The Art of eating in Vietnam

While Saigon casual restaurants en-noble everyday ingredients with meticulous preparation – even standards like spring rolls or fresh, tart squid salad executed with great finesse – the city’s food culture also prizes rarity. I am lured to restaurant Cha Ca Ha Noi, for example, by stories of the legendary ca cuong drops, a liquid milked from a tiny gland behind the wing of the male ca cuong, a beetle that lives in rice fields. Owner Vo Khanh, a former English teacher, breaks into a wide grin when I mention the drops. They are the crowning glory of cha ca, a dish of fresh herbs, noodles and fried, spiced fish from the cuisine of Ha noi. Vo bring forth a little brazier and set it down at my side. On it, pieces of fish dusted with flour and spices fry in a pot of hot oil. Beside, it is a tray of fresh herbs. We remove the fish as it cooks and assemble the dish at the table, adding peanuts, scallions, dill, holy basil, and cilantro, and spooning each serving over delicate rice vermicelli. But it is Vo himself who administers the ca cuong drops. Poised over the dish of fish sauce with his tiny flagon of crystalline fluid, he adds one drop only. The scent takes my breath away. It is like a distillation of all the hyacinths of spring, and it transform the fish sauce into a different entity, perfumed by both flower and the sea. The cost: a mere 40 cents a drop.

When I compliment the delicacy of his rice noodles after our meal, Vo darts to the phone and arrange to take me to the shop where they are made fresh each day. We wind through inner Saigon until our car can go no further, then get out and walk through a maze of narrow alleys where rickety houses lean across the street as if trying to touch each other. Radios and televisions blast from inside the shanties, card games are in progress on stoops, and children play in the dirt. We finally stop at an unmarked building.

Nothing could have prepared me for the elemental beauty of this shop, Lo Bun Khanh – which, owner Bui Banh Khanh tells me, has been in the same location for four generations. Motes of rice flour hang suspended in the clear light as family members carry baskets of fresh noodles through the warren of rooms. Rice bathes in water-filled pottery jars, softening for grinding. It will be mashed into a paste in a hand-turned stone grinder; extruded through a screen; then cut over boiling water. The noodles are fished out immediately and cooled in a cold water bath, then stored. Sons and nephews keep vats of water bubbling over an enormous brick stove, hurling wood into the fire each steamy, the work rhythmic. Ladle, stoke, press, sort. Ladle, stoke, press, sort.

Bui introduces me to his mother, Phung thi Vu, who, he says, still has the best “hand”, and I watch as she twists the fragile noodles into small skeins and places them into worn basket. We don’t speak the same language, but she can see that I’m impressed with her skills, and she smiles shyly. Each day, the family make two and a half tones of noodles for restaurants and homes through out the city. When I remark that those set aside for Cha Ca Ha Noi are the smallest skeins of all, Bui laughs. “Mr Vo pays twice as much; his noodles are half the size of the others.”

From the corner of my eye, I see men ladling milky rice water with what looks like army helmet rigged to a pole. The ladle, practical and haunting, moves me profoundly. But then I realize that this is no helmet. It’s only a standard trade implement – and I’m stunned by the power of my expectations to shape everything I see here. I look again. Behind the vast and stacks of rice flour are stalls of fat, pink-clean pigs. Their quiet snuffling mixes with the watery sound of noodle making, giving the place a medieval intimacy that connects immediately and completely with the stuff of life.