Breaking the fast in Pattani

I happened to be in Pattani, one of Thailand's most Muslim cities, during Ramadan. I had read about the post-fasting markets held in Muslim countries during this holiday, and after talking to a few motorcycle taxi drivers, learned that was a large one held not far from Pattani's central mosque:

There was a huge amount of hungry people and interesting food. The latter ran the gamut from traditional Muslim items such as roti:

and dates, a traditional fast-breaking food:

to more local foods, such as southern-style Muslim curries (shown at the top of this post) and khanom kho:

impossibly soft pillows of rice flour encasing a crunchy cube of sugarcane. There was a popular vendor selling buffalo stew:

identified by its strong smell, not to mention the carefully-displayed tell-tale hooves and horn. And of course, several vendors selling the ubiquitous khao yam:

By the time it started to get dark, much of the food was virtually sold out and the crowds were already thin, with most folks presumably on their way home with the day's meal.

Khao Noi

On the surface, Khao Noi appears to be your typical southern Thai-style raan khao kaeng, curry restaurant. A closer look reveals that Khao Noi is anything but ordinary. The tiny restaurant prepares nearly 50 dishes on a daily basis:

and most un-ordinarily, every one I've ever tried there is delicious.

On my most recent visit I had a plate of rice topped with two dishes: muu phat phet, pork fried with a spicy curry paste, fresh herbs and spices, and kaeng khi lek, a southern Thai-style coconut milk curry of cassia leaves and unusually, tiny shrimp (pictured at the top of this post). The phat phet, as the name suggests, was satisfyingly spicy, and the kaeng khi lek equal parts bitter and savoury. All dishes are served, in the southern style, with a side of crispy veggies to alleviate the heat.

I couldn't stop at this and my second dish included a yam or salad of green mango and a coconut milk curry of "stink beans" (sator), eggplant and fish:

The salad was crispy and sour, and the curry was rich and pungent -- a perfect combination.

Khao Noy 14/22 Th Wichianchom, Songkhla 074 311 805 Breakfast & lunch, closed Wed

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Four Seasons Bangkok's 10th Annual World Gourmet Festival

For the first time I'll be attending, and blogging about, the Four Seasons Bangkok's annual World Gourmet Festival. This year is the 10th anniversary of the event, and chefs such as David Kinch, from the acclaimed Manresa in California, and David Thompson from London's Nahm, will be in town cooking, teaching and leading culinary tours to celebrate the occasion. I plan to attend the dinners of these two chefs, as well as those of Graham Elliot Bowles of Chicago's Graham Elliot, Paola Carosella of Sao Paolo's Arturito, Christine Manfield of Sydney's Universal, and Fulvio Saccardi of Ristorante Conti Roero in Monticello D'Alba, Italy.

Leading up to the event, I'll be doing some brief profiles of the chefs above, and when the festival begins, I'll be blogging on the cooking demonstrations and meals, as well as interviews with some of the chefs.

The event will be held from October 5-11, at the Four Seasons Bangkok. For full details of the chefs involved and a schedule of the events planned, please refer to the official website. Some dinners are already sold out, so if you're in Bangkok and interested, act fast. Call the Four Seasons at +66 (0) 2 126 8866, or email the hotel at wgf.bangkok@fourseasons.com.

Breakfast in Songkhla

When at home in Bangkok I tend to eat a pretty western-style breakfast (toast, eggs, yogurt), so when I'm on the road in different parts of Thailand I really look forward to getting my hands on a domestic breakfast. I certainly wasn't disappointed in Songkhla, an atmospheric seaside town in southern Thailand. The southern Thais have some of the best morning eats in the country, and Songkhla was no exception. It was a morning of several southern Thai specialties and sweet coffee in several different locations.

My favourite place for breakfast in Songkhla is probably an open-air streetside courtyard just off Th Saiburi with different three vendors. One vendor makes old-school style Thai coffee and tea, other vendor makes a delicious khao yam (illustrated above), and another couple make roti:

The crispy pancakes are served southern-style, with a curry and a sweet/sour cucumber dipping sauce.

