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2004-07-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

Bun Bo Hue is yet another of those Vietnamese non-soups. Much like Mi Quang and Bun Rieu the bowl's burstin' with bits of this 'n' that and your dish ends up far less soup, much more saucy meat noodle potpourri
The name itself gives this dish away, Bun Bo Hue comes from the central region of Hue. More precisely, the real deal (apparently) comes from Gia Hoi . The key is the broth. It has a sweet tang to it and ladled in among the liquid are fatty pork slivers, rare beef, chopped spring onions, two kinds of spamsticks and fairly thick fresh bun (noodles). There's also a side dish of beansprouts, saw tooth herb and peculiar to Bun Bo Hue is the stripped end of a banana. (I say the 'end' as I wasn't sure what it was, so I asked the guy next me who said it was the 'banana end'. I'm inclined to believe we're talking green banana here, although my man insisted it wasn't... hmmm??) Anyhow... chuck a bit of what you fancy into your broth/saucy noodle bowl combo and get stuck in.
The spam sticks are slightly sweet, beef is tender enough and the pork fat gets trimmed as a matter of course wherever it rears its ugly head. The tepid soup was blindin', it was due top praise with a bowl tilting slurp draining all remaining broth drops. The moorish crunch of banana 'ends' (if that's what they actually are) gives this dish ten tropical rustic points out of ten. It's good filling stuff for 10,000VD. This stall also churns out four other noodle soups; Bun Mam, Mien Ga, Bun Moc and Hu Tieu.

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2004-07-06T01:14:00.000-07:00

Banh cuon is a northern dish, and to my tastes it's one of the better ones. It's an occasional find on the streets of Saigon. There are two sellers floggin' this stuffed rice film pancake on Ben Thanh market and it's stall 1006 I go back to again and again. Banh Cuon hails from Thanh Tri district just outside Hanoi and it sounds simple enough; mashed up minced pork, mushrooms and prawns wrapped in a flimsy rice film. It comes served with sliced cucumber, cha lua (mortadella) , beansprouts, sprinkled with deep-fried shallots and chopped mint with a nuoc mam (fish sauce) dip. You'll need a delicate touch to replicate this dish in your skullery.

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2004-07-06T01:02:00.000-07:00

This is the southern standard, Ca Kho To (�Stewed fish Vietnamese style in bowl�) 27,000VD. The sweet caramelized fish sauce floods the clay bowl with its thick juices seeping into the fish flesh. Diners can choose from three kinds of fish - Ca Hu (�Catfish�), Ca Loc (�Snack-head fish� � think they mean Snake-head fish�) and Ca Tre (�Fatten fish�). I prefer the Ca Hu for this dish. I am sure the others work equally well, however I do find the Ca Tre a bit too fatty for this dish. This serving of Ca Kho To was first rate. The sauce is addictive and well worth pouring the remnants over rice for a mashed up baby food hit.

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2004-07-06T00:58:00.000-07:00

In her weighty tome, '1000 places to see before you die' , travel writer Patricia Schultz advises readers to shuffle along to Cha Ca La Vong restaurant in Hanoi before they croak. However, if you browse a little further along the bookshelf, next to Schultz's two tonnes of pulped rainforest, you'll find noodlepie's very own '1 thing to do before you leave Hanoi'. It's a slim volume consisting of a single piece of advice: 'Find out the address of Cha Ca La Vong in Saigon and go there instead.'
Cha Ca originated in Hanoi at the Doan family restaurant over a century ago. The street was later renamed simply Cha Ca Street, a legend was born and the hordes still stampede up the narrow, creaking stairs of number 14 to this day. It's a very tired looking restaurant and it has something of a monopoly on the dish (The name Cha Ca La Vong was copyrighted in 1989), but the lazy, slapdash service and average grub put some folk (Pieman included) off a return visit. However, in late 2003 Cha Ca La Vong opened its first Saigon branch at 31 Nguyen Thi Dieu Street in District 3. The food is better, the service comes without the northern snarl and the indoor/outdoor restaurant is still sparse like the Hanoi original, but far cleaner, more modern and comfortable

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2004-07-06T00:56:00.000-07:00

There's only one fish on offer in Hanoi. In the decadent south you can choose from two varieties, Ca Loc (Snake head fish) or the fattier Ca Tre. I tried the Ca Tre once, but the original and only fish on offer in Hanoi, the Ca Loc, works better. The dish is already a greasefest, so you don't really need a fatty fish clogging up the pipes any further. The fish is fried in a saffron tempered frying pan on a charcoal burner sat upon your table. There's bun (cold vermicelli noodles), unsalted peanuts, chopped yellow chili, chopped spring onion, herb plate (mainly a kind of mint and coriander), mam tom (shrimp paste) and nuoc mam (fish sauce). The waiter brings a bowl of hedgerow consisting of green sections of spring onion and dill he chucks it into the frying pan for a minute of rapid reduction before eating.

