The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Nothing could top that crab and vermicelli soup’
Inspired by a Vietnamese restaurant in Hackney, Mark C O’Flaherty jets off to sample a new gourmet tour of the south-east Asian hotspot
I’ve been eating too much, too often, at Viet Grill on east London’s “Saigon strip” at the southern end of Kingsland Road since it opened around 15 years ago. It has tempted me to visit Vietnam on each occasion. I didn’t want to travel there to exoticise Asia, marvelling at how ker-azy the traffic is while sitting in a doorway on a plastic stool slurping pho. I just wanted to eat a lot of beef that had been turned into bo luc lac, drink coffee roasted with butter and vanilla, and go from north to south playing “taste the difference”.
And then InsideAsia, one of the UK’s most skilled Asia-focused tour operators, launched a “Gastronomic Trails of Vietnam” tour. At last, I thought, a way to streamline my gourmand safari. I’m as preoccupied with “authenticity” as the next traveller cliché, but I don’t speak Vietnamese and I’m happy to have a guide take me to the best bun rieu cua in Hanoi for breakfast and show me how to eat it. Which is what the extraordinary Mr Vinh did.
I peaked early with Mr Vinh, my InsideAsia guide, who drove me half mad, but who I grew to love. He repeated the most elementary things three times and literally spelt out many of his explanations, but he was a fascinating northerner – a student of horticulture, an accomplished jazz singer and an enthusiast about Ho Chi Minh’s communism. Nothing would top that bowl of crab and vermicelli noodle soup we shared on our first morning, with its parcel of shiny pork, at Bun Rieu Cua Hang Bac. It was pure, light and sparkling clean, elevated with a spoonful of chilli paste and a carton of fresh herbs. Over the coming days, Mr Vinh took me for £2 bowls of bun cha – with grilled pork and noodles – and to numerous hole-in-the-wall joints, in each of which one woman made one dish, repeatedly and rapidly, extraordinarily well. We cycled through the paddy fields in rural Ky Son, where I stayed at the tranquil Moon Garden Homestay and learned how to make my favourite dish: bo la lot; seasoned beef patties cooked in a betel leaf cocoon. I ate them in a church repurposed as a dining room, listening to farmers belt out karaoke across the lake.
Back in Hanoi, I toured the market around Vinh Phuc with Chef Ai. This was more rewarding for me than any identikit temple tour. We watched tofu being made and shaped into pliable white girders, ready to be cooked with tomato sauce. There were stalls heaving with tiny clams; baskets of colourful chillies and limes; delicious and sweet jackfruit (best fried in flour with coconut milk); plumes of banana flower; sacks of lotus seeds to make puddings, and giant live catfish that periodically made a bid for freedom from their giant bowls. One vendor specialised in a favourite breakfast takeaway – sticky rice seasoned numerous ways: with soy, peanut, mung bean, coconut, sesame or red fruit, served with dried pork, sesame and salt. Her entire stock was layered and compartmentalised in a single covered basket.
The arrangements in the market were painterly: silvered fish heads on tin platters, framed in their own blood. We retreated to Chef Ai’s kitchen, where she made another of my favourite dishes: baked aubergine with minced pork, and cha ca – fish with turmeric and dill. She cooked with rice oil from Japan, and instead of black pepper used delicate mac khen, a dried flower with a numbing quality like Szechuan pepper. I realised, watching Ai, that one reason I love Vietnamese food is how much sugar goes into it. The MSG works magic too.
Some food discoveries were neither sweet nor savoury. I stayed at the new InterContinental at the top of Landmark72, Hanoi. The weirdness of this, the highest hotel in the country, appealed immensely. The lobby, on floor 62, is a glorious, glamorous atrium of bars, restaurants and banquettes; the rest of the tower is full of corporate, Korean-run businesses. I wandered into a Chinese restaurant and ended up eating scampi in deep fried almond crumb covered in blueberry smoothie. Outside, there were a couple of sizeable and very dead birds by the pool, victims of I’m not sure what, overshadowed by the humongous glass tower, while an ongoing industrial elegy played from motorway traffic. Here, I thought, was celebrated baguette with pork, pâté, chilli and herbs. Everyone goes. Everyone raves. I thought it was fine, but more Delice de France than life-changing. Vietnam, does, of course, have an involved history of French colonialism – hence the fixation with coffee, bread and pâté.
We drove to Hue, the charming central Vietnam university town, of which I was enamoured instantly. I spent the day being ferried around on a cyclo – essentially a bath chair on the front of a bike – stopping at lovely little garden houses with cafés. The best was Olé, where I made and ate banh nam – parcels of shrimp and pork in tapioca and rice flour, steamed in a banana leaf.
In Ho Chi Minh City – still called Saigon by everyone in conversation – I had an off-piste lunch: dim sum at The Royal Pavilion in the Reverie hotel, with its hallucinatory cornucopia of hugely expensive Italian-made kitsch. The Reverie is a Liberace-themed ocean liner, on a passage to the Middle East, furnished in Milan by someone who day-drinks. It’s more bonkers than eclectic, with cascades of LED-lit crystal, green malachite grand pianos and Louis XIV flourishes. The dim sum though, is serious business – lush, luxurious, with perfect structure, served in an elegant dining room. A+.
By contrast, my next foodie experience involved hurtling around Saigon on the back of a Vespa, from one baldly lit local restaurant to another. There are 7.4 million motorbikes in the city and being on one, moving at pace, is to enter a video game wondering why everyone hasn’t lost all their lives already. Vespa Adventures’s “Saigon After Dark” tour takes four hours and incorporates seafood, pancakes and live music – which is where I bailed out. I’ll risk perishing on the back of a Vespa, but I won’t go near jazz.
My tour ended with a Mekong river cruise, taking a pretty little boat with sunloungers, flowers and a picnic table of fruit, through the