Gastronomica Gastropoda - Vietnam Food

The French may have the most obvious, though somewhat elitist bookmark in any current reference on the culinary attributes of snails. But having just returned from another work related (and food exploration) trip to both north and south Vietnam, I can attest that the Indochinese have their very own and certainly more down to earth chapters on serving up the diverse variety of gastropods that slime their way across their local landscape. Snails of all colours and shapes mostly of the aquatic variety, were served in some dish at just about every meal I had there. Some were great, some were definitely forgettable, some had spiral shells piled high as the glistening centrepiece treat, some had them shelled and added to a mix stir-fry merely as dot points of meaty earthiness...and below, are some that captured the attention of my tastebuds and camera.

A local colleague showing me the way to twirl the meaty foot out of the shell of freshwater apple snails at a beer cafe in Hanoi. I suspect that this may be a local variety. Vietnamese farmers are waging an on-going but ultimately lost battle with larger introduced species that are ruthlessly chomping their way through the country's rice and taro crops. Unfortunately and typically, the aliens are not so tasty and not favoured as food.

The apple snails were wok steamed with lime leaves, chilli and lots of lemongrass. It took me but a moment's hesitation before joining my enthusiastic dining companions in digging in, or should that be digging out! Tastewise the somewhat chewy meat had obvious hints of earthy...erm...'algaeness' but this was easily fixed by a vigourous swirl in lime juice mixed in with peppered salt. Not so much a fan of the pulpy 'tail' and innards that trailed out after the foot however. The only culinary descriptive I could come up with on this was..."eww"!

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) is such a confounding and clumsy name for this vibrant metropolis of South Vietnam. I, like most of its citizens on the ground much prefer the original of Saigon. In one of the city's many hotpot restaurants I was treated to an entrée of prettily patterned shells poached in a bouillon fragrant with lime leaves. This looked to me to be a marine snail that is certainly popular, seen sold at every local market I wandered through.

In contrast to the first, this variety was tender, clear, and clean tasting. Tasty and moreish indeed.

Food to go with dark beer at a Saigon Bia Hoi (freshly brewed beer bistro). It got a bit lost in translation but I think this may be meat from some sort of large marine whelk or conch flash fried in a wok with basil, chilli and garlic segments. Tasty enough but unpleasantly tough and chewy. A cheap and insufficient substitute for abalone, that infinitely more expensive and much sought after marine gastropod mollusc. However the garlic done this way and common in local stir-fries was delicious eaten whole, not at all sharp or even garlicky. Instead they were somewhat nutty, slightly crunchy and utterly beer friendly!

Noodle Soup Cravings - Pho Chu The, Footscray

Loathed to raise this again, it's horribly cliché but Melbourne's frivolous weather continues to totally baffle me. A mere day ago we were sweltering through the city's hottest November day ever as the mercury hovered around 38°C for most of it, and yet this morning we woke to the wettest day in several years with temperatures cool enough to have to dig our sweaters out of the back of the closet again. If we'd a similar constitution to pet fish in an aquarium, this rapidity of change would've guaranteed to find us all floating belly up on the surface.

Bowl of phở bo mixed with herbage, lemon juice and plenty of bird's eye chilli just the way I like it!

The morning's rain and greyness had us lingering in bed till late but once up and thinking about food, the only brunch craving that insistently crept into mind for a need to be satisfied was a piping hot bowl of soupy noodles. Luckily for us, Footscray is only the next suburb away so it didn't take any deliberating to find ourselves walking into Chu The for large warming bowls of phở. As usual for the two of us, a medium bowl ($8.50) each of phở bo (beef) and phở ga (chicken) were promptly ordered, and I also fulfilled my first caffeine need for the day with a strong hot Vietnamese coffee syrupy with sweetened condensed milk. There's nothing much to share about the venue itself, it's a rack-standard phở joint albeit quite a small one and wholly dedicated to the Vietnamese breakfast staple. Springrolls to whet the appetite are about all you can stray away from the bowls of noodles. Choices are pretty much limited to one's preferred size of bowl, beef or chicken, and to what extend one would like to add associated offal and viscera to accompany the sliced meat (blood cubes, tendon or brisket for beef, and liver or giblets for the chicken). Order the Special for the complete experience. Lingering uncertainly over these selections when the waiter asks for your order will more than likely produce an impatient look to get with the programme.

