Stickyrice

Streets of Fire

 

There is fire on the streets of Hanoi.

It's beating down from above and reflecting back up from below. Temperatures are peaking in the capital and the midday walk to lunch is a scorcher. Hand fans are waving, umbrellas are shading folks from the sun and eyes peer out from cool, darkened cracks in the streetscape. There is a general reluctance to go out. Even the traffic is in a strange state of sedation in July.

But the heat's no reason to go hungry. If I collapse with heatstroke, I will do so on a full stomach.

A stomach stuffed with a specialty from Phu Ly, a town in Ha Nam province. This dish is just a regional variation on a theme really. Its foundation is pre-prepared sheets of banh cuon, a steamed rice pancake which can be eaten straight from the steamer all over Hanoi. Here the sheets are bought elsewhere, cut up into ribbons and loosened in a bowl with a bit of oil. Handfuls of moorish dried shallots are scattered amongst the white before porked grilled roadside is placed on top.

It's essentially bun cha meets banh cuon.

On the side is a basket of incredibly fresh mint and coriander and a dipping sauce consisting of fish sauce, vinegar, lime and fresh chilli which I doctor up myself at the table.

My table is next to the fire where fat fueled flames are licking over the curb, dangerously close to a line of motorbikes. My mercury rises and patches of perspiration develop on my shirt as this light, satisfying lunch slides down.

This place is hot on my list of current lunchtime favourites.

Lunch Money

One serve banh cuon, one iced tea - 20,000VND (USD$1.12, AUD$1.40)

Banh Cuon Phu Ly
64 Bich Cau
Dong Da District
Hanoi

Cow House

Red meat eaters salivate at the mere mention of this specialty beef house out on the dyke road continuation just beyond the Sofitel Plaza. It's packed solid for lunch and dinner seven days a week. I've been chowing down on the cow here for a solid five years or more and, as far as steak-houses go, I'd be shocked to find anything better anywhere in the capital.

Getting a berth at a table is the hard part. It's a bit dog-eat-dog to be honest as there's no system for making reservations nor a stroppy maitre de to muscle customers into line. Beady eyes, sharp elbows and a fast sprinting wide arse have more than once been deployed by this customer to mark some territory in this establishment. Thankfully it all runs smoothly thereafter.

There's a clear division of labour based on gender. Boys cook cows and girls serve them in this joint, the whole act overseen by a very astute couple who are never far away from the cash tin. The kitchen is smaller than the average home kitchen, yet six to eight boys clad in chef gear manage to bump around the grills, woks and salad prep area churning out dozens of plates an hour.

Bits of cow are slapped on all but the side plates of salad.

Because I haven't consulted my cuts of beef chart recently, I can't elaborate on exactly what the bits are. Let me just say that there are long rolls of beef stuffed with ham and melted cheese (bo cuon pho ma), there is diced beef stir-fried with pepper and onion (bo luc lac) and there is the good old standard beef steak with chips and bread to mop up the gravy (bi tet). These are the flag-bearers for me but the simple menu of photos (no prices!) exhibits many more beef dishes, including a spag bol (my y), and allows those of us with rudimentary Vietnamese to simply point to order.

This cow house is a place where meat eaters can congregate and rejoice!

Cow Tab

One serve pho cuon pho ma, one of bo luc lac, side plates of chips, salad and rice, several beers - around the 500,000VND mark (USD$29.20, AUD$36.20)...for four big eaters!

Chien Beo
192 Au Co
Nghi Tam

More Rural Bird

I keep getting these birds; chickens from the countryside or ga ta.

The last one came from Ha Tay. This latest one got its neck wrung and feathers plucked in Ninh Binh, a province 90 kms from the capital famous for limestone karsts rising up out of the ricefields. Not a bad place for a chook to grow up, I s'pose.

Anyway, said chook made its way to my freezer stuffed in the hatch under the seat of my mate's motorbike. It did look a bit wonky when I got it out and thawed it, as if it had been folded or something. Naughty disfigured chicken wouldn't sit straight on the oven tray. Kept falling over while I was dealing to it with the aromatics.

You see I'd thought I'd do a roast this time. Let me call it risky roast because I wasn't exactly sure how a scawny long legged fowl from the provinces of Vietnam would take to being rubbed with olive oil, garlic and lemongrass and shoved in a hot box with spuds for an hour or more. Most of these birds get boiled or grilled. I wasn't sure that the meat wouldn't end up as tough as a billy-goat's knee.

