A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [118]
Right next to the dock, up a few slimy wooden steps, a cook from the Hai Dao restaurant gravely examines the sea creatures we’ve brought and then weighs them on a scale. One pays for one’s dinner by weight. Seated at a large uncovered table, Dongh, Linh, and I are soon joined by the pilot of our water taxi. At Linh’s urging, we order a bottle of Nep Moi, Hanoi vodka. A waiter approaches with my lobster, still kicking, holds it over a glass, and thrusts a short knife into its sexual organs. A transluscent, slightly milky white liquid pours out – and is quickly mixed with the vodka.
‘Ruou tiet tom hum . . . lobster blood,’ Linh volunteers. ‘Makes you strong.’
The Hai Dao is packed with customers, every table filled with enthusiastic Vietnamese families chowing down, some visiting from America, some vacationing from Hanoi and Saigon. Everywhere, there is the sound of those plastic packages of cold towels popping, the floor littered with discarded lobster shells, cracked crab claws, fish bones, cigarette butts, rolling beer bottles.
Food starts to arrive at our tables: tom hum nuong, my lobster, grilled over a wood fire; muc huap, steamed squid with ginger and scallions; ca thu xot ca chau, tuna braised in tomato and cilantro; banh da vung, rice cakes studded with sesame seeds, in a bundt mold-shaped hot pot over a little gas burner at the center of the table; mi canh ca, a sweet-and-sour soup of fish, noodles, tomato, onion, cilantro, pineapple, and scallion, and a few humongous green crabs, overstuffed with roe. It is the perfect setting for a damn near perfect meal. I am now totally indoctrinated to the casual Vietnamese dining experience. I love the way you garnish and season your own food: the ground black pepper and lime wedges you mix together into a paste and dip your food into, the dipping sauces and fish sauce with chili paste, the little plates of tiny green and red peppers, the bottles of soy, the plates of chopped cilantro and scallions.
Dongh has made it his personal mission to make sure I fully enjoy every scrap of Nha Trang’s bounty. He refuses to let me touch the lobster or the crab until he’s tunneled through every claw and spindly leg and removed every micron of meat. When he lifts off the carapace of a jumbo-sized green crab, he beams at me as he points out the beautiful, fantastically plump roe, the crab backs swimming with delicious fat.
We eat with chopsticks. We eat with our hands. We smoke between courses. We smoke during courses. We drink vodka and beer, scattering our refuse all over the table, like everyone else. The food is wonderful. Nothing but happy faces as far as I can see, children and grandfathers avidly sucking the last bits of meat out of crab legs and lobsters, picking out the good stuff from between fish bones.
I am ecstatically happy. I love it here. I love this country. I consider, for the fifth or sixth time at least, defecting.
What else do I need? Great food. The South China Sea’s beautiful beaches. An exotic locale. An element of adventure. People so proud, so nice, and so generous that I have to keep a cover story on tap, should a cabdriver or shopkeeper invite me to his home for dinner (bankrupting himself in the process). It’s a wonderland of food and cooking. Everybody has an opinion. Linh, naturally, says the best food in Vietnam is in Hanoi. Dongh sneers dismissively and argues for Nha Trang. They have definite opinions in Can Tho. And Saigon speaks for itself. To the Saigonese, North Vietnam is a joke – unfriendly, uninteresting, filled with stuck-up idealogues who underseason their food. Anyplace