We have visited the place quite a number of times and it's always full of local suburbanites on their grocery shopping break so there must be something going for it. Chu The produces satisfying enough bowls of phở, not the best and not the worst in Melbourne though I'm now somewhat surprised that I hadn't really been dedicated enough to have kept a phở track record. But here's my breakdown on Phở Chu The.
Pluses:
- Generous amounts of soup and meat, more so than any bowl one is likely to find in Vietnam.
- Beef slices always added to cook through in your bowl and thus served perfectly pink.
- Slices of chicken breast meat also tender and not overcooked nor grainy.
- Okay depth of flavour in the broth though lacks the heady spiciness and pepperiness of some establishments.
- Great rice noodles left with requisite bite.
Minuses:
- Limited variety of herbage with only basil and sprouts and wedge of lemon supplied.
- Chicken can include some pieces with gristle attached (and even non-chicken bits such as tripe!) if one does not expect or care for that; and beef can be untidily sliced and prone to clumping.
- Chicken broth always lacks the punch of the beef, though this is the case everywhere.

Walking outside warmly satiated and full of soup, we looked up and saw a patch of blue sky. Did they or did they not say it was going to keep raining!

Food: 14/20 - Phở or phở.
Service: 14/20 - Efficient, impersonal, inoffensive.
Value: 16/20 - Standard.
R-Factor: 16/20 - Sure, unless I can remember better elsewhere but close by.
Spot Score: 15/20 - See Pluses and Minuses.

Pho Chu The
92 Hopkins Street, Footscray VIC.
[There's another outlet somewhere in Little Saigon, Richmond]

For Footscray local and Food & Travel writer, Phil Lees' take on Chu The, visit his food blog "The Last Appetite".

Footscray Welcomes the Ox

Though I could continue to reflect back on the food encountered on a recent trip to Hanoi, there's really no reason to when similar action is currently happening right here in Melbourne! We hopped on the train last Sunday to join Footscray's Lunar New Year festivities on Hopkins Street, held a little earlier this year so as to not coincide with the Australia Day long weekend. The local Vietnamese community was out in force under beautiful blue skies to welcome in the Year of the Ox and to showcase the fantastic array of celebratory food they have to offer.

Happy red and gold lions welcome in good luck and prosperity for the new year, and scare away evil spirits from the previous one.

One of the many stalls selling celebratory treats for families to enjoy streetside or take home for later. Pork floss ideal for adding a final flourish to one's Bahn Mi.

Rows of barbequed sweet corn came complete with handles.

Skewered Bo La Lot (marinated beef-mince rolled into betel leaf 'ciggies') in chargrilling procession and $3.50 per stick. These were smoky and delicious!

Stallholder kept busy frying up cubes of rice cake (Bot Chien) with egg. A fiver got us a medium takeaway container's worth. Tastewise a little bland and definitely needed boosting from the soy sauce with cut birdseye chillies supplied, plus a further layering with garlic chilli paste from the large help-yourself jar.

More deepfried goodness...knows-what ($5). Some version of Banh Khot? Anyone?

Chargrilled glutinous rice encasing a whole sweetly caramelised banana (Chuoi Nep Nuong) was $2.50 a pop. A new encounter for us and quite a delicious chew drizzled with coconut milk.

Sampled another novel sweet treat, light and crispy rice crackers spiced with fennel seeds(?). Two dinner-plate sized crackers sandwiched loads of malted toffee syrup and slivered flesh of fresh coconut ($5). A gooey crunchy oily sticky sweet and savoury party in your mouth! Extra fun to be had watching wisps of toffee float away into hair of unwary passers-by.

Yet more deepfried temptation in the guise of battered banana fritters ($2 each). Even so, alas by this stage we'd reached deepfried and barbequed saturation and did not try them.

But a large cup of freshly squeezed green sugarcane juice ($5) was very welcomed relief, the extreme sweetness cut with a squeeze of citrussy cumquat.

Late afternoon, but hungry hoards continued to descend on Hopkins Street to enjoy the atmosphere, food, free concerts and a rare fabulously clear Melbourne day.

The celebrations were to continue to 10 pm culminating in a fireworks display but the heat and gluttony proved too much, much earlier, for even the superheroes among us. Overtaxed super senses defeated Spidey, another ice-cold sugarcane juice perhaps? Overall impressions from our inaugural visit though, one of the better street festivals around town to see in the Lunar New Year and a terrific opportunity to sample examples of Vietnamese streetfoods without leaving the country. We'll try to make it again next year.

