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Thursday, December 17, 2009
Dining In Transit (At Saigon Tan Son Nhat Airport)
WHEN I LIVED IN SYDNEY ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MEALS WAS CHICKEN LAKSA. It was right up there with Oporto Portuguese chicken as one of my favourite lunchtime scoffs. Back in those days the Malaysian/Singaporean/Chinese takeout joints in the city served their chicken laksa in tall round plastic containers with the thin thin noodles at the bottom, the chicken and tofu in the middle, and the milky chilli red sauce lingering boiling at the top. When you open the lid a puff of steam erupts hinting of the spicy pleasures within. Strangely, the soup never seems to cool down no matter how long it has been opened and exposed to the air. You burn your mouth off on all those lumps of chicken and the noodles and the everpresent red spicy globules circulating endlessly in the broth. Because I am me and generally clumsy with noodles, I usually splash a spot or two on to my clothes. It is generally a chore getting to the end of it because the spiciest materials tend to gravitate to the bottom of the tub. But no workaday lunchtime in innercity Sydney would be complete without a chicken laksa hit. Now I live in Japan and chicken laksa is as easily obtainable as authentic Bondi style Portuguese chicken. Consequently, when I stopped for an afternoon in transit at Hồ Chi Minh International Airport today and headed upstairs to the bar and restaurant area, I was pleased to see they had a Singaporean diner. (Along with Japanese restaurants, Singaporean hawker food is fast becoming an airport cliche.) Out of the numerous items on the menu, I had to choose chicken laksa...
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Vietnamese Bus Stop Cuisine (Packing In At Around $1 A Bowl!)
MOST VISITORS CATCH THE BUS WHEN THEY TRAVEL AROUND VIETNAM. To be sure there is a train system and I caught it once (the Reunification Express) on part of its long route (from Hue to Hanoi if memory serves me correctly), a hard night in a hard seat. Graybrown misty vistas greeted Alison and I blearyeyed on the entrance to Hanoi, bustling dirty and dusty cool on the midwinter's morn. For some reason Hanoi always seems shabby and rundown on its approaches. Nonetheless, once we got downtown we found it refreshingly civilised with the treelined avenues and all the gents in town wearing berets. We found it a whole lot more sophisticated than Hồ Chi Minh City, which was positively slumlike at the time (this was back in the 1990s). But anyway, that's another rivalry! As well as the Reunification Express I discovered recently there is also a train connecting Hồ Chi Minh City with Phan Thiet (near Mui Ne), which my Japanese buddy Kenichi exploited earlier this year. Kenichi and his hotel Tokyo Ryokan recently got not one but two mentions in the Lonely Planet guide to his home city, so he knows a thing or two about budget travel. Whenever we go travelling or even walking down the street, I can never keep it with him. He is the hardcore traveller penultimate. While I have never railed it on Kenichi's Vietnam route, I have bussed it three visits to/through Phan Thiet in the past 18 months, with my new companion Nga. In fact I have travelled the road to Phan Thiet so often now I know it almost like the back of my hand, with all its bumps and delights, its hornplay and hard braking. The trip starts with a chaotic gathering and farewell from somewhere close to the Sinh Cafe in the heart of backpacker Saigon. You get your luggage thrown into the compartments down below, show your tickets, and dodging the touts step up into the bus. Complimentary bottles of water are handed out, and scented wet tissues which smell of coconut and other tropical spices. With much fanfare the engine is started. Loud music is thrown on the soundsystem, and loud conversations arise to compete with it. It seems to take forever to get out of the city, and it takes just as long (given all the distractions) to drift into sleep. Just as do you manage to fall asleep, the bus pulls into a garage cum noodle shop, and all the passengers are roused for a break stop. The same thing happens on intercontinental flights: they wake you at all the wrong times for all the wrong reasons. But at least the food they serve at the Vietnamese country bus stops are way better than the food they serve on planes!