Continuing along Th Nang Ngam, a street lined with old houses and Chinese shrines, I came across this woman, selling noodles to students in front of a school:

Her husband was equally busy, selling cups of pop to the kids, at 7am...

Just up the road I stopped by a an old shophouse restaurant for a salapao, a Chinese steamed bun, and a yet another coffee:

The coffee wasn't so good, but the salapao contained a delicious mixed pork mixture and a quail egg. This was the kind of place that families stopped by on their way to work and/or school, and I got the impression that most of then had been coming there for a long time.

Continuing to the end of Th Nang Ngam, my last stop was at an even more ancient, Muslim-owned coffee shop (which has also been blogged about here):

with equally ancient interior design and clientele:

I left Songkhla shortly after, feeling full and fully caffeinated...

What to eat in Hat Yai

  Hat Yai is a large, rather unattractive town in southern Thailand. It's by no means a destination, but because the city serves as a crossroads to many places farther south, I've spent quite a few nights here over the years. Fortunately there are worse places to be stuck, particularly if you count eating as one of your hobbies. The residents of Hat Yai are a mix of Thais, Chinese and Muslims and they have provided the city with an interesting restaurant scene. Just in case you happen to find yourself stuck in Hat Yai at some point, I've put together a short list of the places that have caught my attention over the years that I've been going there.

My favourite single dish in Hat Yai has to be the dish above, bak kut teh, as served at Koh Tii Ocha, a Chinese food court-like restaurant in the centre of town. The name of the dish is Chinese, but EatingAsia claim the dish has its origins in Malaysia. The dish is served with your choice of meat and offal (and typically an entire clove of garlic) and sides of rice and paa thong ko, deep-fried dough with a sweet coconut jam dip. The broth is dark, rich and evocative of the dish's Hokkien name (bak kut teh is generally translated as "meat bone tea"). Koh Tii Ocha also serves Hainanese chicken rice, wheat noodles and rice porridge.

Koh Tii Ochaa (Google Maps link) 134-136 Th Niphat Uthit 3, Hat Yai 074 23 4243 Breakfast & lunch

Khao yam is a type of rice "salad" popular in southern Thailand. Rice is cooked with dork anchan, a type of flower, giving it a purplish/gray hue, and is topped with finely sliced herbs, flowers, fruit, ground dried shrimp, thin rice noodles and a thin fish-based sauce. One of the better versions in Hat Yai is served by a Muslim woman who  prepares the dish a couple blocks away from the train station:

Muslim Khao Yam (Google Maps link) Thanon Rotfai, Hat Yai Breakfast & lunch

Another tasty Muslim breakfast is roti, crispy pancakes, served southern-style with a curry dipping sauce. There's a string of Muslim restaurants along Th Niyomrat, including Tamrab Muslim, which does a good roti kaeng:

Tamrab Muslim (Google Maps link) Cnr Th Nipatuthit 1 & Th Niyomrat, Hat Yai Breakfast, lunch & dinner

Chicken, marinated in dried spices before being deep-fried, is a specialty of Hat Yai that has a reputation across Thailand. Many locals claim that Daycha, a restaurant with a couple branches in town, serves the best version. You can order it with sticky rice and a plate of som tam or chopped and served over yellow rice:

Daycha Fried Chicken (Google Maps link) Th Chi-Uthit, Hat Yai 08 1098 3751 Lunch & dinner

Hat Yai has a huge Chinese population, and Chinese food is ubiquitous, cheap and generally quite good. One of my favourite places to eat is Sor Hueng, a khao tom place with several branches serving mostly Chinese and Chinese/Thai dishes, with a few local dishes thrown in as well. Most dishes are made ahead of time and all you have to do is point to whatever looks tasty:

Sor Hueng 3 (Google Maps link) 79/16 Th Thamnoonvithi, Hat Yai 08 1896 3455 4pm-3am

