kottke.org posts about food
For our first lunch in Saigon, we met up with Graham from Noodlepie, a Saigon-centric food blog. We cabbed it from our hotel to Quan Co Tam - Banh Canh Trang Bang to have one of his favorite Vietnamese dishes, banh trang phoi suong (literally “rice pancake exposed in the dew (at night)”). Here’s the outlay:
It’s a simple dish; just boiled pork wrapped in thin rice paper with an assortment of herbs, pickled onions & carrots, cucumber, and raw bean sprouts. As you can see from the photo (or the much better photos that Graham took on a previous trip), the plate of herbs that they give you is quite impressive and varied; one smelled like lemon, another like fish. All wrapped up and dipped in fish sauce, it’s delicious and simple.
Afterwards we headed to the market, Graham for dinner fixings and us for some browsing around. Before we parted, he treated us to a sugarcane & lemon drink (mia da) and a pennywort smoothie (not as bad as I’d thought for something that tasted like salad through a straw). Thanks for the nice lunch, Graham!
We’ve arrived safely in Vietnam. Saigon is by far the most European stop on our trip, which makes sense because Thailand was never colonized by a European power[1] and Hong Kong was British and therefore not European[2]. There are cafes, French restaurants, European architecture, public spaces like squares and parks, etc. It feels like Europe here.
And there are a lot of dongs here. The Vietnamese currency is the dong[3]. Our hotel is just off of Dong Khoi. I’ve seen several restaurants and shops with “Dong” in the name. Beavis and Butthead would love it here; I myself have been making culturally insensitive jokes pertaining to the currency and my pants pocket all afternoon.
[1] The only SE Asian country never to have been so colonized.
[2] Hello, angry Brits! Of course you’re European, but you know what I mean. For starters, you’ve got your own breakfast, as opposed to the continental.
[3] The 50,000 & 100,000 dong notes are plastic and see-through in a couple spots. US currency is so not cool.
Red Bull was originally a Thai energy drink. I’ve seen the original in the stores here, along with several competing brands.
When you only know a few words of a language, it’s easy to get confused when speaking. Somehow the phrase “tod mon pla” is one of the few Thai phrases that has stuck fast in my head, so much so that I’m afraid I’ll get flustered when somebody greets me with “sa-wat dee kha” that I will answer with “tod mon pla”:
Them: “Hello!”
Me: “Fish cakes.”
Thai also sounds a bit like Klingon to me; it’s all the short one-syllable letter combinations strung together. Any day now, instead of “khawp khun khrap” (which means “thank you”), I’m going to reply with qapla’ (roughly pronounced “kah-pla”, it’s the Klingon word for “success” or “good luck”[1]).
Meanwhile, my fast and loose eating on the streets of Bangkok has finally caught up with me as I’ve been spending a little more time in the bathroom than usual for the past day. I flew too close to the sun on bags of soda, my friends. It’s not bad, but I think I’ll lay off getting ice from places on the street.
[1] qapla’ is the only Klingon word that I know, gleaned from hours of watching ST:TNG on TV in high school and college. I’m a big dork, but not the kind that’s anything approaching fluent in Klingon.
Just got back from dinner at Anna’s Cafe (118 Soi Sala Daeng). I had the grilled chicken with garlic and pepper and Meg got tom kah gung (the coconut and galangal soup that we learned how to make in our cooking class, except with shrimp instead of chicken). The reviewers at Fodor’s didn’t like Anna’s, but we thought it was pretty good. Anna’s also seems to be the place in Bangkok to go for your birthday…we heard Happy Birthday sung five different times while we were there.
Matt writes about finding good food in an unfamiliar city. We’ve been struggling with this on our trip to Asia. Offline approaches (books, recommendations by locals, etc.) seem to work well, as does taking a peek on eGullet or Chowhound.
We stopped for lunch today at Tonpo, which is right on the river near a water taxi stop. The heat is brutal here, especially in the middle of the day, so the breeze from the river was quite refreshing. One of the dishes we ordered was fried chicken wrapped in pandanus leaves:
The fried chicken was excellent, some of the best I’ve had (I think we’re venturing out tonight to get more at this place Meg heard about). But do you see that sauce next to the chicken? It tasted exactly like Bazooka bubble gum, swear to god. Fried chicken and gum, a match made in heaven.
