Ho Chi Minh City (Part 3)

Day 5

When I got back from Hue, it was nearing dinner time. Outside, on Bui Vien Street, fighting against the pollution that endlessly wafts up my nostrils, were the smells of Vietnamese cooking. The sidewalks were filled with small food stands and waitresses trying to usher customers into their restaurants. The usual parade of foreign, horror house freaks was getting into full gear. It was a Friday night, and the moon, visible while walking down the street, was full and lustrous behind a veil of yellow-gray smog.

Glass display case of wonders

I returned to eat at a com binh dan joint that catered mostly to locals, although, being in the heart of the backpacker district, you could expect to see some foreigners there, too. The people there have been nice to me before, and their food is excellent, with a selection that's better than similar places nearby.

I ordered rice with rau muong toi (water spinach sauteed with garlic), a shrimp dish that was spicier than I realized but delicious nonetheless (I'm not sure what the dish was called; I merely pointed and said, "tom kia"), ca kho to (braised claypot fish -- basa, in this case, which had a perfect firmness -- in a peppery, caramelized sauce), and a soup of dark greens with mudcrab meat. The entire meal, with iced tea, cost 24,000 dong ($1.37).

Spicy shrimp and ca kho to (claypot basa fish)

I was more than satisfied with my meal, and it felt nice being back in warm, dry Saigon, in a restaurant where no one stared at me and where my Vietnamese was accepted as neither strange nor funny. I've noticed many times that people outside of Saigon complain about Saigonese people -- they're too modern, too loose, and are only after money (the list goes on and on at times) -- but to me, Saigon is the most comfortable, most culturally familiar (not because it's all that Western, but because I lived here for three years), and most open city in Vietnam. In most cases, the people here are welcoming and friendly. Also, I've noticed that the Saigonese generally don't complain about people in other parts of Vietnam, except for Hanoian people. If they do complain, it's usually to the effect that non-Saigonese are behind the times and too conservative.

Making sinh to dau (strawberry shake)

The family that made my sinh to dau was very nice. I sat down and we talked about nothing in particular for about ten minutes. My fruit shake cost all of 10,000 dong (57 cents).

Lots of real Dalat strawberries in there...and a lot of sugar, too.

The restaurant where I had dinner, Quan Com Thanh Hai, is located at 168 Bui Vien Street. Their phone number is 836-5212.

I had sinh to at a sidewalk stand in front of a CD/DVD/VCD/MP3 store called Yen Thanh, located at 190 Bui Vien Street.

Day 6

Today I head to Vung Tau for a couple of days. The hydrofoil that will take me there leaves at 10:30 a.m., so I wanted to wake up early, grab a quick breakfast and coffee, and wander the streets a little before checking out of my hotel and getting a taxi to the Saigon River. I didn't have to go far to find my morning's sustenance.

This guy sets up shop at the bottom of my hotel's stairs

My breakfast today was a no-brainer. At 6:30, as soon as I headed downstairs to the hotel lobby, I could smell suon nuong (bbq pork) cooking outside. There's a guy who sets up his food stand there every morning and keeps it going until late at night. I'd walked past him several times before only to be turned off by the high volume of customers. Today, however, probably due to the fact that he'd just opened, his stand was less crowded than usual so I thought I'd take advantage of the lull and grab a quick bite.

Watching the food get cooked and served. This man's wife squatted at the curb grilling pork over a flame.

The pork that his wife barbecues on the street comes fresh every morning from the market; that's what he told me, and I have no reason not to believe him. The Vietnamese place a primacy on fresh food, and people wouldn't eat here if the ingredients he used weren't as fresh as he claimed. I opted out of the steamed egg-and-pork cake that suon nuong usually comes with, and was happy to chow down on nothing but meat and rice and a negligible amount of vegetables.

My breakfast of broken rice, bbq pork (com suon). With iced tea the damage amounted to 15,000 dong (86 cents).

Doesn't that look sublime? I got my food no more than a minute after ordering it. The man took some time in the middle of his busy morning to speak to me a bit, which was nice. He seemed to like the fact that I'd chosen his stand over the many restaurants surrounding us. A little tip: if you try to speak Vietnamese to local people, even if you only know a few words and phrases, more often than not you'll get better service.

