Miming for Bun

When you wander into a restaurant and can’t speak the local language then there is a short moment when you steel yourself for the interaction with the waiter, who in most cases, will look as confused as you. Bun Bo Nam Bo in Hanoi circumvents this great moment to test out your miming skills by serving a single, eponymous dish in its long, packed hallway of tables. Sit down and your beef noodle combination arrives before you can imagine what Marcel Marceau would do, if only he could escape from that glass box in time for lunch.

The servery out the front pumps out endless bowls of the beef-packed noodles, topped with crushed peanuts, slices of fresh carrot, paper thin wafers of papaya and a fistful of fresh bean shoots. A layer of greenery lies beneath the white bun. Despite the freshness of the vegie components, the beef shines through and dominates the dish. I don’t think that I’d be surprising anyone by saying that Hanoians love their meat front and centre of most dishes.

The eating hall has all the ambience of dark subway tunnel with patrons eating quickly enough to suggest that they know when the oncoming train will arrive. A mezzanine level seems tacked on above the fray, with a ceiling not more than four feet high. Underfoot lies a layer of banana leaves, discarded in the frenzied destruction of nem chua, small packages of cured pork.

Location: Bun Bo Nam Bo, 67 Hang Dieu St, Hanoi

Banh Mi Doner Kebab

I’ve had many a conversation with family and friends whether it is possible to combine the two of the world’s perfect foods, laksa and souvlaki, into a single ideal entity – souvlaksa – but still have not worked out the mechanics of keeping a noodle soup/garlic sauce mixture contained within a pita without resorting to either gel or foam. Herve This has not returned my rambling, incoherent emails. It was with much interest that I approached the banh mi doner kebab, imagining that somewhere in Hanoi, somebody else has been thinking along similar and no less ambitious lines.

Their crisp white toque was almost as impressive and bewildering as their rotating elephant’s foot of miscellaneous kebab meat. I’m still unsure what Germany’s greatest man of letters has to do with it at all but it seems to serve as an appropriately Faustian warning towards those who choose to sell their soul to street side meat barbecue.

The end product was just an average kebab, pork being the rotating meat in question. None of the banh mi’s freshness or crunch but with the addition of recently pickled red cabbage and mayonnaise.

Location: Banh Mi Doner Kebab joints are coincidentally located next to where foreigners in Hanoi do vast amounts of drinking: at the “Bia Hoi Corner” (Corner of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen) in the Old Quarter.

The Ribs of Sapa

My worthless superpower is the ability to step into any city in the world and find a joint that serves barbecued pork ribs. Sapa in Northern Vietnam is not a street food mecca but ribs were there to be unearthed, alongside the usual assortment of chicken parts and other innards prepped for the grill on the street just north of Sapa’s central market. The ribs had the heavy charcoal flavour that comes from a long period of rest in a sugar-packed marinade followed by a short and brutal blast over the coals.

One of the barbecue innovations that you see around Vietnam is superheating the charcoal barbecue with an electric fan. I never saw this in Cambodia (possibly as a result of extortionate electricity prices), but it seems to be more common in Thailand as well, especially as a technique for heating a charcoal-fuelled wok burner.

The Narrowest Karaoke Cafe in Hanoi

There is not much room for dancing but the acoustics kick ass. Hanoi, Vietnam.

Lao Cai Lager

The bugbear of all brewers is consistency. While most of Southeast Asia’s lagers are dull, watery and forgettable, they can’t be faulted on their brewing process. Every beer comes from the factory with a taste that is of invariable quality. For all the poor base ingredients and surplus of rice malt, Asia’s biggest breweries manage to churn out the same product ad infinitum. When you pop open your can of Anchor or Tiger or Singha, it will taste the same as the last one. Not remarkable but infinitely dependable.

Lao Cai Lager however manages to not place a heavy emphasis on regularity. The first bottle came out as the expected crisp bland lager. The second tasted like someone had dropped a sizeable chunk of rock candy into the bottle. The third was skunky and strange, possibly left out in the blazing sun for a few weeks. I didn’t make it to a fourth as things seemed to be progressing in a bad direction.

My theory is that there is no Lao Cai Brewery. Lao Cai, situated a few kilometres from the Chinese border, would make a great staging post for Chinese beer smuggling runs. The enterprising ale pirates then rebottle their contraband booty under their indigenous label as not to attract attention from the Vietnamese authorities. The perfectly unpredictable beer crime.