Hat Yai also has two pretty good night markets. The most famous is located north of the centre of town and is a great place to sit down to a dish of the local deep-fried chicken, a southern-style curry, a dish or khanom jeen, or some local seafood:

Hat Yai's Night Market (Google Maps link) Th Montri 1 6pm-late

Another night market, located slightly closer to the centre of town, specialises in take-away southern Thai eats:

Hat Yai's Night Market (Google Maps link)

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Shoshana

Operating since 1983, Shoshana must be the longest-standing Israeli restaurant in the Khao San Road area, if not in all of Bangkok. Nowadays there are several places in the area serving pitas, felafel and even shwarma, but I inevitably go back to Shoshana. This used to be partially for the constant stream of Seinfeld re-runs being played there (I've never owned a TV), but was mostly for a delicious break from Thai food.

As is the case with many of my favourite places to eat, I rarely stray from a few dishes that I know to be good. The set above, my usual, combines felafel, French fries, a garlicky eggplant dip and "Israeli salad".  I seem to recall the set selling for 55 baht until relatively recently, making Shoshana also the cheapest place in Bangkok to obtain Western-style food. The price has gone up 120 baht now, but it still remains a bargain, especially when you consider the quality. Although they're not breaking any gastronomical barriers, the folks at Shoshana are extremely talented at deep-frying -- this despite not using a Western-style deep-fryer (they use cheap aluminum pots) or deep-frying thermometers. Their skills are evident in the non-soggy and super-crispy French fries to the dry-yet-moist-in-the-right-places schnitzel. They also do good liver dishes, decent home-made pickles (shown in the background) and a decent yogurt shake.

Shoshana 88 Th Chakraphong, Banglamphu, Bangkok 02 282 9948 11am-11pm

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Khao Tom Jay Suay

Other than noodles, the greatest contribution the Chinese have made to Thai cooking, at least in my opinion, is khao tom. The Thai words literally mean "boiled rice," but in this case they refer to restaurants that serve a variety Chinese/Thai dishes to order, often with small bowls of watery rice. One of my favourite khao tom places in Bangkok is Khao Tom Jay Suay, an ancient shophouse restaurant in Chinatown. The restaurant is colloquially known as Khao Tom Roy Pee, "100 Year Old Khao Tom," but I was told it's really only about 50 years old.

You can recognise Khao Tom Jay Suay by the vast table out front holding the restaurant's huge array of raw ingredients, mostly different types of vegetables:

Directly behind this, and shown at the top of this post, a fellow works a station with several prepared dishes. These include several types of meats and fish, a few stir-fried dishes and soups such as jap chai, a type of vegetable-heavy Chinese stew. He shouts the orders out to two additional stations within the restaurant,  a soup station and a separate stir-fry station, and as far as I could tell, no order is recorded on paper.

Must-order dishes at Jay Suay include the delicious smoked duck; muu phat nam liap, minced pork fried with salted Chinese olive; the previously-mentioned jap chai; and any flash-fried veggie dish. On our visit we ordered all of these, as well as a stink bean stir-fry, a tom yam of squid and mushrooms, and a salad of plaa salit thot, a type of deep-fried fish:

You'll be sitting on the side of a smelly street and it will inevitably be hot, but the food is full-flavoured and excellent.

Khao Tom Jay Suay 547 Thanon Phlap Phla Chai 02 223 9592

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A bite to eat in Siem Reap

Cambodia isn't generally known as a culinary destination, but I really enjoyed the eats during five recent days in Siem Reap. The quality of the city's foreign cuisine, particularly its French, was much better than that of a huge city like Bangkok. Among other meals, we had a fun lunch at Le Bistrot de Paris, and on a daily basis, excellent pastries from the Blue Pumpkin (unfortunately we never made it to dinner at the allegedly delicious Abacus). And the Cambodian food was excellent too, for which I have to thank Chef Joannès Rivière, Executive Chef at Hôtel de la Paix. Chef Jo oversees a truly delicious Khmer set menu at Meric, the hotel's restaurant, which includes dishes such as his famous stuffed frog, a trio of pounded salads (coconut with pork, wild eggplant with fish, and sesame with chicken), and an equal parts tart and smokey star fuit salad with smoked fish. It was really one of the best restaurant meals I've had in a long time, but unfortunately the restaurant was too dark to document with my crappy old Nikon D100 (you can though see a pic of Meric's famous watermelon salad here).