You can find this food stand at the foot of the Viet Nghi Hotel, at 198 Bui Vien Street.

Ho Chi Minh City (Part 2)

Day 3

This morning I got up with the sole purpose of eating an old favorite in my old neighborhood of Phu My Hung. Phu My Hung is off most people's radar, and sometimes people avoid it on principal because it's a planned community in the style of, say, Singapore or Seoul. A lot of people say it has no soul. But I lived there for over a year in the nicest, most wonderfully private Vietnamese house I've ever lived in, and I learned that there's a lot more to Phu My Hung than just a bunch of new, ugly high-rises, more Koreans than you can shake bulgogi at, and streets laid out in a grid. It also has a lot of great cafes and restaurants (plus it's close to other districts, such as Nha Be, that are really interesting to explore).

Anyway, enough about Phu My Hung. The point of my trip was to get com tam ga (I usually just bark out com ga, however).

Com tam ga. This was my favorite breakfast when living in Saigon.

There were quite a few differences to note since I moved back to the U.S. 22 months earlier. The most important difference was that they got rid of their yellow broken rice and replaced it with white broken rice. When I asked why, the owner, noticing my despair, gently touched my shoulder and explained that many people requested that they use white rice instead. No surprise, really. In Vietnam, rice is always supposed to be white. It was still good, but I longed for the yellow rice, if only for the color.

Com tam ga, thick nuoc cham sauce, chicken broth, and complementary jasmine tea. They do it right at Nam Khanh.

The woman asked me if I thought their com ga tasted better before, and without thinking I said yes. I'm not really sure that it did, though. I don't think she believed me anyway. Who would have after hearing me grunt and moan in gustatory rapture as I shoveled my breakfast into my mouth? The nuoc cham sauce is what really makes this dish special (not to mention the fact that it only costs $1.25 for all of this). It's thick, sweet, salty with a fish sauce flavor, and has a slight kick from chopped red chilies. Without the sauce, the dish really wouldn't be coming all the way to District 7 for.

The com ga pros, hard at work

Nam Khanh was always a peaceful place to start the day. Follow up the com ga with a little Vietnamese coffee and no day will be all bad.

The people working here initially didn't recognize me, which was a little weird since I never saw another white dude eating breakfast there, and because I used to chat with them now and then, but after I'd complained about the change of broken rice one woman pointed at me and giggled, saying, "I remember him! He hasn't come here in a long time!" Maybe she was just being polite. If she was, I certainly appreciated it. I mean, come on, who hates to be forgotten?

The new face of Nam Khang. I liked the old face better. Once they got rid of the yellow rice, it was all over.

The second big change was that they changed the front of their restaurant. I really wish they hadn't. Two years ago it was a quiet, unobtrusive spot on the wide sidewalk, with several nice, dark wooden tables under sun umbrellas. Now it looks like a bus stop. It also resembles every other renovated store or restaurant around town, which is too bad, because the style grates on the eyes.

Nam Khanh can be found at S8-1 Huong Vuong 2 Street, Phu My Hung, District 7. Their menu, which also includes excellent lunches and dinners, is in English, Vietnamese, and Korean (the area is known by many as "Little Korea"), and delivery in the neighborhood is free. Their number is (84-4) 410-0345.


When I came back from District 7 it wasn't yet 8 a.m., and since I didn't get coffee at Nam Khanh I decided to wander around my hotel on Bui Vien Street to see what new cafes had sprung up since 2007. The place that I found was a real gem, partly because it's attractive and serves excellent coffee, but also because it supports young, hearing-impaired people who might otherwise have difficulty finding work in HCMC.

I was initially attracted to the sign out front that advertised free wi-fi. HCMC, despite its generally poor infrastructure, is far more wired than any city in the U.S. that doesn't have a wi-fi cloud hovering over it. And the sheer number of cafes in HCMC surely rivals the number of cafes in all of the U.S. west coast combined.

