me the opportunity and confidence to teach the way I want. At the start of my courses, students normally respond to me with curiosity (“Why you look Vietnamee?”) followed by denial, anger (see previous post),  fear, bargaining and finally, acceptance.

The final stage is the most important and the most reassuring. It takes a while but finally the students come to value your teaching and as such, elevate its importance above your skin colour. I’m sure there are Australian Indians, Afro-Americans who have been through this themselves. Hopefully our experiences will go some way towards dispelling such widespread prejudice towards non-white English teachers.

These are pretty much guaranteed not to give you lung cancer.

Coming from the capitalist west, I initially wondered why speciality food joints weren’t spread out more evenly over the city. Surely the competition at Phở cuốn street would be too much for some businesses to bear. I mean, can you imagine ten large supermarket chains having outlets next to each other? But as often with financial and economic matters, I was wrong. Every single one of these places is packed. Why? because the Hanoian mindset is the completely opposite way to how we think in the West. They decide what they want to eat before they’ve looked at the menu, before they’ve even left the house. It therefore makes sense for retailers to concentrate into areas known to serve these dishes in order to attract the most business.

I spend most of my idle time making mundane connections in languages. Like the other day when this guy on a motorbike looked at my rolled tobacco cigarette (rare in Hanoi) and called it a ‘thuốc lá cuốn’. My brain started to hurt as I formed a connection:

‘thuốc lá cuốn… Phở cuốn… so ‘cuốn’ must mean rolled!’

But I had no-one to hi-five.

Phở cuốn is medium-thick rice sheets rolled with minced beef and lettuce, coriander and a few other fresh herbs that I really learn the names of. Served alongside Nuoc Cham, it’s a really simple dish that seems to encapsulate the food here in Hanoi really well. Light, zingy and fresh tasting. Found throughout the city, Hanoians are justifiably proud of this dish.

After the meal, I couldn’t help but take the picture below. A common sight in a city where it is nearly always impossible to find the real thing.

Genuine Calven Klains

What: Phở cuốn

Where: 27 Truc Bach, Ba Dinh

How much: 30,000 VND