Celebrating the Lunar New Year or Tet is the festival highlight of the year for Melbourne's large Vietnamese community spread around several suburbs and surrounds. Check out more Tet festivities that were held at Richmond's Victoria Street at Off the Spork, through the captivating camera lens of Agnes, fellow Melbourne based blogger and fried food aficionado.

Getting off the Streets - Vietnam Food

Investigation of restaurant opportunities in Hanoi led us to Nam Phuong, which offered 'traditional' Vietnamese cuisine within the fine dining confines of a revamped French villa, located within strolling distance from Hoan Kiem Lake. There was hardly time to wipe the sweaty post-walk sheen off our faces nor be dazzled by its fairylight cobwebbed facade before we were set upon by beaming doormen to escort us up the front steps. Inside was a franco-colonial alternate reality to real world Hanoi, air chilled to perfect ambience, muted jazz tunes and decor carefully chosen to provide only a romanticised hint of the foreign life on the other side of the pastel olive-yellow walls. Pretty waitresses in elegant silk ao dai sealed the bubble. The maître d', a tall slightly portly but blatantly effeminate fellow in his own brightly coloured traditional dress provided a cheerful and not unwelcomed relief to the stately mood. An expatriated Thai, Mr Arkracha energetically greeted and farewelled guests and marshalled his troops in feigned brusqueness through the evening. Witnessing him delicately donning surgical gloves to deftly shell crab legs for hapless neighbouring Japanese guests was a chuckle. And that, is my general take on Nam Phuong. A dining destination dedicated to tourists, businessmen on accounts, consular staff and the like who don't mind laying out the cash to eat 'as the natives do' in a venue where the local masses never will.


Food was presented beautifully. Our centrepiece dish was Ca Mu Chien, a whole fish (large freshwater goby) deepfried and served with an oyster sauce of ginger, mushrooms, fresh and dried scallops, and sharkfin strands. Impressive on the plate but despite being garnished with just about every Asian treasure from the sea, lacked a certain 'oomph' thus failing to totally mask the slight taint of pondage in the fish. Perhaps I'd been spoiled with similar and infinitely cheaper dishes had at the suburban bia hoi cafes over the previous week, including a remarkable fish-kettle braise of carp with no muddy or weedy taste whatsoever! Our dinner at Nam Phuong with a sweet-sour soup, starter of two crispy soft shell crabs stuffed with a rich crab-roe mayo, a couple of mains and a few drinks came to 1.4 million VND or just over A$100, a somewhat expensive feat in Vietnam. I would reconsider this place for its ambience, for the pleasant service, for the clever female trio of folk musicians and even for Mr Arkracha (as long as he keeps his hands away from my large, err...goby), but can't wholeheartedly rave about the food.
Nam Phuong Vietnamese Restaurant, 19 Phan Chu Trinh Street, Hanoi.


Food that I can, and will wholeheartedly rave about though, was found at restaurant Quan An Ngon. What can I say about this place that hasn't already been said by many. Not so much a fancified foodcourt but a food courtyard. A convenient gathering of individual cooking stations operated by streetfood traders whisked away from the streets, screened for the quality of their respective specialities, and all brought into one compound consisting of both roofed and greenery filled open-air dining areas. Again the atmosphere was not of a foodcourt but that of a relaxed restaurant, with menus organising everything on offer and service provided by uniformed waitstaff. And on the evening we visited it seemed that half of Hanoi was there, the warm air was thick with mouthwatering smoky smells and the unmistakeable hubbub of folks feasting around laden tables...surrounded with proper chairs no less. Add to that clean cutlery and hardfloors that won't require the skills of Katarina Witt to negotiate and it's a near perfect Hanoian food experience. Blessed are the little luxuries.

A starter of battered prawn and sweet potato fritters (Banh Tom) with perfectly vinegared and sugared dipping fish sauce (nuoc mam cham). Crunched with gusto and surely the best way to go for one's calcium supplementation. Calorific but utterly delicious.

How can we sit down for a mixed meal in Hanoi without smacking into some Chao Tom (barbequed shrimp paste moulded around sticks of sugarcane)? We can't! These were served as a dish with thin rice vermicelli squares, assorted herbage, thin rice paper for wrapping and nuoc cham for dipping, but the sequence in the process was a puzzle until a waiter standing by took it upon himself to be my personal food coach for the evening. He was watchful too! One wrong move such as a care less jumble of everything together to shove greedily into my mouth would illicit a tut-tutting tap on the hand, a shake of his head, and a mimed demonstration on how it should be done; savage uncouth foreigner! Yes all without uttering a word. I didn't mind, it added to the experience. What a laugh!