The attractive, comfy interior of Sozo's 2nd floor

Sozo is located at 176 Bui Vien Street. A delicious glass of iced black coffee only costs 20,000 dong ($1.14), and the first floor, where customers enter, has a display case filled with what are said to be excellent pastries and cookies. I'm trying to cut down on the sweets myself, so I can't say firsthand that they're worth coming here for. But the coffee is awesome, and the staff here is great.


I was also excited for lunch, as I had plans to hit a place called "Tiem Com So Mot," which I came across many years ago when scouring the area for cheap electronics. This place consistently has an amazing selection of fresh-made dishes. And the wait staff, who tend to stare at foreigners (it's a like a disease in the country), are very nice and efficient. Watching them bustle around each other on the greasy, always crowded floor is like watching people skate around a tiny ice rink, not gracefully but somehow skillfully enough never to fall or to slip and dump a plate of hot soup on their customers.

One of the best com binh dan selections in HCMC

I never lived all that close to this place, but it was worth going out of my way to get here, even in the hottest months, during the heaviest rains, and in the most lung-clogging traffic. I've also noticed that the more dead you look when you arrive, the better the service. And if the traffic's exhaust has pretty much asphyxiated you when you get there, one of the blue shirts will lead you to a table beneath a high powered fan and give you a free iced tea.

They do a brisk business here...and have at least 30 employees

They've got everything you could ever want to eat, just as long as what you want to eat is Vietnamese

I've probably had about three quarters of the selection, which generally doesn't change much, in the photo above. I've never had a bad meal, though that one quarter I've yet to try still seems a little intimidating to me. I don't think I'd ever knowingly order those big brown eggs on the right or the chunks of fatty pork behind them.

All this, plus tea, cost a mere $2

On this day my lunch consisted of white rice and boiled veggies, a grilled pork and onion skewer, shrimp and fatty pork in a sweet garlicky fish sauce, more veggies, and a dark leafy soup with mud-crab. It was worth getting lost on foot, nearly getting run over by motorbikes on the sidewalk, and a hot sun beating down on me, to find.

Bananas are a free dessert after one's meal

Tiem Com So Mot is at 74 Suong Nguyet Anh Street in District One. Their phone numbers, for free delivery within the area, are 833-4628 and 832-4376.


Dinner was a casual Western affair with an old writer friend at Skewers Restaurant, on Thai Van Lung Street. My friend, Martin, eats here regularly, and seems to know everyone that walks through the door. (Which is good for me, as I get to meet new people through him.)

The cozy interior at Skewers

This meal marked my first Western food since leaving Hawaii on December 28th. I must admit that it felt nice entering such a classy place and not worry about being stared at or otherwise imposed on. One can easily fall in love with the atmosphere at Skewers.

The cooking station on the first floor of Skewers

In addition to their extensive Mediterranean-inspired menu, they also have a good wine list, and the long wooden bar that greets you at the entrance is more than just a little inviting. I decided to order the grilled salmon on a bed of niçoise salad. It wasn't a huge portion by any stretch, but the salmon was cooked and peppered nicely, the vegetables were crisp and fresh, and the mustard-infused dressing was subtle but flavorful. I was more than happy with my choice.

My grilled salmon on top of a small niçoise salad

Martin ordered the rack of veal in the photo below. It looked scrumptious to me, and the colors of his dish only heightened my estimation of it. But I didn't eat it; he did. His verdict, succinct as always: "Well, I got it all down." You have to understand that Martin can be a little picky about his food, and he's been known to say what he feels about things. I'm not a fan of veal anyway, but those veggies sure looked good.

Breadcrumb and walnut crusted veal rack with spinach and tomatoes in a white butter sauce

Even if this dish wasn't the best, I've eaten at Skewers enough to know that they generally succeed pretty well with their menu. And Martin's regular patronage of the restaurant attests to this, too. The owner, a Vietnamese-American who was raised in San Mateo, California, is one of the better success stories in Saigon's food and beverage industry. He's a super nice guy, too. Prices are reasonable, with entrees ranging from 65,000 to 240,000 dong (~$3.70 to ~$13.75).