I had to be vigilant and I had to use aluminium foil for part of the cooking time. The result was well worth the risk. I cleavered the bird into pieces and surrounded them on the plate with sweet and normal potatoes. Ye olde feast ensued, drumsticks were brandished, bones flung about, tankards of wine swilled and spilled and wanton wenches pleasured.

Well, almost. Kind of.

Good Bird Soup

 

The Spot: North-west of the Old Quarter, within spitting distance of Truc Bach Lake and just up from the Chau Long market, this fine exponent of bird soup is directly opposite the Hanoi Cooking Centre (which incidentally had its official launch late last week). One of my favourite coffee hangouts is nearby...in fact so near I wheel my motorbike there afterwards. Nothing quite like good pho followed immediately after by an hour on the caffeine drip!

Space and Atmosphere: A jolly owner directs patrons to appropriate parking spots and collects the dong on the way out. He attempted a conversation in English with me, and despite his abstract pronunciation, I manage to gain full comprehension. Amazing what seven years in a classroom with Vietnamese students can do! The pho chain gang are ready at the serving station of this narrow space, which has walls papered with fantastic metallic floral contact. I think my textbooks were covered with the stuff in the 70's. Dusty plastic flower arrangements feature prominently and every unopened soft drink, beer and Hanoi vodka bottle is shelved against the floral walls, giving off some kind of trippy psychedelic vibe. The business altar above the back door is flashing with fairy lights.

Shopfront Style: Mixed messages are being conveyed here. Up high, there is pepsi sponsored signage promoting pho ga at a completely different address while below, the shop's yellow canopy advertises che, which they apparently flog at night. The latter has the correct address. Ignore the signs and look for the chickens!

 

Sticks, Condiments and Crockery: The chopsticks are shorter and with a more defined eating end than the industry standard sticks found in most pho joints. Old jam jars do nicely for the red sauce and garlic infused vinegar while the lime wedges are fully replenished on fancy orange tear-shaped plates. All in all things are spiffy in the condiments department, with smudges and smears kept to a minimum. A clean-freak is in the house somewhere!

Serving Station: A chopping block, various plastic containers of seasoning, mi chinh, lime leaf needles and stainless steel bowls and trays loaded up with bird bits for all tastes as well as plates of rare and corned beef for the pho purists...the big custom-made glass and steel cabinet is well set up for pho assembly, with the finishing touches of herbs and soup carried out by the ladler on the street.

Meat Generosity: A generous handful of quality bird from the thigh and breast lands in my bowl along with a serving of trang trung (tubes and eggs).

Service to Delivery Gap: I hit this bird soup house during a lull, so after putting in my order on the way in, the soup practically followed me to the table.

Stock Factor: I slurped to almost the bottom of the bowl.

Cost: All spelled out in the photo above. (USD$1.40, AUD$1.72)

Rank: I can't bring myself to start the ranking palaver again, by setting pho in conflict with pho, chicken pho against beef pho in an unresolvable battle that will only end in tears. Nor do I want to be exposed for my less than scientific research methods. Let me just rate this as pretty bloody good!

The Vina Buffet

The ubiquitous com binh dan restaurant is the lunch experience that Hanoian workers gravitate toward, whether they toil carting coal, selling lychees or pushing a pen in a government office. Translating roughly as "rice at a reasonable price", these lunch outlets replicate the home-cooked meal which, not all that long ago, most Vietnamese returned home to consume.

But life is busy these days and times have certainly changed in this developing country. Going home for lunch with mum, where there could be some nagging about housework or the boyfriend or a dish one doesn't like but she insists on making or a stint with the dish cloth...all this can now be avoided.

Because there is a bit of money about and the streetside Vina buffet is inexpensive.

Like at home, rice is central at these eateries and it is served in big old communal buckets when eating with the colleagues and only slightly smaller ones when eating on one's Pat Malone. The latter is rare as the Vietnamese consider the lone diner a cause for concern, even pity.

I am far from concerned as I make myself known to the buffet choices. Pork is done all ways; there are fatty slices of boiled pig, ribs caramelised and juicy, pork with crackling, mince stuffed in tomatoes, bits from inside stir-fried and turmeric stained trotters not trotting anymore. The pig is dead but very well-utilised! Chickens have lost their heads, too, their flesh also figuring pretty prominently. Stewed eggs, omelettes and tofu offer a respite from the meatfest, with vegie content coming in the form of standard water spinach and steamed cabbage served with boiled egg and soy sauce. Snails, squid scattered with dill and a soup containing bitter melon round out the selections.

