Vietnamese Soup: Here Today, Saigon Tomorrow

[Nate sez]: as he cradles his first sandwich of the day...In light of all the glorious stupid jokes one can make about Vietnamese beef noodle soup like: Pho Real, the Pho-cking best, & call me on the Pho-ne, let's just skip the shit and get down to business.

Pho: Shizzle

As the national dish of Vietnam, we're all (hopefully) familiar with it in one respect or another - a meaty beef soup flavored with star anise, cinnamon, and five spice, filled with fresh medium width rice noodles, topped with raw sliced beef, brisket, tripe or other offal, and finished with basil, mint, rau ram, chilies, fish sauce, chili sauce...and the list goes on.

Every single street stand, every soup-slinging hole-in-the-wall, every overpriced, tourist oriented upscale noodle dive has a distinctly different style. The condiment trays vary widely, the amount of anise or 5 spice changes, are they fresh noodles, dry noodles, chili oil, chili sauce...nobody knows. You simply have to try them all.

And we did. And we do. And frankly, after 14 days of shoving bowls of 60 cent noodles down our throats, we still can't quite get over the shocking variety, the heart and soul, and the massive repeat value these noodles deliver. It's breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner.

Maybe you've had too much Hanoi Vodka - have a bowl of Pho. Maybe those tiny Vietnamese guys who took you out to the best clams and snails you'll ever eat drank you under the table - have a bowl of Pho. Maybe you're homesick, desperately lonely, and the cacophony of motorbikes, screaming children, and blasting Backstreet Boys are killing you - Have a bowl of Pho. This isn't world traveling food writer's over-romanticism, it's the stone cold truth.

[Ben sez]: Yeah, we save that kind of romanticism for our sandwich ladies.

Call it the chicken soup of Vietnam. This comfort food at its finest.

Viet Noodle Primer:

If you think that all there is to Vietnamese noodles is Pho...you're just wrong. As much as I'll go on for days about Pho, I'm a diehard Hu Tieu boy to the end. Pho is beef soup and medium-width noodles. Hu Tieu designates a whole different creature: rich pork soup, sometimes clarified, sometimes not - filled with thin rice noodles, roasted pork, shrimps, maybe wontons, maybe seafood, and garnished with the same dizzying multitude of herbs, chili products, and citrus. Order Hu Tieu Mi and you'll get thin Chinese-style egg noodles. I personally only roll with rice noodles, but if you need some variety, it's okay with Mi once in a while (I'm not sorry about that one).

Ben and I are constantly at odds over which is better. He's beef Pho-Life. I roll with the Who's-Hu Tieu crew. Pork stock is god.

Bun: Rice vermicelli rocks out in noodle salads and special soups. You may order a Bun dish and get a bowl of noodles with grilled pork, fried spring rolls, and herbs, served with nouc cham (sweet, sour, spicy, Vietnamese fish sauce) and pickles. You may order Bun Bo Hue and get a tomatoey-sweet/spicy beef and thick rice vermicelli soup. Bun refers to the type of noodle: round rice noodles.

There are also clear noodles, thick wide noodles, thick round clear noodles, pork skin noodles, long noodles, short noodles, fresh noodles, dried noodles...let's face it, these guys don't fuck around. Vietnam is noodle heaven. We've covered half a square kilometer and it took us almost two weeks to eat at most of the street stalls and noodle garages.

We heard that Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) doesn't have much to offer - few museums, not many tourist/world heritage sites, and it's loud. Who the hell cares? If you like food (meaning if you have a pulse) - this is Mecca.

Welcome to the Noodle Revolution.

Banh Mi Harder!

[Ben sez]: Live from Vietnam, Ben et Nate are here to bring you a breaking news bulletin from the food frontier in Saigon.

We arrived in Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) after 16 hours in transit. Watching out the bus window we saw cities that seemed to be 90% Pho restaurants, city blocks with five or six Pho restaurants next to each other. Suffice to say, we were excited.

After grabbing some sleep and checking our email like the good internet addicts we are, we stepped outside to meet our first portable sandwich shop (a woman with two baskets on a yoke to be carried down the street on her shoulders). A little pointing and holding up two fingers and she was slicing open baguette, inserting a few meatballs from her simmering pot of delicious red sauce, stuffing in pickles and cilantro, then pouring on a delicious chili/fish sauce mixture. The "OH MY GOD, SANDWICH!" meter was off the charts, after the shit we were eating in Cambodia, we could hardly contain ourselves as we reached into the bag to remove our little, newspaper wrapped, sandwich bundles of joy.

One bite into the light, crispy, distinctly Vietnamese baguette and we knew this was something criminal. Something so good it makes you groan and melt into a little puddle of bliss on the ground. A combination of slow-cooked pork in mystery sauce and awesome pickles (and probably some heroin based on the reaction we had) that for that moment seemed to embody everything that is good about life.

Nate got that glazed-over look to him, looked off into the distance and said happily, "I really wish a sniper would just put a bullet in my head right now, because I'm pretty sure it doesn't get any better than this."

[Nate sez]: It's true, and I wasn't completely kidding.

