HANOI — There is an old Vietnamese proverb: “Anywhere you find two women and a duck, you have a market.”
From Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An to Dalat, my husband and I swept through the country’s colorful markets, snacking on freshly and exquisitely fried spring rolls stuffed with minced pork, sweet turnips and young papaya, then dipped in the omnipresent sauce of lime, garlic, chiles, fish sauce, rice vinegar and sugar.
We stopped for a feast of the popular and populist pho, a bowl of spicy, beefy broth designed as a make-it-yourself meal — we added to taste and whim fresh bean sprouts, minced hot red peppers, rice noodles, tiny fried onions, bits of salty preserved cabbage, and the essential, colorful and crisp tangle of herbs.
In snacks, as in meals, bite after bite, one can only smile in amazement at how the Vietnamese eke complex flavor combinations out of deceptively simple techniques with utterly basic cooking equipment. From modest market stall to upscale dining rooms, flavors were vibrant, refreshing, wholesome.
Vietnam offers an omnivore’s cuisine of varied soups, the freshest of fish and shellfish, an avalanche of fresh vegetables, and a bit of fried fare to soothe our cravings for crunch and fat.
There were welcome discoveries and new flavors. Having grown pumpkins in my garden for years, little did I know that one could blanch the tender young green pumpkin tendrils and sizzle them over high heat with a healthy dose of fish sauce and crushed garlic.
The Vietnamese grow delicious avocados, but consider them a dessert: In Dalat we snacked on surprisingly creamy and sweet avocado ice cream churned with condensed milk. And after sampling the mild, tangy and crunchy water-spinach sprouts, I wanted my own rice paddy just to enjoy the omnipresent green — often called morning glory sprouts — that grows joyously in the paddies.
Our palates were rewarded each day with a perfect-pitch balance of salty, sweet, spicy, crunchy and soft, whether with an expertly seasoned fish paste wrapped around a stick of lemon grass; a cool, refreshing drink of green onions, basil, ginger, mint, lemon, salt, fish sauce and fresh coriander; or a restorative mousse of avocado and artichoke.
Over a period of 10 days, markets and meals filled the hours, and three in particular stand out.
La Vertical Our last meal in the country was with Didier Corlou, a Frenchman who runs the amazing restaurant La Verticale, housed in a tall, narrow 1930s villa in Hanoi. A colorfully decorated space, the restaurant features five colors — green, yellow, black, white and orange — symbols of the five seasons, spring, summer, autumn, winter and “the transition season,” a 21-day period between each of the other four.
It is a happy, vibrant, personal space, where Mr. Corlou offers a superb cuisine that fuses the best of French and Vietnamese culinary culture with utmost respect for the seasons, quality and locality of ingredients. His food is straightforward, totally spontaneous and unselfconscious.
While so many of his combinations are brand new — a cold tomato soup served with a scoop of black peppercorn sorbet; lamb chops coated with a golden crunch of bee pollen; a vibrant escabèche of sea bass and sea greens; crab and mushroom wrapped in rice paper and deep fried — everything on the plate or bowl is identifiable.
So much of the pleasure of food is in memory, and though we may not have memories of Mr. Corlou’s creative combinations, we know a mushroom from a tomato and can relish the pleasure of each ingredient.
Mr. Corlou, a longtime chef at the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi, is now on his own as chef and chief alchemist with a ground-floor spice shop that is unique. He searches out the best cinnamon, turmeric, red chiles, ginger, and black and white sesame from all over Vietnam and creates his own curries, salt mixes and myriad other blends for his boutique.
Cha Ca La Vong Whether one is a dedicated gastronome or a first-time visitor to Hanoi, chances are one has had the Cha Ca La Vong experience. Unique in the world, and a delight that can equal the high of that first croissant in Paris, a perfect risotto in Milan, pork barbecue in the Carolinas or amaThe restaurant on Cha Ca street in Hanoi’s old quarter has been at the same location since 1871, and serves only one dish, a fragrant, herbal mélange of turmeric-coated fish cooked in oil over an open flame in the center of the table. At your table, you add all the wondrous fresh ingredients of Vietnam.This is a place you visit with a crowd, making for a festive table boisterous with laughter, sips of local Halida lager beer, and great hits of herb and spice. Guests tumble up a rickety staircase to enter a series of thoroughly unadorned dining rooms. It’s the single dish that makes the theater here.