Do not take pity on me. I don't have time to talk.

Com Binh Dan
Dinh Liet St
Old Quarter

Evening Market Madness

At my local market in the late afternoons, the vendors clear out. Meat and produce sellers alike vacate the stalls they rent in the market building and cart their stock to the side of the narrow road on which the market is situated.

It's a monotonous and painstaking process. Perfectly displayed merchandise, having served the pre-lunch shoppers well, is packed carefully into baskets, styrofoam boxes and all manner of containers and hauled fifty metres or so, where it is again artfully organised to attract the consumer eye. In the current heat, this mad daily operation zaps the energy and patience of these small business operators. They are curt to even the most polite bargaining.

They make this move because their customers no longer want to stop, park their motorbikes and walk into the market stalls, preferring instead to do a drive through pit stop shop. A few years ago, one vendor set up a small satellite sample of produce from her main stall and started garnering large handfuls of dong from the evening traffic. Others followed suit and now, the actual market is a dark empty cave at five o'clock while the road outside is gridlocked with motorbikes spewing fumes, sweaty butchers weilding cleavers and forthright shoppers poking and pointing.

Amongst a smorgasboard of the essential flavours of Vietnam.

Poor Man's Cakes

I know what food looks like because I've really been exposed to it. I take note of what goes in my piehole. I examine food flavours on my palate and savor them, mostly. In some lobe of my brain, a complicated classification process occurs, recording smells, textures and tastes. One category becomes the realm of my gag activator, where nasties are noted. These nasties are divided into two sub-categories: those I can get down, if I don't think too hard, in a one-chew, one-swallow manoeuvre and those I have to spit out or I'll park the tiger.

What I'm trying to say is that I've developed, as have you, prejudices and pre-conceived ideas about food. These can evolve into lifetime barriers; for many years an olive was a salty rubber bullet to me and I'm still not convinced about oysters au naturale. The Vietnamese, in general, think that cheese is stinking rancid crud.

So, in a similar vein, I've had my suspicions about these peanut-studded discs for some time. Dense white spongy looking stuff, while not posing much of a threat to the gag activator, does not promise the tastebuds much in my experience. The preconception here is bloody bland and boring. But in the interests of research I'm willing to give these cakes, called banh duc, a try.

They are made from rice flour which has been soaked in water (and lime, as in the mineral, according to the vendor). Boiled while being stirred constantly to remove lumps, the mixture is poured into moulds or shaped into rounds, some of which contain peanuts. When prepared by this vendor in the Old Quarter, the rounds are cut into pie pieces and served with tuong, a fermented brown sauce made from beancurd and peanuts. The fermentation gives the sauce a mild hint of alcohol. The fresh chili clipped in gives it heat. The sauce appears to hold all the potential with this dish.

And the verdict?

While I can't say "I told you so", I can say "I told myself so!" There's an element of silky nothing to it, I'm afraid. The sauce makes banh duc palatable. As a culinary episode, it gets the thumbs down. I will defend its importance in this still developing country's foodscape, however. Not everyone can afford to eat like me. The shoeshiners, coal-carters, fruit-vendors and less fortunates of this city have to eat, too. 
Banh duc is traditionally poor man's food. It also has its own proverb:

                    "May doi banh duc co suong, may doi di ghe lai thuong con chong"

...which is difficult to translate into English.

Loose Change

One serve of banh duc - 8,000-10,000VND (USD45-56c, AUD57-72c)

Banh Duc
Ta Hien St
(near the corner with Hang Bac St)
Old Quarter

The Beach Supermarket

The beach is a supermarket in Nha Trang, Vietnam's south-central coast beach resort town. Earlier this year, I spent two weeks in its aisles. As is the case in much of the country, particularly the major towns and cities, there's no need to actually physically go shopping. From my front gate in Hanoi's West Lake district or indeed from my banana lounge on Nha Trang's golden sands, I let the shopping come to me.

This morning in Hanoi, where the variety of travelling vendors pounding the pavement meets virtually all my retail needs, I could've bought hot corn on the cob, a studded dog collar, a wedge of pumpkin and a handful of chilies, a padded pink bra, a cornetto, a bunch of flowers and a hoola hoop, among other things. As I stood on my doorstep, I could also have had my shoes shined, my knives sharpened and my cockroaches exterminated.

