Food Enroute
It has been so rewarding to eat Vietnam with an insider. Our Easy Rider guides were so thoughtful as to order our meals and eat with us each day; that’s how we ate the best food in this country.
Before lunch on our first day, Bang stopped to pick up a few kilos of a fruit I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be passionfruit, our dessert for that meal and the following six. Cut in half, they are eaten with a spoon like pudding. Tart, sweet and juicy.
Along the way. we would stop at small eateries, mostly scrubby little joints with greasy tables and a woodstove in the back. A lot of them had names that were also the address and sometimes someone would be cooking meat over a tiny charcoal BBQ in the front. It was at these places that we would learn that bitter melon soup is eaten at the end of a meal, that tofu can be delicious when it is stuffed with spicy meat, and that crispy, deep-fried chicken can make an outstanding meal.
We also tried honey-barbecued squid stuffed with beef, stir-fried deer meat with morning glory, stewed wild boar, barbecued weasel (I think it was weasel; they didn’t know the English name for the animal but described it as “like a fox with a long nose”), and a fantastic seafood hotpot.
For breakfast one morning, we had Vietnamese steak and eggs, which were cooked as they were brought to the table on a scalding iron hot plate. The steak was actually buried beneath fresh coriander, tomatoes and cucumber and was only one of three different meats on the platter. We figured out pretty quickly that Vietnamese people love meat- I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much in one week.
Plus, at breakfast, there was always hot, Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk.