The next day Jo took me to New Cheip Sok, a restaurant he recommends not only for it's kick ass Khmer food, but also for its noteworthy and classy wall of beer bottles:

I left the ordering to Chef Jo. There was prahoc k'tis:

a delicious 'dip' of Cambodian fish sauce, fish, herbs and coconut milk, served with fresh and par-boiled veggies. This was a dish that exemplified Khmer flavours: mild, herbal and balanced, and revolving around something fishy.

There was deep-fried pigeon:

which were served with the simple but absolutely brilliant Khmer dipping sauce of salt, pepper and lime:

Mam, raw Khmer-style fermented fish served with a platter of fresh herbs, veggies and fruit and slices of pork:

And the house specialty, "hidden eggplant", a Chinese-Khmer deep-fried dish combining minced pork and eggplant:

New Chiep Sok N# 253 Stung Thmey Village, Siem Reap, Cambodia +855 12 630 570

Hôtel de la Paix Sivutha Boulevard, Siem Reap, Cambodia + 855 63 966 000

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A walk through Mae Hong Son's morning market

The morning market in Mae Hong Son is one of my favourite in Thailand. Despite being a rather small market, and the fact that I've spent quite a bit of time there, on each subsequent visit I always seem able to find some new ingredient or dish I wasn't previously aware of. This is partially due to the fact that Mae Hong Son is rather more seasonal than other places in Thailand. Much of what's on offer is dictated by the weather, which unfortunately during the rainy season is rather limited. I missed the bright red tomatoes and fern shoots of the cooler months, but was compensated by the variety weird edible insect larvae, tender edible fruit tree leaves and bamboo shoots of the rainy season. Year round there's always an odd selection of items from just across the border in Burma: calendars with Burmese pop stars, pickled tea leaves and packets of herbal medicines. And breakfast at the market is always one of the weirdest and most satisfying in the country.

To view a slideshow of some random images from Mae Hong Son's morning market, click on the image above and use keyboard arrows or hold your mouse above the images to navigate through them.

Pa Ni

As mentioned previously, Mae Hong Son was pretty wet, so we spent a lot of our time indoors, much of it eating and drinking. Of all the things we consumed there, I'm pretty sure that the local sweets were the biggest hit among the two chefs. We bought several banana leaf packages of the sweets on a daily basis, and they never seemed to tire of them.

Our sole khanom purveyor was Pa Ni, a native of Mae Hong Son who was taught by her mother to make Shan/Thai Yai-style sweets over forty years ago. My personal fave of her repertoire is something called peng mong:

According to Pa Ni, this one is made using what she calls paeng mi, "noodle flour" (I suspect this simply wheat flour), and has the consistency of a Western-style cake, with a salty/sweet coconut topping acting as the frosting. Because of the crumb-like consistency of the sweet, Chef Andy reckons some sort of leavening agent is used here, a rarity in Thai sweets.

My second favourite has to be alawa jun:

a significantly heavier sweet made from rice flour, ample coconut cream and a slight hint of durian (Pa Ni adds thurian kuan, durian paste, to this sweet). Like all of Pa Ni's sweets, the top is slightly singed, the result of a "baking" process where, after steaming the sweets, she covers the trays and tops this with a layer of hot coals.

The regular alawa:

is slightly lighter and gets most of its flavour from sugar and coconut milk.

And Suay thamin:

is the Shan pronunciation of the Burmese shwe thamin, "golden rice", and is rather heavy sweet made from sticky rice.

For an earlier post on Thai Yai sweets, go here.

