The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
All revved up and ready to tuck in
My sons, Ted, 19, and Gillies, 13, are masters of manipulation. Seven years ago they told me that although they loved Italy they thought I should be more adventurous with our holiday destinations. Accepting the gauntlet they’d thrown down, we’ve since stared in wonder at the Northern Lights, driven huskies through Finnish snow and got completely lost on the outskirts of Moscow while trying to find a Russian gastropub. But last year we went on
our biggest adventure yet, to Vietnam.
I fell in love with Vietnamese food 30 years ago in a tiny restaurant in west London. I’d just moved to the city and was reeling with the discovery that, in London, I could eat the world. Moroccan food, Lebanese, Malaysian, I was enchanted by them all, but Vietnamese food – with its hot, sour, salty, sweet flavours – I adored. I’ve been making Vietnamese food ever since, but it’s hard to cook the food of a country you’ve never visited and I wanted to discover what I didn’t understand. While my sons like food too, they’re primarily history buffs. Most of their knowledge of the country had come via Hollywood and I thought there must be more to learn than Oliver Stone or Stanley Kubrick could ever teach us.
The Old Quarter of Hanoi, which we hit as soon as we arrived from the airport, is crammed with restaurants and hole-in-the-wall joints (many of them specialising in just one dish) and vendors touting deep-fried bananas, wedges of fruit scattered with chilli and doughnuts sprinkled with sesame seeds.
There were stronger food smells than in any city we’d ever visited – citrus (from baskets piled high with oranges and red limes), peanuts being toasted over charcoal, fish sauce, fermented bean paste and coffee. We met Than, a food blogger, who took us on an evening tour. “We’re going to eat this city!” he shouted as we set off, leading us to places we would never have found on our own and ordering dishes I’d never heard of.
Hunkering on doll-sized plastic stools, we ate rice noodles with fish cakes, herb omelettes with a blistering hot chilli sauce, fritters made of sandworms – “Ha, you didn’t know they were worm cakes, but they’re good, aren’t they?” – bánh mi (a baguette filled with pork pâté and pickled vegetables) and strong, sweet Vietnamese coffee. After hours of eating we decided to forego a fusion restaurant – I can get fusion in
London – and Hanoi’s newest and trendiest gin bar. Sated, we returned to our room – we’d opted for family rooms for the whole tour. It was cheaper and, apart from fighting over the bathroom, it had pluses. It meant we spent all our time together and that when we felt a little overwhelmed – as we did after that first day – we could unwind and share notes.
Day two brought our first cooking lesson. Chef Ai, who had recently won the Vietnamese version of MasterChef, took us around her local market where tofu was being freshly made, women sat beside pyramids of dragon fruits and prepared vegetables to order, fish were being scaled on stone slabs and smiling stall holders urged us to buy from buckets of fermented vegetables. Gillies discovered that one of the smells he found most difficult in Hanoi was fermented yellow beans. He was looking decidedly peaky and Ai expertly steered him away from the area where the poultry was being killed.
In Ai’s home kitchen, after green tea and oranges, we made Vietnamese dipping sauces (dipping sauces are present at every meal), spring rolls that didn’t fray at the edges (you have to roll very tightly) and a Hanoi classic, cha ca la vong, a fried fish dish with turmeric and dill that I’d made at