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Dave Says:

There are three things the small coastal town of Hoi An is famous for:

1) it’s speciality seafood

2) custom made clothing

3) it’s listing as a World Heritage town of cultural interest
Because of these assets it’s full of tourists, in fact more tourists than mopeds which is very strange for Vietnam. On the whole, the tourists aren’t interested in number 3, can’t eat anything but number 1 and go ga ga for number 2. In the interests of presenting you, the reader, with a balanced report, us, the travelers, will compile first hand reports on numbers 1 and 2 and quickly say the buildings covered by number 3 are neat but tales of CoCo Black Diamond and White Rose are much more interesting. So let us begin with number 1: food. Hoi An is on the coast and so famed for it’s seafood. White Rose is a like a pot-sticker with shrimp and fried onions, Fried Wontons are crackers with a shrimp based concoction on top and Cau Lau is a type of noodle soup made from well water from one and only one well in town. Notice the repetition of the words “fried” and “shrimp”. Most restaurants offer a set menu of all these things plus dishes like banana leaf steamed fish, crab soup and squid for about 60,000VND ($4) per person. It is, no doubt about it, a great deal - if, however, you are a westerner. The local people could never afford to eat at these restaurants and I’m not sure if they’d even want to. Comptetion in town is stiff, every restaurant sends people running to you with a menu and cries of “you eat here”. In order to save you the gastric distress that is bound to follow so much questionably prepared seafood, Sarah and I tested each dish for you. We are glad to report they are all very good the first time you eat them, rather good the second time, marginal the third and quite grim when you can’t find anything else on your last night in town.
All restaurants are family affairs and operate on lean profit margins. The menus are large but as we found out, only because of their proximity to the market. Whilst quaffing 3000 dong (20 cent) “fresh beer” Sarah had a hankering for the crab on the menu. When we asked to the size of the crab we were told they didn’t know until they went to the market to buy it. So, we ordered it and the girl grabbed her jacket and ran to the market to buy our lunch. Ten minutes later she was back and ten minutes after that, fresh crab steamed in lemongrass and garlic was on our table. In this town the restauranters like to help you eat. Mr Kim at the Cafe des Aimes likes to snatch your chopsticks from your hand and load your wontons with stuff in the right order and Mai at The Bale Well actually feeds you like a baby.
The Bale Well deserves a special mention. It’s off the tourist trail, hard to find and is right by the well whose water is the only one that can be used to make Cau Lau (which ironically doesn’t appear on the Bale Well’s menu). Mai doesn’t speak english except for the words “Vietnamese food, full tummy”. We were the only westerners there for a while, until two nervous looking Aussie girls showed up, but as soon as we appeared Mai leaped at us, and with much excited Vietnamese offered us a seat. Actually she offered us two each - the little plastic stools they sit on are too small for our long european legs so she stacked two on top of each other. No time for a menu (there wasn’t one anyway) or to ask the price because food started to arrive. Mai basically sells satay pork and chicken but it’s the process of assembling the rice paper roll and stacking the rice pancake that is the key to enjoying her fare. So insistant is she that it be done right, she does it for you complete with dipping it in the peanut sauce and stuffing it in your mouth. I can eat quick if I need to and I needed to because Mai was right there with bite number two. Sarah, as you probably know, eats really slow and this was proving culturally difficult for Mai to understand. No matter how hard she rammed the roll into Sarah’s mouth, it just wouldn’t go in. The previous occupant had not, nor had any intension of vacating the property. Fortunately Sarah handled it with all the grace required as peanut sauce flowed out her nostrils. More food came. More of the “same same” food came and still more. Mai stopped feeding us in order to feed the Aussie girls and Sarah could breath. Wonderful food but just like all the food in Hoi An, it was a little too much of a good thing. We left this local’s only joint paying about three times the local’s price but it was worth it just for Mai.
We next decided to take a Vietnamese cooking class, Just about every place here will sell you one and some are more elaborate than others. We chose three dishes from the menu we’d like to make and then headed to the market with Han our “chef”. Han is a lovely Vietnamese girl who I don’t believe has been to culinary school and works in a little family restaurant that has the odd rat or two. They all have a rat or two, every store, more rats than mopeds (which is now my standard unit of measure in Vietnam). What she lacks in formal education she made up for in market know-how. Asian markets are smelly, noisy, dirty and totally facinating. She showed us how to pick out the best veggies and we bought some noodles for our lunch. When we returned to the restaurant we proceeded to make steamed pork spring rolls, seafood hotpot and grilled shrimp in banana leaves. Please note the lack of the word “fried” in our choice of dishes.
I don’t believe Vietnamese cooking to be as sophisticated as some of it’s asian neighbors but it sure tastes good when you make it yourself and don’t fry anything. The simple ingredients are grown locally and very much organically - we haven’t seen any mechanized farming - the ox pulling the plough is as high tech as it gets. When they combine together with a little chilli and black pepper all is good with the world.
So that’s it for White Rose, read the next post to learn all about CoCo Black Diamond.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Global Travels, Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.