Nha Trang Food Odyssey Part 1
‘Sup Substackers, Seven here. For the past week, I’ve been eating and drinking my way through Nha Trang, Vietnam, and in a nutshell it’s been pretty awesome. I blogged about it over on bangkokseven.com but left all the food-related details for this post. Here are the highlights thus far…
Pho
So, everybody knows this bowl of beef and noodles is the quintessential Viet street meal, and despite growing up in LA where there’s a pho joint every other block, I’d never tried it until coming to actual Vietnam. At time of posting, I’m still here, and still grubbing daily, but thus far I’ve pho’d twice. Here’s my take:
In the first joint (40k for a bowl), I sampled the broth before adding any accoutrements (chilis, lime, bean sprouts, mint, fish sauce) and found it to be just lovely. The flavor of everything from the soup to the noodles to the beef were so utterly clean. Then I added all the aforementioned goodies to make a flaming cauldron of spicy, savory, sour deliciousness. I added too much lime--a mistake I won't make again. When compared to the boat noodles of my home country of Thailand, it’s hard to come to a conclusion. I hate to use the apples-oranges cliche but they really are different, and good for different reasons. What’s better—pizza or cheeseburgers? That’s where I’m at with Thai vs Viet noodles.
The pho I scarfed down the next day (30k) was better and cheaper than the first one. The broth was cloudy, like it had chicken stock in it. I eased up on the lime and even added mint leaves. It was heavenly. For good measure I got baked oysters with cheese which were fantastic.
120k for those bad boys.
Banh Mi
The only Viet staple more popular than pho is the classic banh mi sandwich. It’s a combo of Vietnamese weirdness packed into a colonial leftover: the French baguette. Banh mi’s vary widely depending on which joint you happen to wander into, so try to do some research before setting out. Google some reviews and watch the videos they got up on YouTube about chow in Nha Trang. It’ll help you avoid the shitty ones. I mistakenly ordered my first banh mi from the same place where I got my first pho. Their specialty was definitely the latter. The sandwich that appeared at my table had some pork in it, plus a couple of lightly-pickled cucumber slices, a drizzle of sauce and that’s all. It was good—but it wasn’t great.
My 2nd banh mi came from one of the “popular” places just across the street from the Night Market. There was a long queue, and some of the patrons were Vietnamese so I was pretty confident it’d be good. They definitely added some accoutrements that the first one didn’t have—namely TWO sauces, plus dried onions and two kinds of mystery meat.
If I’m honest, I don’t know what all the banh mi fuss is about. It’s……….just OK. But I do plan to try a couple more places in the next few days, in the hopes that banh mi really is great, and I’ve just been to the wrong places so far.
Bun Bo Hue
For years, it bothered me that Anthony Bourdain—TV foodie traveler extraordinaire—said Vietnam was his favorite culinary destination. It really chapped my hide that he chose it over Thailand, which is clearly the superior country for street food and unique, awesome dining awesomeness. So when I saw an episode where he called bun bo hue “the best bowl of soup in the world” I had to fuckin’ try it.
The bun bo hue absolutely leapt with marvelous flavor, with cuts of rich tender beef, fat sating noodles, and a broth unlike anything I'd ever tasted. I tossed in some chilis, bean sprouts, lime, and mint for good measure. The entire experience was transcendent--except for the can of Coke that was set before me without warning. I hadn't had a soft drink for around 5 or 6 years. It tasted like a monkey’s asshole and nearly ruined the meal.
Overall, I’d give this delectable bowl (delectabowl for short, copyright BKK7) of goodness an 8 out of 10. I can’t back Bourdain 100% because, to be honest, I’ve preferred every Thai bowl of noodles I’ve ever had. But this stuff was pretty damn good.
Coffee
So, for some reason, Vietnam has a very prevalent and eclectic coffee culture. There’s a coffee shop every 10 meters, and people sit around drinking it morning, noon, and night. What sets Viet coffee apart is the wild array of enigmatic flavor combinations that literally nobody else ever thought of. Thus far, I’ve samples the following:
Hanoi Sour—this variation is popular in the country’s capital.
It had whole ambaralla fruit, which combined with the coffee and sugar produced a face-punch of sweetsourbitter flavor that I'd never experienced before. The closest I'd come to it was when I visited a tea house in Seoul and ordered the four-flavor tea. Twas meant to be sweet, sour, savory, and bitter but all I tasted was shit. This, on the other hand was the taste buds equivalent of first-time sex with a girl in a new country. It was exciting and exotic, yet familiar and comforting, and a bit unsettling. I loved it.
The barista took such tender-loving care to make it, the cashier actually brought me a small glass of chrysanthemum water to tide me over while I waited for the real drink. At 70k dong, it was nearly double the cost of a bowl of pho. Money well spent, I say.
Coffee number two was called an egg coffee. It’s basically iced Americano with sugar, condensed milk, and egg yoke. This thing was the back-alley blowjob version of a coffee. Thick, saucy, over-flavored, too sweet, too savory. ‘Twas a coffee that should've been ashamed of itself but instead blasted it's flavor all over my brain cells like a crack contact high. In fact, if someone told me there was actual crack in the coffee, I wouldn't have been a bit surprised.
My third java was a coconut coffee cold brew. I don’t have a photo because it arrived at my table in a nondescript plastic cup, and nothing about it distinguished it from any other coffee—at least, in appearance.
It was essentially an iced coffee with coconut milk. I was so excited to try it, thinking it would combine the best of both coconut and coffee to create something remarkable. Instead, it did the opposite. It blended the worst of both flavors to create something like a tactile strength exercise. Similar to the Hanoi sour, the initial sip seems to fight itself on the palate. One’s first instinct is to spit it out. But after swallowing, the combination of flavors coalesced into something wholly enigmatic, if not pleasant.
The aftereffect is something akin to drinking coffee out of an open coconut. It's at once bizarre and familiar. It's bizarliar.
In addition to the VietCentric fare, I’ve also sampled local attempts at Western delectables. But that’s fodder for a separate Substack, to be posted later. Stay tuned…