Skewers is located at 9A Thai Van Lung Street, District 1, HCMC. Their telephone number is (84-8) 822-4798. For more info, check out their website at www.skewers-restaurant.com.

Day 4

This morning I woke up early, though I'm not sure why. I was probably just hungry. My stomach's eating clock is all screwed up from a combination of jet-lag and my desire to eat more than usual for the sake of documenting it during my limited time here. In any case, I was glad to get up early. Staying in the backpacker area of the city, which is like a horror house of scary foreigners that unfortunately became reality, the only time one can find peace on the street is at dawn.

Lam Cafe. I'm not sure what the "far far away" slogan on the signboard means, but it was just down the street from where I was staying

That's approximately when these photos were taken. Lam Cafe had its doors open, so I went inside. True, there was a young man sleeping in a chair in the middle of the entrance, but that didn't stop me from shaking him vigorously and thrusting my giant foreigner's face into his sleepy Vietnamese one. Not bothering with a menu, I asked for eggs and bread (banh mi op la), some fresh veggies, and a black coffee. When he stumbled into a back room, I was half sure he'd fall asleep back there.

Dawn on Bui Vien Street is about the only time you can find it this empty

Luckily, he only took a few minutes to return. By then, already, I was noticing more motorbikes on the street, and other food stands had started to set up. Early morning is a good time to watch local people start their day, which usually consists of exercising on the sidewalk or street, taking their kids out to pee in the gutters, and hacking up phlegm and depositing it where people are most likely to walk. It's not great if you're sitting on the sidewalk eating breakfast, but after a while you learn to block it out.

A simple breakfast of fried eggs, French bread, a few fresh veggies, and black coffee (all for $1.25)

My breakfast was as simple as it looked. I loaded my eggs down with pepper and then ate around the yolks. The bread was warm, as if it had been held over a flame rather than toasted, and although I asked for fresh veggies I only really trusted the tomatoes. Okay, I trusted everything but the sickly green lettuce, and I passed on the onions because having onion breath is a hell of a way to start the day.

I finished it up with something healthy, which seems to be rare for me these days

I love the fruit salads you can get in Vietnam, though it's often best to ask what selection they have on hand before ordering. Otherwise you're liable to get a dish stacked with nothing but sliced watermelon, which is fine for some, but I personally like having more variety. For only about 75 cents I got a huge dish of sliced pineapple, banana, and mango.

Once I finished breakfast, I headed into the city to see my friend and former landlord, then came back and started preparing for my 1:30 flight to Hue.

The Past 24 Hours in my Kitchen

The past 24 hours in my kitchen have been a mix of success and failure. I've had some free time on my hands since getting back from my trip, and because I'm jetlagging something fierce and not really bothering to recover from it, I've decided to spend more time than usual cooking up old favorites and trying out what are looking to become new favorites.

On Thursday night I tried to make Vietnamese clam soup (canh nghieu), which uses leeks, garlic, fish sauce, chicken stock, fresh star fruit, and about two dozen Manila clams, among a few other ingredients. The recipe appeared to be very simple, requiring that I first boil the clams, then remove them from their shells and set them aside from the soup stock, which I save for later. Then I fry the leeks and garlic, add the clams, and splash in a couple tablespoons of fish sauce.

So far so good, right?

I toss this mixture, which is colorful and looks great, into the stock, which I've brought to a boil again, and quickly add sliced star fruit. Once it gets hot, all that's left to do is ladle the soup into dishes and garnish with cilantro, red chilies, and rau ram.

It was so salty! I was probably guilty of ladling too much soup into our bowls, too, which only intensified the salty flavor. The next time I make this I intend to halve the amount of fish sauce I'm supposed to use, and cut down on the six cups of chicken stock the recipe calls for, and I might also try to add a twist to the dish's saltiness by adding a little shrimp paste, which was optional.

The star fruit saved the day. In the end, my wife and I discarded the broth and ate what we could fish out of it.