Alcohol by volume: 3.5%

Location: Lao Cai, Northern Vietnam.

Let’s consume ethnicity!

Each Sunday in Bac Ha in mountainous Sapa, Vietnam, subsistence farmers from the surrounding hills descend on the normally sleepy market to watch tourists perform feats of amateur ethnography and find new ways to trivialise their culture.

Local hilltribes get into their Sunday best to hit the market mostly for mod-cons and consumer durables: new lightbulbs, fabric printed in Flower Hmong patterns imported from Hanoi, kitchen implements, traditional musical instruments (above). At the entrance of the market is my favourite moment of staged authenticity: a photo booth where tourists can pose for a shot with their selection of garishly-dressed local women and children against an equally garishly printed waterfall backdrop. Travellers are then shuttled off into the nearest village so that they can capture the smiling local kids for posterity in their more authentic setting.

Because I feel uneasy treating subsistence farmers as a tourist attraction by virtue of their silly hats, I hit up the (mostly) ethnically Vietnamese vendors for food.

The weekend meat of choice seems to be slabs of incredibly fatty local pork. I don’t think that I’ve ever visited a market so pig-centric, with a long line of pork-only butchers displaying their cuts on a row of wooden trestles.

This little pig went to market. Belly seems to be the popular cut and butchers cut each slab into more manageable slices to order.

On the ready-to-eat front, I found a vendor selling these small disks of orange rice flour batter, deep fried until crispy on the outside but still chewy. The whole batter is infused with a mandarine/citrus flavour, giving them a slightly tart and sour edge as well as (I assume) their lurid orange color.

The market also does good business in live buffalo, the going rate reported to be around $600 per beast. There is much quiet discussion and consideration of each animal and very little hustle to indicate that a sale is actually taking place.

Location: Bac Ha Market runs on Sundays in Bac Ha, North of Lao Cai in Vietnam.

On the beaten path, Halong Bay

At Hang Dau Go (Wooden Stakes Cave) in Halong Bay

Drank in public

There’s two ways to enjoy beer. Firstly, the late and sorely-missed Michael Jackson in his apophthegmatically-titled Beer suggests that for proper close examination, beer is best enjoyed in the privacy of one’s own home, lest the neighbouring drinkers think that he or she is the sort of person that would be pompous enough to sniff at their glass of ale:

A gentle swirl disturbs the beer enough to release its aromatic compounds. This level of study is best pursued in the home, as serious swirling might easily be thought pretentious when conducted in a bar or restaurant.

Drinking at home alone however, tends to take on negative connotations rather than being the preserve of the connoisseur. If I told people that I spent my nights at home alone with my Little Creatures, they’d probably associate me with the wrong Michael Jackson. Some beers are meant to be savoured and considered. They are designed to be flavourful and thought-provoking but still best enjoyed in the second way, in public. I tend to think pretension be damned. Swirl your beer rampantly. Drink your Belgian lambic from a beer bong for all I care.

Of all the manifestations of public drinking, none are more out in the open than that of Vietnam’s bia hoi. For all the keg partys and beer gardens in the world, nothing is easier to find than a simple keg of bia hoi in any shopfront in Hanoi. Bia hoi is a beer designed to be drank in public and nowhere else. It’s simple and straightforward, comes only by the keg and relies on a huge informal network of shambolic streetside vendors for its success. Larger vendors have their fresh beer delivered daily by the factory, smaller vendors pick themselves up a keg as soon as theirs runs dry. The vendors themselves range from dedicated beer halls to little more than a keg on a stand and a collection of ankle-high plastic stools. Some have elaborate tapping systems for their kegs, others have a clear plastic hose that they suck upon to create a siphon.

A glass of bia hoi

The beer itself is so uncomplicated that it is almost transparent. It has the barest of effervescence, hops but a little hint of maltiness. The head is soapy and can barely be sustained long enough for it to arrive in front of you after the beer’s short journey from keg to your plastic stool.

Locations: Everywhere up north in Vietnam. Hanoi Bia Hoi has handy maps and reviews of various bia hoi joints around Hanoi. In the countryside, the big kegs of beer at the front of the stores are hard to miss.

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The Last Appetite

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