The dish in the photo which follows may look like pho, but it is not pho. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but my girlfriend Nga reckons it is hu tieu. Suffice to say, it was soup with noodles, and seafood played a major taste role. As usual there are plenty of chillies and vegetables and citrus juice to drop into the mix. And it packed in for about $1 a bowl, the standard price in these parts. And when I had finished it mouth stinging from the chillies, it was time to climb back aboard the bus, and resume the voyage to Mui Ne.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Here's Some Saigon Streetfood Not Even Noodlepie Has Scoffed! (Vietnamese Kebabs)
ALTHOUGH TO BE FAIR TO NOODLEPIE HE HAS DOCUMENTED THE KEBAB SCENE IN FRANCE AND APPARENTLY HASN'T LIVED IN VIETNAM FOR SOME TIME, SO HE CAN BE EXCUSED FOR FALLING OUT OF TOUCH WITH THE STREETS. I first became alerted to the Indochinese kebab scene in September last year, during a visit with my parents to Hanoi. One of the first things I noticed was that they call kebabs kebaps here, or to be more precise banh mi kebap. One of the second things I noticed was that Vietnamese kebabs were not served with the customary pita bread and Mideast herbage (that's why they are called banh mi kebap!) Read The Last Appetite's review of Cafe Goethe in Hanoi for a fuller illumination of what, exactly, a Vietnamese kebab experience is all about. If you want to stray somewhat off topic you can check out my site about the kebab scene in Tokyo, Japan. They don't make kebabs with banh mi bread in Japan, but do sometimes drop wierd stuff into the pita such as mashed bananas. That happened to me one cold night near Yoyogi Park in Harajuku! For more authentic looking and tasting kebabs in Saigon, specifically in District 3, read this Gastonomy Blog review. Interestingly, the kebabs here seemed to be stuffed with chicken; Vietnamese apparently dislike the taste of lamb.
On the topic of noodlepie, I remember reading him opine once that the possibilities were huge for someone who knew how to make a decent pizza in Ho Chi Minh City. That's because the local pizzas were so poor they wouldn't stand up to the launch of a quality product. Now there may well be a tiny bit of cultural imperialism coming through in noodlepie's assertion (that there is only one way to make a pizza, and that is the Italian/American/European way). Asians have a long history of appropriating foreign foods and reinventing them for their own tastes, in their own style. When I first moved to Japan eight years ago I used to scoff at the strange pizzas there (the ones topped with mayo and squid and acres of sweet corn) and the equally bizarre pasta dishes (although I must confess I fell in love with the squid ink spaghetti, literally, at, first bite!) It took me a while to understand that Japanese pizza should not be compared outright with the pizza you find in the West, but judged as its own unique cultural product in its own ground of referents. To put it blunt, pizza can be about more than cheese and tomato sauce! Given that it's his stated mission to bridge the food worlds of the Occident and the Orient (hence the label: "noodle" + "pie"), noodlepie should understand this. That said, the sophistication of Vietnamese pizzas lag far behind those of Japan in my own experience, so I am not sure my argument really applies here. Maybe noodlepie is right -- maybe Vietnamese pizzas suck! I haven't eaten enough of them to know definitively, for sure. However, I did manage to get down a couple of slices today, just up the road from my hotel, when Nga abandoned me to go run an errand across town. Nga often tells me to wait somewhere while goes often doing stuff (in this case she was getting an injection at a local clinic or hospital!) Instead of getting indignant like I used to, on this trip I am savouring these moments of independence and imagining myself as a free spirit in Vietnam, just like I was those four days I was here in March 2007. For an hour or so the shackles of coupledom drop away, and I am free to entertain myself as I please, until she returns. It has happened four times now in roughly 24 hours: one stint in Lotteria with my shrimp and cheese burger and an Australian girls junior indoor cricket team and a hell of a general racket, two times in the street just watching the madness, and this afternoon (being Tuesday June 30 2009) upstairs in a cheap fly-infested pizza joint above our old familiar Coop Supermarket. I've been dying to eat Saigonese pizza for ages now, but Nga would never stand for it (besides, she would consider it a rip-off at more than 100,000 Dong a pizza). But when the cat's away the mice sure do play... and freedom lies on the margins of the page!