We’ve been eating a lot off the street[1] here in Bangkok. On our morning and afternoon walks to and from the Skytrain[2], there are one-person food carts each serving up a particular little snack for 5-10 baht[3] apiece. It’s a good grazing situation; lunch yesterday lasted about five hours[4] and consisted of some orange juice, a thai iced coffee, pork balls on a stick, grilled chicken on a stick, some sort of sweet coconut custard thing, chrysanthemum juice, some noodles that very much tasted like ramen (with pork), more sweet coconut custard things, some peanut crepes…
[1.5 hour interlude for a foot and thai massage[5] that I quite enjoyed and Meg quite didn’t]
…fried dough balls, pork and pineapple on a stick, a bag of orange soda, pork crepes with tiny egg[6], and dessert tacos. Altogether it was maybe US$6 for the two of us (and my dad ate some too).[7]
I love eating this way and it was something that was sorely missing in HK.
[1] From street vendors, not literally off the street.
[2] Auto traffic is awful here…traffic jams everywhere. So we’ve been using the Metro (subway), Skytrain (the elevated train), and the river taxis to get around. They get us to most places we need to go. There are motorcycle taxis available, but we’d rather not split up on the journey. Two/three-person motorcycle-powered rickshaws called tuk tuks are also available, but we’ve heard conflicting reports of the usefulness/sketchiness that we’ve opted out of them altogether.
[3] It’s about 40 baht to a US dollar. A meal at a small restaurant with tables on the street cost us around US$5 for the two of us, including gigantic beer.
[4] We started out at Aw Kaw Taw market, walked over to Chatuchak market, and then to the area around Sala Daeng.
[5] The massage was around US$7 per person. I want one every day.
[6] Onto each crepe, the cook cracked a tiny egg. He made up about 10 for the woman ahead of us and cracked 10 tiny eggs, one for each crepe.
[7] To those who say they can’t afford to travel, I say to you: stop making excuses. If you’ve got the income and leisure time to be spending time reading this blog, are sufficiently motivated, and make it a priority in your life[8], you can certainly afford it. The most costly item is the plane ticket, but if you watch for deals and are flexible in where you want to visit (maybe you go to Brazil instead of Thailand), you can get over here for less than you might think. And once you’re here, you can get by on $20 a day, including lodging. Travel is cheaper here as well, buses and trains are always an option, and there are several low-cost airlines that serve the region. It requires a little effort and intrepidity, but low-cost international travel can be done.
[8] This is the big sticking point for most people, I think. If you choose to have a family or focus on your career or pursue a costly photography hobby, you might not have the money or flexibility to travel this way. But that’s a choice you’ve made (on some level)…and I would argue that if you’re 30 years old, you can arrange to make an overseas trip once every 3-5 years, and that’s about 7-8 trips by the time you’re 60.
Meg and I took a Thai cooking class today at Baipai Cooking School on the recommendation of my friend Darby (thx, Darb!). Since cooking is her thing, Meg’s got the full write-up with photos. They pick you up at your hotel, you spend 4 hours cooking (part instruction, part hands-on) in a small outdoor kitchen (there were about 8-10 other people in the class) tasting as you go, you eat the meal you cook, and then they drop you back at your hotel. All for around US$35 per person. We made pad thai, tom kha gai (chicken & galangal in coconut milk soup), fish cakes, and tab tim grobb (water chestnut in coconut milk). Very fun and highly recommended.
Quick note to say that we’ve arrived in Bangkok, which I think is going to be more our speed somehow. Not that Hong Kong wasn’t nice, but something about here feels better. We had a really chatty taxi driver on the way in (wish I’d gotten a photo or recorded some of the conversation, but I was too busy trying to keep up with his wall of words)…we learned a bit of the Thai language, that Pepsi is more popular than Coke here, and not to trust doormen. “Never go eat seafood where the doorman tell you to go eat seafood. Is too expensive. He get a commission. Go Chinatown, find your own.” And then when we drove up to the hotel, he spotted the doorman and his eyes narrowed…”there he is, the doorman,” and gave us a look of warning.
After checking in and showering, we met up with my dad, who took us for a typical Thai meal in a small, unassuming restaurant. Green mango salad, pork with spring vegetables, and a coconut milk soup with shrimp and mushrooms (it came in what looked like a bundt cake pan, with a small flame in the middle to keep the soup warm). Then we walked around a bit, orienting ourselves to the city. All the street food looked super good, and lots of bargains to be had at the night market (including about 15 different kinds of “pussy” listed on a card I had shoved in front of me on Patpong street). More to follow.
The day before yesterday, we went for dim sum for lunch again…can’t get enough of those meat-stuffed buns and pastries. This time, we cleverly arranged to bring some locals along so we’d have a little better idea what was going on food-wise. Or rather, they cleverly arranged to meet up with us. A couple of days into the trip, we received an email from a couple of HK high school students, Denise and Christine. They just happened to be working on an article about blogging for a school magazine that gets published once a year, and wrote to see if they could interview us. We agreed — on the condition that we treat them to dim sum — and off we went on Saturday to the Chao Inn on Peking Road in TST.