Pa Ni 9 Thanon Singhanat Bamrung, Mae Hong Son

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Back in the MHS

If you'll recall, back in February I spent a month in the northern Thai city of Mae Hong Son. Cool weather, great scenery, great food and ample opportunity to explore combined to make the month one of the most pleasant of my life, and ever since then I've dreaming, virtually on a daily basis, of going back.

In mid-August I finally got my chance, and this time was accompanied by Chef Andy of Pok Pok fame, Chef Hock and for two brief days, Maytel (herself more a Restaurant Manager than a Chef). We spent a week in Mae Hong Son, and as Maytel describes here, there was a great deal cooking and eating, although unfortunately not as much exploring as I'd like to have done. I've never previously been to Mae Hong Son during the wet season, and found it to be very... wet. Due to the rain, we were largely housebound the first two days and a couple days after that, I came down with a flu and was housebound again for a few more days... Needless to say, this was something of a disappointment after so many months of wanting to come back, but in the end it was worth it simply for the moments of health and clear weather and scenes such as the above.

A couple food-related blogs to follow.

Media roundup

Heaps of exposure this month: in addition to pieces in about four different in-flight mags, if you rush to your local bookist you can find two pieces I did in this this month's Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, including a roundup of the best places to get your khao soi on in Chiang Mai. I contributed a short piece on Bangkok eats to this month's Saveur (there's also a link on their website, courtesy of Bangkok-based scribe, Jarrett Wrisely). And finally, the 13th edition of Lonely Planet's Thailand is now in shops. I did the Bangkok and Northern Thailand chapters, and am particularly proud of my work on the latter, having made the most significant changes to that chapter in a decade (I still have my copy of Thailand from my first visit in 1997).

Hàng Me

  How many different dishes can one make with some form of carbohydrate, shrimp and the occasional pork rind? Leave it to the Vietnamese to have created a fantastic number of dishes using these relatively limited ingredients, all of them creative and delicious.

I became aware of this at a restaurant called Hàng Me in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. Although located steps from the backpacker strip, the place was filled with locals and littered with the banana leaves used to steam the various dishes -- both signs of good eats.

I started with the dish above, bánh bèo. Mentioned previously, the dish takes the form of a noodle steamed in a ceramic cup and topped with a savoury shrimp mixture and pork rinds. I enjoyed this one even more than the one in Hoi An: the noodle at Hàng Me was soft and slightly salty, and pork rinds make just about anything taste better.

Another variant on the noodle-and-shrimp theme was bánh nam:

This was my favourite item of the meal. The noodle, steamed in a banana leaf:

was again incredibly tender and savoury, and the shrimp topping was deliciously meaty, fatty and rich.

Bánh ram ít were almost identical to bánh bèo, except that the noodle here is perched on a crispy round of pork rind:

Bánh loc, another combination of carb and shrimp, was steamed in what I assume was a bamboo leaf:

The noodle element was apparently made from tapioca flour and is supplemented with two shrimps and a piece of fatty pork belly. The slightly rubbery texture of the noodle and the fact that the shrimp weren't shelled made this my least favourite item of the meal.

As I was about to leave, they brought out a few slices of freshly-made chả tôm, steamed 'cake' of prawns:

Eggy, meaty, and, at that point at least, graciously lacking a noodle element, it was a perfect end to my most memorable meal in Vietnam.

Hàng Me 45 Võ Thị Sáu, Hue 7am-10pm 054 383 7341

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Bánh Canh Cá Lóc

Often it's little more than an atmospheric locale that draws me a to a particular vendor or restaurant:

Such was the case with the ancient dining room of this streetside stall in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. Practically before I really even knew what was being served, I'd taken a seat and placed an order.

It was a few seconds later that I learned that I'd be eating  bánh canh cá lóc:

Not knowing exactly what this was, I watched with wonder how patties of a pasty white dough were rolled onto PVC pipes:

Thin slices of the dough were chopped off directly into the broth:

forming the noodles of the dish (shown at the top of this post). I found them a bit chalky, but liked the broth and other ingredients, which included fillets of snakehead fish (the epynomous cá lóc), oily and orange from having been fried with turmeric, chunks of giờ, a type of Vietnamese sausage, a single quail's egg and heaps of green onion.