In Nha Trang, the beach supermarket caters more for tourists and holiday-makers. One afternoon as I laid about like a sloth on the beach having just turned the last page of a fantastic book of food stories, I scribbled down a list of the products walking by. From this list I could eat huge rice crackers as big as dinner plates, fresh fruit peeled and cut, sugar coated cakes carried on aluminium trays on the vendor's head, boiled peanuts, chewing gum and candy, potato crisps and, for the main course, a seafood buffet served under the fine spray of the sea on yellow plastic plates.

Other vendors offer to adorn me. Bead and shell bracelets, fake gucci sunglasses and straw hats would ensure that I return home looking like I'd been on holidays. More cerebral stimulation can be purchased in the form of photocopied Vina-themed literature and mass-produced asian landscape paintings from a vendor whose catch-cry is "Hello...is it me you're looking for?" I can get fags, tissues and postcards that will never be written on. If I'm feeling lucky, another vendor will sell me a lottery ticket. The list goes on and the shopping keeps coming to me. If I bought everything on offer, I'd need a trolley.

And that would be a real bastard to push through the sand to the carpark.

The alluring deep frying of food

In Hanoi, at one of my favourite soup slurping stations, one of the teenage helpers was on wonton duty. A blackened wok on a high gas flame was set up on the footpath and extra long cooking chopsticks were keeping the hot oil safely at bay. Trays of limp uncooked wontons lay nearby awaiting crispification.

The alluring deep frying of food.

In Australia on Friday nights, I'd volunteer to go with Mum to the fish and chip shop to witness the same kind of action. The Greek proprietors would turn white fish and potatoes into magic golden brown via a finely tuned system where raw product entered the first bubbling oil vat at left, gradually moving right before being lifted, drained, salted and wrapped. "Can't you drive any faster?" I'd say to Mum on the way home. I would be salivating like a rabid dog.

A recent TV program on Discovery T&L showcased America's love affair with grease. They take the technique to a whole new level with anything from bacon to mars bars to a Texan creation known as a chicken fried steak getting slathered in batter and immersed in oil. I did watch in horror at some points but more at the eaters than the food.

I could see myself in them.

I do love a good fry-up. The heat, the bubbles, the crispy crunchy outcome, the possibility of third degree burns, the oil stains on the groin of my tousers, ill-fitting trousers struggling to house my expanding arse... the onset of obesity. It all adds up to excitement, adventure, risk, living dangerously. Some people jump out of planes. My personal favourite extreme sport is eating deep fried food. 

And these cracking giant wontons (banh hoanh thanh), filled with minced up pork and liver, are a fine exponent of this cuisine.

Herbs and Tubes

I seem to be facing a few of my culinary demons lately. Chewy is the demon here. It's not often that I find myself attacking the garnish with gusto before that which lies beneath it. I'm making the same choices as a rabbit.

But it becomes rather obvious to my eating companions. They are chewing with relish as I continue to mow through the botany. I do eye the cuts of tube trying to identify a piece that is small, that I can get down with minimal chewing and a trap-door swallow. I don't want my mates to place a gnarly thick bit in my bowl for me. In these situations in the past, there has been an expectation that I demonstrate some kind of adverse reaction. I want to be brave. I don't want to offend. I want to communicate a 'water off a duck's back' kind of vibe.

It's hard, when I know that poo used to travel these tubes.

Pig intestines (trang) are commonly available across the city, along with other organs and offal. They are not a delicacy but something eaten on an everyday basis. They are clean, all traces of poo long flushed out. If I'd been born Vietnamese like my friends, I wouldn't be getting so worked up about this.

I do eventually bite the bullet...and it is kind of rubbery like a garden hose.

But it has had me thinking since. What has happened to me and my ilk? Why is it such a challenge to eat these parts of an animal? Surely they were part of the diet in generations past. In parts of Europe they probably still are. Where do these parts of the pig end up in my country? Perhaps I have regularly eaten them disguised in a sausage or spread on toast as liverwurst, in an altogether different form.

Can I acquire a taste for them in their original form, before any processing, when they were not that long ago clearly related to the vital functions of a living thing? Pulsing, beating, belching, farting living things!

I would have to practise long and hard.