Dragon fruit to the right. Fresh off the plane, I haven’t quite got my street food legs yet. Off for a Thai instead at Chivit Thai ( 130 Ph Wat Bo, Siem Reap 012 830 761) set is a wooden pavillion and garden. Complimentory spring rolls, a scorching green papaya salad ( I asked for hot) and fish cakes in dipping sauce. The most interesting dish was squid served with egg yolks. That’s solid yellow half yolks. The tiny squid […]
Travel
Eating and drinking abroad and at home. Sometimes I get sick too.
Weasel poo coffee – as posh as pig’s arseholes
We are a coffee granule free zone. But I do have half a kilo of some stuff that passed out of a Weasel’s backside. At least in Vietnam they call it weasel. It is a civet and the beans are poohed out, it having eaten the coffee berries. Some poor bugger collects the droppings and (hopefully) washes them before roasting. It makes a very, very dark coloured bean and a very strong dark coffee. J says it even tastes of […]
Goat, veal, pork or duck?
“Like dried baby goat. Or perhaps – I know – like veal, like the veal of a baby suckling calf, only drier.” This is how Princess Mary of Denmark’s royal father-in-law Prince Henrik describes dog meat. The Hairy Bikers couldn’t decide whether it tasted like Pork or Duck. J warned me off this delicacy so I can’t tell you what I thought of the taste. I may have eaten it without knowing. I just don’t know. What I can tell […]
Drink within your means
How much should you pay for wine? Or let’s put it this way: How much more than the cost of food should wine be? In Melbourne the cost of a main course in a restaurant is fast catching up with the cost of wine. If I’m feeling poor I may spend $40 to $50 on a bottle in a restaurant. Feeling rich and I may double the figure. To put this into context in the kinds of restaurants where I’m […]
Baguette & Chocolat
We’re a short drive from the Chinese border. Chris, from Sydney, reckons Sa Pa reminds him of a French ski resort. And the more I think about it, he’s right. The hotels have that French chalet feel. Sa Pa is at 1650m, the base high of ski resorts like, um, Courchevel 1650. And then I woner up the road, up the steps with the water buffalo (see previous post) and enter Baquette & Chocolat ̣(đ Thac Bac). It is just […]
Slow train to rapacious Sa Pa
It’s 380km from Hanoi to Sa Pa near the Chinese border. The trains are as slow as trams making it an overnight trip in a sleeper to possibly the cloudiest place in Vietnam. We arrive in driving rain and hail. One travel guide tells us that the sun shines fro 60 days a year here. That’s right, for the remaining 300 odd days it’s cloudy. Somehow in six years this town has grown from only eight hotels to 233. There’s […]
Michelin and Vietnam
Well why wouldn’t there be a connection between Michelin and Vietnam? After all it was the French who colonised Indochina from 1883 to the 1950s. Ho Chi Minh – at the time just plain old Nguyễn Sinh Cun – trained as a pastry chef with Escoffier in the Carlton Hotel in London. Later he moved to Paris and founded the French Communist Party. And it was the French who trained the Vietnamese to make wonderful baguettes, paté and coffee (believe […]
Eating on fried fish street
Stay in the old quarter in Hanoi. Learn to love the congestion, the buzz and honking of motor scooters. Ah, and the smells. Two stroke, food and incense. This is the place where the action is. Life is lived and transacted on the street or at least without leaving the motorcycle saddle. It is a place where street names have a meaning. Hang Gad is chicken, Hang Hahn is onion. Hang Ruoi is clam worms. And the stretch between Hang […]
My first Pho: Hanoi
Well, not strictly my first but my first in Vietnam and for breakfast. It’s hot and humid and we’re about to be killed by several hundred motocycles bearing down on us at a crossroads. Somehow we make it over and land at the Little Hanoi 1 (25 Pho Ta Hien 926 0168) restaurant, recomended by Lonely Planet. And this is why we are to dump Lonely Planet because it was stuffed full of people – all Wasps – who had […]