The sides, present on every table, included banana leaf packages of delicious giờ and nem (fermented pork sausage), and tiny hard-boiled quail's eggs, which were meant to be dipped in a salt and chili mixture. I grew to love these sides in Vietnam, and they made every meal a fun experience.

And if, like me, you're feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of bánh in Vietnam, have a look at this handy online Banh Guide.

Bánh Canh Cá Lóc Hùng Vương, Hue 4pm-late

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Phương

I must admit that of the reasons I was most excited to visit Vietnam was because I knew I'd be able to consume bánh mì, Vietnamese-style baguette sandwiches, on a daily basis. This dish is virtually non-existent in Bangkok, and is in my opinion, the perfect sandwich. Unfortunately, other than coincidentally stumbling across the same delicious bánh mì in Saigon that was mentioned at EatingAsia, most bánh mì I encountered during my week in Vietnam were hastily put together and not entirely delicious.

This was until I arrived in Hoi An and came across Phương. Judging by the throng of impatient customers alone, I knew this would be the bánh mì I had been expecting:

I ordered bánh mì pâté, a crispy submarine of bread filled, assembly line-style, with peppery pork liver pâté, slices of barbecued pork, thin slices of cucumber and tomato, a few sprigs of cilantro, hot pepper sauce and a final sprinkling of Maggi:

The result was crispy, meaty, oily, spicy and veggie; essentially everything a sandwich should be.

Phương Near corner of Bạch Đằng and Nguyễn Duy Hiệu, Hội An Daytime

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Bánh bèo nhân tôm

I didn't really take to Hoi An. Don't get me wrong, the city's famed Chinese and French-colonial-style buildings were beautiful, and the setting was pleasant. But virtually every single structure seemed dedicated to selling t-shirts or overpriced food to tourists, and there seemed to be more of the latter than locals. And on top of all this, when I was in town, the town's central market was in the process of being rebuilt, which apparently caused many of the local vendors I had read about at EatingAsia to stay at home. That's why, after having walked around in search of a meal on my first day, I was happy to discover the scene below:

This street vendor was feeding a steady stream of satisfied locals, and was one of the few eating options in Hoi An's old town that didn't seem to be aimed specifically at Western tourists.

A closer look, not to mention help from a friendly local, revealed that she was making bánh bèo nhân tôm (pictured above), a round noodle steamed in a ceramic cup. At each order the woman tops the noodle with a creamy orange mixture made from shrimp, and a sprinkling of crispy croutons:

The dish had a lot in common with cao lầu, another of Hoi An's signature dishes, both in the slightly dark colour of the noodle and in the use of croutons. The result was equal parts soft, salty, creamy and crunchy -- a perfect example of the disparate ingredients, flavours and textures the Vietnamese are so absolutely brilliant at combining.

Bánh bèo nhân tôm Hội An Daytime

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Bánh Xèo 46A

Lonely Planet's Vietnam reckons that Bánh Xèo 46A makes the best bánh xèo in Saigon. I'm certainly no authority on the dish, a type of Vietnamese filled crepe, but I reckon Bánh Xèo 46A do the best version of the dish I've had.

Unlike the bánh xèo served in Laos and Thailand (where it's known as khanom beuang yuan), where the crepe is often paper-thin and crispy, the dish here is pleasantly eggy, hearty and relatively thick. The filling was also slightly different than bánh xèo I've had previously, and in addition to the usual shrimp, sliced shallots and bean sprouts, included thin slices of fatty pork belly. Watching the locals eat I also learned the definitive way to attack a dish of bánh xèo: roll a hearty hunk of the crepe up in an entire lettuce leaf until you have something the size and shape of a spring roll, and using your hand, dip it in the dipping sauce.

Bánh Xèo 46A 46A  Đ Đinh Công Tráng 03 824 1110 Breakfast, lunch & dinner

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Vietnoodles

I had nearly forgotten about the Vietnamese obsession with noodles. Virtually every dish you encounter in this country contains some sort of doughy strand. There are so many noodle options I've yet to even consume a single dish of phở, arguably Vietnam's most recognized noodle dish.