We ordered a variety of dim sum, including a Chaozhou specialty dish (made of beef…it looked a little like headcheese), which after an initial taste by everyone at the table, was left for the wait staff to collect. We also had some shrimp dumplings, BBQ pork buns, sticky rice (and beef?) wrapped in lotus leaf, spring rolls, and some rice noodle dish I’m forgetting the exact ingredients of. We chatted about food, blogging, teen life in Hong Kong, movies, etc. They attend an English-speaking school, so their English was quite good and the conversation flowed easily. A favorite conversational tidbit was that when you buy fake electronics in Hong Kong, they ask you which logo you want on it (Sony, Panasonic, NEC, etc.) and then affix the proper sticker. Awesome.
Thanks for the nice lunch, girls. I hope you got what you needed for your interview.
Finally procured some dim sum here in HK (with more to come tomorrow). On a recommendation from Arthur, we hit Spring Moon in the Peninsula Hotel. After getting some oolong tea that smelled like apricots (which we later learned was also organic), we ordered the following:
From right to left are the xiao long bao with scallop (soup dumplings with scallop), the steamed green chive dumpling with minced shrimp, and rice noodle roll with chicken and spinach. Not pictured is the baked BBQ pork puff (the pastry had impossibly little flaky layers) that we started with.
And for dessert, Meg had the mango pudding and I went for the deep fried egg yolk buns. Arthur hyped up the mango pudding:
People that know me have heard me hype this up forever: there is a good chance that this place has the best mango pudding in the world. No exaggeration. You can also get the mango pudding in the lobby lounge, or get it room service if you’re staying at the hotel. I remember the first time I tried it, I was staying there, and we got mango pudding like every day. It’s just so damn good, I can’t even describe it. The texture is moist, not too rubbery, perfect mango flavor… it’s just awesome. If you’re EVER in Hong Kong, you must at least go to the Peninsula lobby and try this out. You won’t be dissappointed.
And according to Meg (who admittedly might not have extensive mango pudding experience), he’s not wrong. Now, being a Minnesota State Fair veteran, deep fried is something I do know a lot about, and those egg yolk buns (when you cut into them with your fork, they look like eggs; white bread surrounds a deep yellow bread center) were fantastic…somehow light and rich at the same time.
BTW, if you’re heading to Hong Kong (and elsewhere in Asia) in the future, you should check out last week’s Asia thread. Lots of great suggestions in there; thanks everyone.
Went to dinner at Xiao Nan Guo last night, a Shanghaiese restaurant in Central (level 3 in the Man Yee building). Meg had a little trouble with her entree (a hairy crab), but Grandma’s BBQ pork belly (or something like that…I should have written it down) that I ordered was pretty good.
We also had an order of “chef’s special steamed pork dumplings”, which we guessed (correctly!) were soup dumplings. They looked quite similar to ones we’ve had in NYC (@ New Green Bo, Grand Sichuan International, and Joe’s Shanghai), but the broth inside was a lot lighter and the dumplings were more delicate (meaning that they tended to break before we could get them into our spoons and slurp the yummy juice). Very tasty…I could get used to the lighter soup, but I still prefer the NYC ones. I think we’re off to find some dim sum today, so we’ll see if we can drum up more soup dumplings.
(Also, after lunch yesterday, we picked up some pastries on the way back to the hotel from the MTR. I had some maple syrup bread and Meg had a milk French toast bun. I’ve found the bread here in Hong Kong to be great, something I didn’t expect before we got here.)
Soon after we arrived, we discovered that Alain Ducasse — fresh off his 3 star grade in the NYC Michelin Guide — has a place in Kowloon quite close to where we are staying called Spoon. Thinking of splurging a bit on dinner, we went to check out the menu (fish choices shown below):
Turns out that Spoon is somewhat like Craft in NYC…you mix and match entrees with different sauces and sides. Here’s how they describe Spoon:
The menu is not organized in a usual progression of first course, main course, cheese and dessert, but reflects a concept that allows each guest to tailor make his/her own meal. Each section is divided into three columns, allowing guests to mix and match their own main course, sauce and accompaniments. Ducasse says “everything is proposed and nothing is imposed”. With the idea of having something for everyone, the menu includes Asian, Western and vegetarian dishes.
One of things I like about eating out is placing myself in the hands of a chef who knows what he’s doing. I’m not sure my curried yams with truffled bacon in Hollandaise sauce would compare favorably with whatever a chef picked by Alain Ducasse would prepare for me to eat. As interesting as it looks, we may have to skip it and check out Felix at the Peninsula instead…you can take a whiz while looking out at the city.
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