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2004-07-06T00:55:00.000-07:00

Pick and choose what you like from the sidedishes and stick it in your bowl. Lastly, you'll be needing a wee bit of sauce. Fish sauce good, Mam tom better. A spoonful of the purple monster brings Cha Ca to life. OK - I know - it stinks, but try it just once, it really works. It's also worth stirring some sugar and half a lemon into the mam tom to tart it up before letting it loose in your bowl. This is the greasiest dish in the east, but one of the best. Dinner for two with one extra order of Cha Ca (it's that good...) plus a couple of drinks costs 208,000VD. It's slightly cheaper in Hanoi. Cha Ca at 31 Duong Thanh street, Hanoi is an excellent (and better) alternative to the original joint

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2004-07-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

Quan An Ngon at 138 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street in District 1 brings streetstalls in off the streets, dresses them up fancy, doubles the street price and hauls in punters by the hundredweight. The result is an illustration of the overwhelming appeal of street nosh. This place has around 400 seats and you'll be lucky to find one free at lunchtime or dinner. The owner, purportedly a savvy Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese), had a superb idea - Scour the streets, find the best dishes out there, the best street chefs cooking those dishes, offer them a gig at a new restaurant and a regular, reliable wage. Bingo, Quan An Ngon was born in 2001. The owner recruited 20 or more cooks this way and each serves their own speciality inside Quan An Ngon.

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2004-07-06T00:48:00.000-07:00

First up is Chao luon (Rice porridge with eel) costs 17,000VD. Chao comes in several varieties, (Ga) chicken, (Muc) squid, (Vit) duck, (Tom) shrimp, (Ca) fish and (Long) offal. Chao luon is probably not the first choice of many in 31 degrees of sticky Saigon pre-rainy season heat, in an outdoor restaurant, with a limited number of fans, sitting under parasols and banana trees... but... I have a heavy Chao Luon habit to feed and, to my mind, this joint serves up porridge perfection

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2004-07-06T00:47:00.000-07:00

I have a feeling the real draw is the fact that diners can peruse the stalls that line the perimeter of this indoor/outdoor restaurant - which is a bit of a courtyard-come-temple if you know what I mean - and get a sanitized sense of street eats without having to actually step foot in the gutter themselves - God forbid. I am a big fan, it must be said. I've never had anything I would call total crap here, but there are some dishes that are noticeably better than others. And I had two pipin' hot hits on this visit.

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2004-07-06T00:43:00.000-07:00

Next up is a northern dish Banh Tom Ho Tay (Fried shrimp cakes) costs 14,000VD. Ho Tay is West Lake in Hanoi (that's the big lake to the north end of Hanoi) and there's one restaurant on Ho Tay called, imaginatively enough, Banh Tom Ho Tay and it's supposedly THE restaurant for this dish. I've been there several times, it's a tatty spot serving naff food. Quan An Ngon does the dish better. Plus, there are no rats, no crappy chairs, no knackered tables, no hordes of roaring drunks or floors littered with dinner debris. Quan An Ngon is civilised.

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2004-07-06T00:42:00.000-07:00

There are two types of Chao Luon. One is the freshly exterminated eel cooked in with the porridge variety - this one can be a touch fiddly in the bone department. The other is the luon chien (fried) variety - the eel is deep-fried in a very light batter and thrown into the hot porridge just before serving. That's the way I prefer it and that's the way Quan An Ngon dish it up. It's the porridge that takes the time, 3 to 8 hours simmering or until the rice is mushy and it... err... looks like porridge. Season, throw in the eels, splash of deep fried shallots, herbage, a side of quai (fried bread stick), half a lemon, chili sauce and you're ready. It's the slightly crispy texture of the fried eels combined with the smooth warmth of the porridge and a biting combo of pepper and chili that keeps me craving more. It's simply yum.

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2004-07-06T00:34:00.000-07:00

The shrimps are deep-fried in a light batter with slices of sweet potato served on a bed of lettuce and herbs with a nuoc mam (fish sauce) dip with sliced carrots, chilis and su su. It's crunchtatsic fun, I am a repeat offender - doesn't matter what I order at Quan An Ngon, I always seem to have room to squeeze in some Banh Tom at the end. Naughty.

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2004-07-06T00:33:00.000-07:00

Top of Hanoi's gutter grub hit parade and an unfamiliar face on the lunchtime pavements of Saigon is Bun cha. So far I've spotted a paltry eight places serving this northern specialty in Saigon. A large proportion of them are near the airport. Whereas, the bun cha babes of Hanoi are grillin' in the gutters on every available street corner in town. In the soft south I've found only one al fresco barbie and that's at 8 Ly Tu Trong Street in District 1. They've lifted their bun cha out of the gutter with their waist high 'deluxe' barbie unit. You won't find this up north. You won't find a guy grilling up north either, but it's the man's job down south.

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2004-07-06T00:12:00.000-07:00

I blogged up another Saigon bowl of bun cha some time ago, but a serious bun cha habit isn't easy to break and it's never long before the carnivore in me starts stalking the streets for more charred carcass. This joint on Ly Tu Trong Street has five or six plastic tables on the pavement next a bamboo tree. There's plenty more seating inside. Like the bun cha I blogged up previously , it's massively popular. Packed around 11am (Bun Cha is a lunchtime only dish) mostly with Hanoians looking for northern scoff cooked by northern cooks. There are a few differences between this one and the last one I tried; there's far less variety in the hedgerow department here (lettuce, beansprouts, rau muong (stripped morning glory) and Rau Dap ca (fish mint) - that's yer lot), smaller cha gio (Vietnamese spring rolls) and a much lighter fish sauce.

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2004-07-06T00:09:00.000-07:00

I've eaten here many times before without complaint, but I found the meatballs were a little 'off' today and needed a higher char factor. I added a spoonful of the garlic vinegar and a couple of the garlic cloves from the pot on the table. The lightness of this bun cha sauce begs for the bollocks the garlic vinegar gives it. The cha gio were slightly disappointing. Large lumps of pork meat are not a fave find inside my spring rolls. It's a crime committed in various other parts of Saigon and I wish it would stop. You'll find better here and here . Bun cha, cha gio, iced tea and a wet napkin set me back just over a buck at 18,000VD.

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