Vietnamese noodles usually take the traditional form, such as the dish shown above, mì trứng, wheat and egg noodles with chicken.

Another standard is bún bò Huế, thick udon-like rice noodles served with slices of tender beef:

But often things verge towards the unfamiliar, such as câu lầu, Hoi An's signature dish:

A mixture of light brown and slightly grainy noodles, shredded herbs and slices of pork. The dish is served without broth and is garnished with squares of the noodle that have been deep-fried until crispy.

This noodle dish, also taken in Hoi An, employed short, squiggly lengths of a clear noodle and was served with a small baguette:

And Vietnamese noodles don't even have to be noodle-like, as is the case with bánh bèo:

round disks concealed under a shrimp-based dressing, clear shrimp-filled dumplings and Vietnamese sausage.

Hồng Hạnh

As mentioned previously, this is a bit of a whirlwind trip, which leaves me relatively little time to explore dining options on my own. Knowing I'd be in Saigon I went directly to EatingAsia's Vietnam archives and found I wasn't staying very far from Hồng Hạnh, a restaurant specialising in Hue-style cuisine they appeared to have much praise for. I jotted down a couple dishes that looked interesting and headed over one evening.

Even before your bottom hits the chair at Hồng Hạnh you're presented with two side dishes:

On the left is bản công thành chiến, a deep-fried, meat-filled bun. On the right and wrapped in banana leaves are two different kinds of Vietnamese sausage: giờ, a pepper-studded piece of steamed minced pork, and nem chua, raw fermented pork with plenty of garlic. Both were wonderful, particularly the giờ, and I could have ordered a beer and called it a meal.

But following EatingAsia's tips I ordered bún thịt nướng (no pic) and the dish pictured at the top of this post, bánh đa, a deep-fried rice cracker served with tiny freshwater snails fried with fresh herbs. The former takes the form of thin rice noodles and shredded herbs topped with thin slices of grilled pork. the dish was sweet from the ubiquitous nước chấm, a syrup and fish sauce condiment, and could have used a few more fresh herbs, but instantly reminded me of the fresh Vietnamese flavours I'd been missing since my last visit to the country. I really enjoyed the latter, which was as simple as it was rich and herbal.

Coming back the next day, I arrived just before lunchtime. Business was slow, and after a couple minutes one of the employees came over and sat with me:

She couldn't speak much English, and compensated by helping me order, and eventually, taking it upon herself to season my dishes with copious chili (luckily I like spicy). With her help, I ordered bánh ít trần:

a dish described in the English-language menu as "round patty stuffed with green peas paste and meat taken with taro cake stuffed with meat." The two patties, one of which was fried and crispy, the other steamed and sticky, were stuck together, were served with shredded daikon and carrots, and two types of Vietnamese sausage. Unusual, but tasty.

We also decided on a bowl of bánh canh cua:

a thick crab-based broth with pork and, according to EatingAsia, tapioca starch noodles. The crab wasn't the pleasantest I've ever encountered, but I really enjoyed the fishy heartiness of the soup, the clear slippery noodles and the fact that the Vietnamese will put crushed black pepper on just about anything.

Two excellent meals, and if for some reason I had to head back to Saigon again on this trip, I'd eat there again.

Hồng Hạnh 17A Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, Saigon 08 3827 4252 Lunch & dinner

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Back in the SRV

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, that is.

Motivated by an open schedule and a temporary lack of work, I've decided to spend a week in Vietnam. Starting in Ho Chi Minh City, I'll be taking the Reunification Express north, with a stop in Hoi An (and possibly Hue), before terminating in Hanoi. It's a bit of a whirlwind trip, and having relatively little time to explore each destination, I'm relying on the generous consul of guidebooks, websites and blogs. Luckily, there's some great eats advice out there, and I'll be posting my pics from various meals and markets as often as I can get a decent WiFi connection.