Later that night, feeling guilty for ruining dinner, I got a sudden craving for jackfruit muffins, the recipe for which I'd recently copied from a wonderful blog called Tangled Noodle (http://tanglednoodle.blogspot.com/2009/01/jumpin-jackfruit-langka-muffins.html). The muffins turned out great -- they were sweet but not sugary, and the taste of jackfruit, which can be strong, was in fact quite mild. My wife and I had two each right away (hey, they were small!), and two days later they were gone. I'll have to make more soon...

Langka muffin

On Friday night I went all out for dinner. I made Vietnamese jackfruit salad (goi mit tron), which I've already posted the recipe for, and followed this with a shatteringly delicious wonton soup that I got from another great food blog called chezannies.blogspot.com (http://chezannies.blogspot.com/2008/12/wonton-soup.html).

This ended up taking around two hours, but the next time I make it I should be able to get it done a little quicker.

I started by mixing the ground pork, shrimp (shelled, de-veined, and quartered), and chopped green onions, jicama (this was brilliant), then tossing in some fish sauce, salt, pepper, and a few other things. What's great about this is that you just mix it all together. I just jammed my hands into the mixture and squished everything around for a few minutes. It was kind of gross but I knew right away that the wonton filling was going to be a winner.

You wouldn't want to enter this into a beauty contest. A wonton contest, however, is a different story.

This is when I recruited my wife to help me. See, she's from Utsunomiya, Japan, which is famous basically for one thing: gyoza. While gyoza are Japanese-style wontons, and typically use different ingredients than what I was working with (such as cabbage), she knew exactly how to stuff and seal the wonton skins. I didn't even realize that the wonton edges needed to be rubbed with a bit of water to make them stick together, though it made perfect sense to me when I saw her do it. She filled a small bowl of water, instructed me on wetting the skins, then showed me, like a practiced gyoza chef, how to seal them. When I saw her skill, I made her do the rest.

Hey, why leave this important job to someone like me, who'll screw it up for sure? And besides, for the last couple of days she's been enjoying the fruits of my labor; all I had to do was point at the disaster I'd made of our kitchen, and at all the random ingredients clinging to my clothes and hair, to guilt her into helping me. What would have taken me an hour to do took her twenty minutes. She was so good, in fact, that not a single wonton skin went unused, and not a speck of stuffing was left in the bowl.

In the meantime, I washed and chopped up some bok choy and yu choy, and prepared a soup stock using nothing but dried anchovies stuffed in tea filters (thanks for the great tip, Annie) and placed in a pot of boiling water for thirty minutes.

Pretty soon my wife became excited by the wontons, and she volunteered -- volunteered! -- to boil them. As soon as the first batch finished we gave them a try. They were insanely good. I mean, I'm not a huge wonton fan, but these were outrageous. My wife commented on how light the pork flavor was, then said it was because boiling it removed much of the meat's oil. Sounds good to me.

The photo below doesn't do this wonton soup justice. Yes, it looks good, but the taste...words can never capture how surprised we were by the wonderful flavor.

The broth: so clear, with a light but distinctive taste of anchovies and two types of boiled choy, would have been excellent on its own. And the veggies: the bok choy and yu choy, boiled in the broth for only five or six minutes (getting this exactly right was admittedly lucky), had the perfect crispness to them, and their deep leafy flavor (which isn't to say they were overly bitter) combined brilliantly with the broth and wontons. And finally, the wontons: they were, quite simply, the piece de resistance.

I highly recommend this recipe. And thanks again, Annie and Nate, for sharing this on your blog.

Ho Chi Minh City (Part 7)

Day 13

I've said these words six different times in my life: "Today is my last day in Vietnam." ("Last," of course, referring to a particular journey there, and not my life's journey, which will surely see me back in Vietnam some day.) This time, like at other times, I'm torn over how this makes me feel. I'm happy to have come here, seen all the changes that have taken place, eaten a TON of amazing food, and now I'm ready for the peace and relaxation that awaits me in Hawaii. People in Hawaii complain a lot about traffic (it's one of the few justifiable complaints there), but you won't hear my voice among them. Not after Vietnam, anyway. The traffic in Saigon, and the air pollution that's largely a result of it, gives me the distinct impression that for many years to come life there will be marked to a large degree by people's inability to get from one place to another safely and quickly. The noise, too, is going to drive half the country insane...if it's not insane already.

