by audrey -

Hoi An

Hoi An was a dubious stop on this trip – online reviews and tour books alternately described it as the best part of Vietnam, and…an overly touristy town quickly losing its last fragments of soul. 

I guess both views are right.  Hoi An was picturesque, charming, tiny enough to easily wrap your head around.  It was also fairly commercial, and every building was either a tourist-aimed restaurant, store, or booking agency.  The buildings and streets are a nice balance of navigable and old-world-looking (stones instead of concrete curb, neatly packed dirt).   Faisal thinks they hired a tourism consultant, who advised them not to get in peoples’ faces.  (One tour book mentioned a ban on aggressive motorcycle/taxi hustlers.  In contrast to Nha Trang and Saigon, it was nice not having someone periodically question my ability to walk ten feet.)

At night, the river water comes in with the tide, and makes the daytime waterfront street and market area a little splooshy.  Kinda cute, but kinda bad for the restaurants that do business there.  Almost a dead zone. The morning sees some busy markets, though, and those are always fun to walk through.

Good:

  • Moped rental without an international driver’s license, ghetto helmets and friendly grandma included. 
  • Thoroughly enjoyable, well organized cooking class
  • Friendly small food providers (mostly) 
  • Watching two skinny Santas ride by on a moped, holding a sack.  Totally looked like a bank robbery.
  • Good tailors

 

Bad: 

  • Totally got gypped on the “fresh crab” at a restaurant.  They made a big show of letting you pick the crab from a bucket, and then fed us some frozen, untasty bug-like thing. Not so cool.  But what are you gonna say, right?  The thing I don’t understand is…the cost of freezing a crab in Vietnam, where they have lots of fresh ones…seems like it’d be more than just getting fresh crabs.  Sad. 
  • Overpriced, mediocre food at sit-down restaurants
  • Lazy, short-cutting tailors
Oh yeah – the tour books all go on about the local specialties – cau lau (noodles made with water from a certain well), white rose (shrimp dumplings), and some fried seafood spring roll.   The fried roll is really good, noodles are decent, and hm…if you’ve had good shrimp ha gow at dim sum, don’t bother with the “white rose.” Chewy, clammy, unimpressive. 
by Audrey -

Food update – Vietnam

 

Street food tasted better than restaurant food, with the exception of a few specialty places.  We didn’t check out any of the super duper fancy French places though.  (Why bother, with $1.50 meals this good?) 

Easier to process pictures, with brief notes, methinks.

 

From Vietnam

Hoi An cuisine has two key ingredients: Crispy rice paper (either as substrate for something – think bruschetta, crouton, or snack) and fried scallions.  Both good things. The local noodles that the tour book talks about (cao lau) are decent, the “white rose” is just a shrimp dumpling, and the fried seafood spring rolls are delicious. Picture above is from the table during our cooking class.  I crisped that rice paper cracker myself, fyi – over glowing coals, no less!

 

From Vietnam

Southeast Asia is supposed to have good fruit.  These are wax/bell apples/lian wu.  They taste a lot better in Taiwan.  I totally bought a bunch of the red ones thinking they’d be sweet, but no, they tasted bitter and gross. Boo.  Longan, jackfruit, rambutan, cherimoya, and bananas were good though. 

 

From Vietnam

Sandwiches and bread feature fresh French bread, and cost less than a dollar.  I had a warm corned beef + chili + cucumber sandwich for about $.75 one morning.  Good stuff.  The tour book promoted bread + laughing cow cheese for the unadventurous, and indeed, the cow was on a lot of these little carts.


From Vietnam

Grilled spicy meat, to be dipped in a lime+salt+pepper mixture.  Nha Trang. This kind of treatment made even the squid slices into a treat.

 

From Vietnam

This is the view from a market-side fruit shake stall. A lot of these spots would run out of ingredients, and be unable to complete your order.  While it’s a little annoying, I found comfort in thinking that if they run out, what they do have is seriously fresh, and they don’t have frozen backups sitting around.   At one place I had to ask revise my fruit shake request from guava to coconut to avocado, to finally settle on pineapple.  Since this place was so close to the market though, when Faisal got banana, she just walked to the nearby banana vendor to grab some.  So cool.

From Vietnam

This was a warm tea made from lemongrass, lemon basil seeds, and sugar, with a sprig of mint thrown in for good measure.

 

From Vietnam

This was the fish in clay pot from a Hoi An cooking class.   There was also a really good “grilled fish” (really, it was fried. please.)  on “Grilled Fish Street” in Hanoi, that was similarly dill flavored.  Piping hot, scooped onto rice…there’s texture from the fried fish, sweetness from the meat, flavor and heat from the herbs, chewiness and neutral coolness from rice…nuts thrown in for some crunch. Good stuff.  That fish restaurant was one of the not-street-food-but-still-good exceptions.

 

From Vietnam

Representative shot of street food noodles. This one had bamboo shoots, fried donuts to accompany, and a friendly proprietor.

From Vietnam

 Vietnamese dessert seems to mean some variation of sticky rice.  Fried into a cake, pounded into mochi with coconut, or made into a softer rainbow-like cake.  Not particularly exciting for me.Â