Vietnam is going to be awesome.

Oh, did I mention that the sandwich cost 5000 Dong? That's about 30 cents. That's a deal I can live with. On top of that there seem to be Banh Mi stands everywhere serving a a vast array of sandwiches, from the aforementioned juicy meatballs, to grilled brochettes, to god-knows-what paté - all of which are delicious.

All this blogging is making me hungry... I think it's time for another Banh Mi.

Khmereoke?

[Nate sez]: Cambodia brings to mind the massive and incomparable Angkor Wat. The exotic tropics of SE Asia. Paris of the East they called Phnom Penh. The truth is, this place is a nightmare (and ironically) since we didn't get our Vietnam visas in Cambodia, we have a fixed entrance and exit date instead of flexible date visas. Whoops! Now we're stuck on this god-forsaken shithole with nothing to do, and you better believe the food/everything here is bordering on inedible, toxic, and unsanitary at best.

Highlights so far: we found a bottle of '92 Bordeaux at a store in Siem Reap. Which anagramatizes to 'Rape me, si?' - which is only completely appropriate given the level of over-the-top hawkers and dramatically overinflated prices. Funny thing about that bottle of wine - it looked suspicious, like why does this label look wrong? Like why is it only $5.50? Why does this seem to be lacking some important information that any other bottle of French wine would have? I was too curious to see whether it had simply been the worst year for Bordeaux as I sensed (turns out it was really bad according to Wine Spectator) or if there even more foul play fermenting...

Unfortunately my deepest, most hideous and unrighteous fears came to fruition - as we opened the bottle, the cork looked funny and wet, lacking a name that matches the chateau label. I poured the wine into my cup (fine, I'll admit it, I'm doing sensory analysis with Orikaso plasticware), the aroma was waaaaaayy too sharp to be 15 years old. Heavy duty fake vanilla , lots of alcohol, nail polish remover, and an ambiguous assortment of ripe red fruit that can only be described as Red Kool Aid. The taste was truly hilarious, and the finish was that of a tinge of malty flavor. Yes, malty flavor - as in malted milk balls and sweet, dark German beer.

Apparently, I'm not the first to notice the presence of fake wine in Cambodia - read a funny article about it here.

This could only mean one, terrifying and horrible thing. The Cambodians have a flare for knocking off anything. This stems from the fact that Burger King won't do business here, the 7-11 won't do business here, no chain/franchise/international-institutions-of-convenience-and-economic-dominance will do business here yet, so they tend to poorly copy everything and pass it off as the original.

Guess what they did? They made up a fictitious chateau called "Chateau la Prevote" and filled it with, that's right, UNIDENTIFIED ASIAN RED WINE. I'm almost completely sure of it. While I was in Japan doing way too much alcohol research, I started exploring the wide, unrecognized world of cheap Asian grape wines. They all have this mysterious malty note to them - and la Prevote was super Asian-wine malty. Don't worry Australia, their best wine is worse than your cheap, sickening Yellowtail. Whether I would describe it as "rice malty" or "barley malty" is yet undecided, but malty indeed.

[Ben sez]: Actually the maltiness was reminiscent of Taro root if you ask me.. which you didn't, so I'll let Nate get back to lamenting our time in Cambodia.

We've now been stuck in Phnom Penh for 10 days, trying desperately not to get so depressed by the squalor, the begging children, and the absolutely oppressive heat. After eating so many desperately mediocre meals in Siem Reap for too much money, we had little hope for Cambodia's capital. We found a couple tolerable joints, not too expensive, roughly Vietnamese, kind of Chinese, a little homestyle Khmer now and then.

The market food is sketchy. I mean if the smell of rotting meat and fish baking on asphalt (indoors no less) isn't enough to turn your stomach over a few times, the utter absence of any food safety practice should be sufficient to keep you away. I have an iron stomach, I'll eat anything that won't injure me, but this was too far.

With heroic persistence, we found some good things to eat. A night market near by our guesthouse puts out what was immediately identifiable as the best meal in Cambodia as soon as we tried it. How do I know? Because everyone and their mom eats here every night. And it costs 75 cents - Fried Rice and Beef with Soy Sauce and Local Greens at Orussey Night Market is the only way to fly. We also found an awesome sandwich of grilled beef brochettes with with shallot/daikon/cabbage pickles on grilled, margarined baguette. On this one evening where the food gods smiled upon us, we found a dessert stand serving assorted syrup soaked thin cookies and donuts with sticky rice, coconut pudding and coconut creme covered with shaved ice and sweetened condensed milk. It was safe to consume. It was 50 cents. It was what good SE Asian street food should be.

This little market was a rare gem in the war torn, lawless country that attracts mostly sex-tourists and druggies. We should have heeded Anthony Bourdain's warnings about the absence of great, much less good food in Cambodia, but I was thoroughly convinced that any country next to Thailand had to be paved with delicacies.

Seeing as it took 14 days of digging to find anything much better to eat than convenience store peanuts and Pocky, this was a tough blow to the Ben et Nate contingency, but we must move on to the promised land of noodles.