This may be a predictable thing for me to say, but the one thing that hasn't changed, and actually seems to be improving, is the food landscape all over the country. Vietnamese cuisine is less well-known than the cuisines of many of its neighbors (and former colonizers), but I'm confident that this will change. I don't see how it can't, in fact. Vietnamese cuisine could easily hold its own in a free-for-all cage match with virtually any other world cuisine you pit it against. What I regret most about my food discoveries here is that they'll never find their way over to the U.S. I'll always have to return here to find banh can, bun hen, cha gio ganh hao, and all the rest. But maybe that's not so bad. For one thing, the recipes would probably get corrupted if they were brought to foreign shores, and for another thing this only gives me more of an impetus to return to Vietnam.

But enough of my rambling. Let me get to my final "Vietnam Tastes Good" post...which won't seem particularly Vietnamese, I'm pretty sure.

Rather than set out to find some breakfast food on the sidewalk, I needed to see a friend to hand back a key to his apartment that I never ended up using, so for the sake of convenience we decided to meet at his favorite cafe downtown: Centro. It wasn't the most symbolically satisfying end to my stay in Vietnam, but it was good to see him a final time, and I'm not about to complain about the food. The fact was, it was pretty good.

Bye-bye, Centro

I smacked down 59,000 dong ($3.38) for an impressive "fruit crepe with sweet sauce" and another 33,000 dong ($1.89) for an iced coffee that appeared on my bill as a "coffee shakatto." Apparently, there was some shaking involved in the preparation of my drink, and that cost me probably close to a dollar. The crepe was good -- full of sweet, fresh strawberries and crisp, tart apple slices, with a puddle of sauce that appeared to be a combination of cream and sweetened condensed milk. It was tasty. The sugar and caffeine was exactly what I needed (though the sweet sauce was a little cloying, I have to say). But the fact remains that Cafe Lam, on Bui Vien Street, has better fruit crepes AND better coffee (no fancy names needed, baby), and for only about a quarter of the price. Of course, there's no wifi at Lam's, nor any air conditioning, and it's much noisier there, and the bathroom's a scarier option, and you're sitting on the edge of the street where garbage is thrown and the random rat scurries to and fro. (And I'm not slamming the rat. That's just part of the local scenery here, and if the locals can handle it then I'll do my best to as well.) In any case, the extra $4 I paid to have breakfast at Centro is sometimes totally worth it -- oftentimes it is, in fact, especially if you intend to hang out with friends and/or get work done -- I was just hoping to get a final Vietnamese meal in before checking out of my hotel and heading to the airport.

Fruit crepe with sweet sauce and a "shakkato" coffee

My friend and his girlfriend both ordered what looked, and sounded, as they were eating, like an amazing breakfast: two fried eggs in a homemade tomato sauce with cheese and onions scattered on top, and a piece of fresh baked French bread on the side. The price? 75,000 dong ($4.29). My friend claimed that this was the shiznit, and my eyes gave me no reason to disagree.

Fried eggs with tomato sauce and cheese, with a baguette on the side

I didn't have time to grab lunch in town, but while waiting to board at the airport I decided to shell out $6 for seafood fried rice stuffed in a coconut. It was either that, or a greasy pork chop on rice. It was disappointing, but this is better and more interesting airport fare than you'll find in the U.S. Which isn't saying much, of course.

Seafood fried rice in a young coconut

My flight got delayed, so I left the waiting area and found this gem of a spot in a lounge upstairs. It was unfortunate that I came across an Illy Cafe, but there was free wifi here and the waitresses were about as nice and efficient as anywhere I've come across in Vietnam.

Saigon International Airport lounge. Thank god they finally finished the international wing. It's like the Ritz compared to its previous manifestation.

I was more than happy to get an iced Americano and a chocolate pastry while using up the last of my computer battery. I think the coffee and pastry cost something like $6.

One last iced Vietnamese coffee...and a chocolate pastry for good measure.

An hour later my flight began to board...and I was off to Hawaii by way of Taiwan (and an overnight layover there).