Once you are seated, waiters deliver a parade of accompaniments — an empty bowl, chopsticks, communal bowls of vermicelli rice noodles, platters of scallions, grilled peanuts, Vietnamese coriander, bowls of sauce garnished with fresh chopped chili peppers and the platter of fresh dill. Next, a waiter arrives with a charcoal-fired brazier, tops it with a battered aluminum frying pan filled with sizzling oil and tiny, golden morsels of turmeric-dusted white fish. He showers all with slivers of scallions and handfuls of dill, and the dish sizzles on.
Then you season your own bowl to taste with all the trimmings. (It was here I realized, after a week in Vietnam, that I had become totally addicted to the crunch, salt and fat of the lowly peanut, an addiction that continued for weeks upon my return to Paris.)
Guests are offered seconds and thirds, and it is doubtful that anyone leaves Cha Ca La Vong anything other than sated and satisfied.
Quan an Ngon While our last meal in Vietnam, La Vertical, offered the best tastes of the trip, a close second was one of our first meals of the tour, a glorious lunch at the indoor-outdoor, theater-like restaurant Quan an Ngon in Ho Chi Minh City.
The sprawling, family restaurant attempts to recreate the open-air markets of Vietnam, with individual cooking stalls set up along the perimeter. Diners can stroll from stand to stand, watching as one woman deftly wraps rice paper around spring rolls filled with fresh shrimp and generous amounts of greens and scallions; examining the talent it takes to make a perfect portion of grilled tender squid to be seasoned with a combination of spicy salt and lime salt; or wonder in the ability to cook perfect, lacey rice crepes from a thin batter, filling them with expertly seasoned minced shrimp and pork.
The menu, like the voluminous, always packed restaurant, is large, but you are assured of up-to-the-minute freshness, because everything is cooked to order in front of you. The best tastes of the meal included fiery grilled shrimp; raw rice paper filled by diners with herbs, slices of tangy star fruit, spicy fish paste and bean sprouts, and dipped in a chili-laced sauce; and ultra-crispy fried spring rolls served with a mountain of bright-flavored herbs.
At the end of our stay, as we boarded a flight from Hanoi back to Paris, our suitcases carefully packed with a bubble-wrapped bottle of the top-quality Phu Quoc nuoc mam (fish sauce), we heard our name over the airport’s loudspeaker. Officials had examined our checked luggage, removing the bottle with a simple judgment: “Fish sauce no fly.”zing tapas in Spain, the turmeric-laced white fish meal in a bowl is an event.
The New York Times
From Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An to Dalat, my husband and I swept through the country’s colorful markets, snacking on freshly and exquisitely fried spring rolls stuffed with minced pork, sweet turnips and young papaya, then dipped in the omnipresent sauce of lime, garlic, chiles, fish sauce, rice vinegar and sugar.
We stopped for a feast of the popular and populist pho, a bowl of spicy, beefy broth designed as a make-it-yourself meal — we added to taste and whim fresh bean sprouts, minced hot red peppers, rice noodles, tiny fried onions, bits of salty preserved cabbage, and the essential, colorful and crisp tangle of herbs.
In snacks, as in meals, bite after bite, one can only smile in amazement at how the Vietnamese eke complex flavor combinations out of deceptively simple techniques with utterly basic cooking equipment. From modest market stall to upscale dining rooms, flavors were vibrant, refreshing, wholesome.
Vietnam offers an omnivore’s cuisine of varied soups, the freshest of fish and shellfish, an avalanche of fresh vegetables, and a bit of fried fare to soothe our cravings for crunch and fat.
There were welcome discoveries and new flavors. Having grown pumpkins in my garden for years, little did I know that one could blanch the tender young green pumpkin tendrils and sizzle them over high heat with a healthy dose of fish sauce and crushed garlic.
The Vietnamese grow delicious avocados, but consider them a dessert: In Dalat we snacked on surprisingly creamy and sweet avocado ice cream churned with condensed milk. And after sampling the mild, tangy and crunchy water-spinach sprouts, I wanted my own rice paddy just to enjoy the omnipresent green — often called morning glory sprouts — that grows joyously in the paddies.
Our palates were rewarded each day with a perfect-pitch balance of salty, sweet, spicy, crunchy and soft, whether with an expertly seasoned fish paste wrapped around a stick of lemon grass; a cool, refreshing drink of green onions, basil, ginger, mint, lemon, salt, fish sauce and fresh coriander; or a restorative mousse of avocado and artichoke.
Over a period of 10 days, markets and meals filled the hours, and three in particular stand out.
La Vertical Our last meal in the country was with Didier Corlou, a Frenchman who runs the amazing restaurant La Verticale, housed in a tall, narrow 1930s villa in Hanoi. A colorfully decorated space, the restaurant features five colors — green, yellow, black, white and orange — symbols of the five seasons, spring, summer, autumn, winter and “the transition season,” a 21-day period between each of the other four.