[Ben sez]: Vietnam, watch out, we're hungry, malnourised (peanuts and Pocky is not a balanced diet), and started this trip with the mission to find the best bowl of noodles. You better believe I'm going to be eating Pho (Vietnamese Soup) three, four, maybe eight times a day.

We're taking a boat down the Mekong tomorrow to get to 'Nam and there are preliminary flood warnings for low-lying areas based on the massive uncontrollable salivating that I will be doing the entire trip to Ho Chi Minh City.

Take A Fruit Stand

[Nate sez]: What's sweet, succulent, beautiful, a little prickly, and beloved by all? well...yours truly of course - But the more widely available, and much cheaper, Thai Fruit is a more apt answer to the above query. On practically every damn corner of Bangkok, on every island paradise, in every alley, nook, and cranny is a fruit stand selling whole or prepared fruit.

People take their produce very seriously here. Once you get used to this insane abundance of 30 cent servings of juicy, crunchy pineapple, bizarre but addictive sweet soaked green guava, watermelon, cantaloupe, green mango, asian pear, strawberries, mangosteen....

Let's rap shall we.

The all encompassing, ever popular, Mangosteen.

No other fruit carries such a large following these days in gourmet circles as the mangosteen, with it's hard, green stemmy top and eggplantian body, one cuts the top off to reveal the delicate white flesh segments inside. It has been touted as the single greatest fruit you'll ever eat.

Let me tell you something. We bought a bucket of these, tore into it like ravenous wolves, and when we emerged, we looked at each other - confused - because there was something seriously awry. It's called hype. Now maybe we didn't eat the shining example, perhaps we managed to dig out all of the wrong mangosteens (including the ones the Thai ladies picked out for us), but we've eaten them in central and south Thailand (and Cambodia), and it still tasted like a cross between sweet lime and cherry with a wonderful, soft, juicy texture that was (look, I'll admit) fantastic.

Queen of the fruits? No. Worth the god-knows-fucking what they're going to charge you at your local Chez le Trend d'Semaine for a well plated piece of fruit? Not this one guys.

The Daily Fix

The mangoes (as discussed previously) are the undisputed king of all fruits around here. May his reign be supreme. Nothing has beaten the face contorting deliciousness with which a Thai mango will annihilate you. There is also the much more prevalent (and cheaper) pineapple. They are so sweet, sooo juicy, sooo overflowing with pineapply love that no matter how mundane it may seem, it's just really fucking good everyday. Ben has issues without the stuff. I personally branch out into watermelons, asian pears, and green sugar soaked guavas.

[Ben sez]: Seriously, between the 10 baht pineapple (put it in my veins!) and the ripest mangoes you've ever seen I've though about hiring one of the fruit cart vendors to just follow me around and hack up pineapple all day long to supply my fix. When I get tired of that there are countless mango-ladies on the street to peel and cut up mangoes in all of their groan-inducing goodness. The combination of these two delicious yellow fruits is like having god shove a fistful of sunshine down your throat.

Rose Apples (pictured right) are also one of the more interesting (and consequently completely unavailable in the states) fruits. They are really crisp, actually bordering on styrofoam (like the ones discussed from Taiwan), and have a slightly grape-apple flavor that is really refreshing. In Thailand they're much juicier and sweeter than their Taiwanese counterparts, and this makes a regular appearance on my daily fruit consumption list.

What's that smell?

Durians - Jackfruit
[Ben sez]: We finally bit the bullet (and the fruit) and picked up these members of the spiky-fruit-of-doom family (a.k.a the Bombacaceae family). Jackfruit is actually good, a little bit of that Thai fruit funk, but also tangy and banana-y, not something requiring multiple daily indulgences , but not something to be avoided. Nate compares it to the flavor of JuicyFruit gum, I'm not sure if I agree, but I definitely see where he's coming from.

Durian, the stuff of legends, myths, epic poems, and more than one "No Durian Allowed" signs in hotels. On our last day in Bangkok it seemed like it was time to see if all the hype was right. According to various sources this is a stinky, custardy, caramelly fruit - I don't really agree. We got our massive lobe of Durian (in Ben's hands on right) in its plastic bag, and already there was a palpable funk that I couldn't quite place. Definitely soft and custard-like in texture, it barely required a knife to break apart before going into our apprehensive mouths. After some deep sensory evaluation, accessing the depths of our taste memories - it has hints of banana and pineapple, the ubiquitous Thai-fruit-funk taken to a whole new level, but primarily it tastes like steamed/sweated white onions. Maybe a little celery. Somehow this fruit has managed to be a perversion of unsalted mirepoix flavors.

Definitely not what I'm looking for in my fruit - and it tastes even worse when the Durian-flavored burps set in. I think Nate's solution for stinky tofu burps (swilling whiskey) might be required next time I eat durian.

[Nate sez]: And to put this into perspective everyone - we're being ridiculously concise. There are more fruits (RAMBUTANS!), more delicacies, more fascinating and mysterious fruit products that we could actually write a book about. So until we either have the luxury of a financier, or become independently flush, we'll stick with concise.