Two noodle soup dishes followed, first was bun cha (sizzling, flame barbequed balls of minced pork to add with vermicelli noodles into a room temperature bowl of nuoc cham). The charred pork balls smelled so good that we dunked them into the liquid broth (actually my helpful friend above did) and tucked in before even thinking of a photograph! This dish must surely be one of my more memorable tastes of Hanoi, having not encountered it anywhere else before. It's supposed to be primarily a lunchtime dish but I guess the benefit of eating off the streets is that such limitations go out the window. The second bowl was Mien Luon (chargrilled eel in noodle soup, pictured), also superb. Fatty chunks of eel with crispy charred edges in a savoury soup stock, herbage and soft noodles.

In case you hadn't noticed I loved this place, but a parting note of caution. The fabulous savouriness of the dishes here is helped along by a supercharging with sodium glutamate (like most if not all local dishes in Vietnam). The price is a quenchless thirst to remember the experience by.
Quan An Ngon, 18 Phan Boi Chau Street, Hanoi.

[Local names of dishes transcribed with help from great blogs Noodlepie and Stickyrice, invaluable resources for discovering the breath of Vietnamese cuisine and streetfoods]

Images from Hanoi - Vietnam Food

This latest trip to Hanoi was over two months ago. Everytime I travel for work, I envision that there'll be plenty of downtime to blog whilst on the trip. Well of course that's never the case. If I'd spent the evening back in the hotel room, I would either be stuck with my usual desperate rush to complete preparations for meetings the following day, or have returned so weary that all I would manage is to lie prostrate over the gluttony of pillows and listlessly cycle over 20 plus channels of nothing...in a foreign language.

Any-hour traffic in Hanoi's streets. Australians beware before stepping foot to cross. They come at you from the other way! Don't bother waiting for a break, it won't happen. Local's tip to me, just make sure you've eyeballed who/whatever is bearing down on you and you won't get hit. It works, for the most part.

Pho (pronounced 'fur' as far as I can approximate) for breakfast at a streetside stall across from the hotel, just one of many pho stalls dotting Hanoi's streets. I'll have to admit that the novelty wore off after the first few times of slurping noodles with my knees around my ears (note kiddie stools) accompanied by traffic fumes and whiffs of gutter drainage that had been percolating in the tropical heat.

A hearty bowl of bun bo (Beef Rice Noodle Soup) from the same stall. For approximately one extra Australian dollar when ordered via the hotel's small dining room, the concierge dashes across the street with a dishwasher-cleaned bowl and returns in 5 minutes to serve it up with accompanying greens. This order consisted of brisket beef with softened tendons, tripe, miscellaneous vessels, steamed cubes of congealed blood, some sort of spammy pork sausage and a knuckle of pork hock. All good things.

There was an option of buying a shot of steeped snake and reptile wine at a somewhat tourist orientated cafe at Halong, on a short side trip to its World Heritage listed coastline. Alledged to cure all ails from the common cold to flagging libido and more, though I was dubious that such an elixir would help in any way with the only ailment bothering me at the time. Mild diarrhoea from suspect seafood. So I passed.

Somewhat sunbaked fruits hawked by dexterous rowboat traders at Halong Bay.

Aside from the few pics shown here, I had some amazing meals during my couple of weeks in North Vietnam. Experiences at some of the restaurants I'd visited in Hanoi city will follow in the next post, but some of the more interesing dishes I sampled were found in the bia (beer) cafe I was taken to daily, to lunch with colleagues I was visiting. Stirfried vegetables of countless exotic variety, whole fish (carp and snakehead) hotpot braised with tamarind and mint, super crispy fresh baguettes served with mounds of soft butter and white sugar, obligatory plates of deep fried crinkle-cut fries, rather gamey salads with cold sliced goat meat, delicious claypot braised eel, stirfried frog ribs and legs, and on and on. Not to mention toasts after toasts with Hanoi bia hoi, the local fresh beer. No wonder the locals require a post-lunch siesta to break up their workdays!

I leave readers with a thit cho (dog meat) restaurant snapped on my way to the airport. Such establishments are found in certain sections of the Old Quarter and around the city outskirts, including along the highway to Noi Bai. Traditional ones are distinctively double story Tay buildings raised on stilts, with seating on the upper level. I declined several invitations, not being able to get past my western sensibilities. My blogging 'pen'-name "Towser" is in reverence to my pet pooch after all.