It is a happy, vibrant, personal space, where Mr. Corlou offers a superb cuisine that fuses the best of French and Vietnamese culinary culture with utmost respect for the seasons, quality and locality of ingredients. His food is straightforward, totally spontaneous and unselfconscious.
While so many of his combinations are brand new — a cold tomato soup served with a scoop of black peppercorn sorbet; lamb chops coated with a golden crunch of bee pollen; a vibrant escabèche of sea bass and sea greens; crab and mushroom wrapped in rice paper and deep fried — everything on the plate or bowl is identifiable.
So much of the pleasure of food is in memory, and though we may not have memories of Mr. Corlou’s creative combinations, we know a mushroom from a tomato and can relish the pleasure of each ingredient.
Mr. Corlou, a longtime chef at the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi, is now on his own as chef and chief alchemist with a ground-floor spice shop that is unique. He searches out the best cinnamon, turmeric, red chiles, ginger, and black and white sesame from all over Vietnam and creates his own curries, salt mixes and myriad other blends for his boutique.
Cha Ca La Vong Whether one is a dedicated gastronome or a first-time visitor to Hanoi, chances are one has had the Cha Ca La Vong experience. Unique in the world, and a delight that can equal the high of that first croissant in Paris, a perfect risotto in Milan, pork barbecue in the Carolinas or amaThe restaurant on Cha Ca street in Hanoi’s old quarter has been at the same location since 1871, and serves only one dish, a fragrant, herbal mélange of turmeric-coated fish cooked in oil over an open flame in the center of the table. At your table, you add all the wondrous fresh ingredients of Vietnam.This is a place you visit with a crowd, making for a festive table boisterous with laughter, sips of local Halida lager beer, and great hits of herb and spice. Guests tumble up a rickety staircase to enter a series of thoroughly unadorned dining rooms. It’s the single dish that makes the theater here.
Once you are seated, waiters deliver a parade of accompaniments — an empty bowl, chopsticks, communal bowls of vermicelli rice noodles, platters of scallions, grilled peanuts, Vietnamese coriander, bowls of sauce garnished with fresh chopped chili peppers and the platter of fresh dill. Next, a waiter arrives with a charcoal-fired brazier, tops it with a battered aluminum frying pan filled with sizzling oil and tiny, golden morsels of turmeric-dusted white fish. He showers all with slivers of scallions and handfuls of dill, and the dish sizzles on.
Then you season your own bowl to taste with all the trimmings. (It was here I realized, after a week in Vietnam, that I had become totally addicted to the crunch, salt and fat of the lowly peanut, an addiction that continued for weeks upon my return to Paris.)
Guests are offered seconds and thirds, and it is doubtful that anyone leaves Cha Ca La Vong anything other than sated and satisfied.
Quan an Ngon While our last meal in Vietnam, La Vertical, offered the best tastes of the trip, a close second was one of our first meals of the tour, a glorious lunch at the indoor-outdoor, theater-like restaurant Quan an Ngon in Ho Chi Minh City.
The sprawling, family restaurant attempts to recreate the open-air markets of Vietnam, with individual cooking stalls set up along the perimeter. Diners can stroll from stand to stand, watching as one woman deftly wraps rice paper around spring rolls filled with fresh shrimp and generous amounts of greens and scallions; examining the talent it takes to make a perfect portion of grilled tender squid to be seasoned with a combination of spicy salt and lime salt; or wonder in the ability to cook perfect, lacey rice crepes from a thin batter, filling them with expertly seasoned minced shrimp and pork.
The menu, like the voluminous, always packed restaurant, is large, but you are assured of up-to-the-minute freshness, because everything is cooked to order in front of you. The best tastes of the meal included fiery grilled shrimp; raw rice paper filled by diners with herbs, slices of tangy star fruit, spicy fish paste and bean sprouts, and dipped in a chili-laced sauce; and ultra-crispy fried spring rolls served with a mountain of bright-flavored herbs.
At the end of our stay, as we boarded a flight from Hanoi back to Paris, our suitcases carefully packed with a bubble-wrapped bottle of the top-quality Phu Quoc nuoc mam (fish sauce), we heard our name over the airport’s loudspeaker. Officials had examined our checked luggage, removing the bottle with a simple judgment: “Fish sauce no fly.”zing tapas in Spain, the turmeric-laced white fish meal in a bowl is an event.
The New York Times
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment