FOOD!

Bun cha (I think it’s pronounced boon kia)

• Grilled pork patties and sliced pork. Served with rice noodles, a heaped platter of herbs/greens and some kind of sliced cucumber/squash-like vegetable. Of the greens, we could only recognise mint,Thai basil and eryngo leaves (which really are green blades that taste like wan swee).
• The meat is grilled over a charcoal fire. When you order, some apple-juice-coloured liquid is poured over it. This liquid tastes like diluted fish sauce. You can add some cut chillies into the soup-sauce but beware! Those chillies are powerful!
• We asked (gestured, rather) for one portion. What we did was to put some noodles in a bowl and add some soup-sauce (it helps to loosen the noodles). Take the meat and eat it with a generous helping of greens. My favourite is the one that looks like mint but has jagged edges (see photo, somewhere bottom right). Yummy!
• The rice noodles aren't the same as bee hoon or mee sua but , rather, closer to putu mayam.
• We tried 3 stalls – 1 Hang Manh, 20 Ta Hien and 90 Hang Truong
• Cost : an amazing 10K or 15K dong (SGD 1-1.50)for a portion that's pretty much big enough for 2 small eaters like sister and myself.
• Be prepared to walk away full, satisfied and smelly!
  

Banh cuon (I think it’s pronounced baan kwon)

• Vietnamese chee cheong fun!
• I was dying to try this with the beetle juice - ca cuong ("kah kwong"). We got the hotel receptionist to write the name of the dish and the beetle juice. A little article below from VietnamNet.
  
  VietNamNet – When there’s a fly in your soup, you send it back, but in downtown Hanoi you can pay a pretty penny for something a whole lot bigger: ca cuong.
  
  Nestled between shops retailing hair products and stationary, one of Hanoi’s more unique eating establishments serves up it wares. While far from being the only purveyor of culinary favourite banh cuon, as the owner proclaims, it’s the only place to get ca cuong.
  
  Banh cuon is a simple dish, rice paper wraps of pork and mushroom on a nest of herbs and sautéed onions. Its a tasty snack, most often eaten by Vietnamese people for breakfast, it certainly doesn’t sound worthy of penning an article over. But on Cha Ca Street, downtown Hanoi, it’s served with the musk of a ca cuong water beetle.
  
  A dab of the beetle’s musky juices adds a curious flavour to the dish. Served along side the banh cuon come a small bowl of fish sauce with pressed pork sausage floaters.
  
  A young man steps up to the table, jabs a chopstick into a jar and deposits the smallest amount of ca cuong goodness into the mix. A quick swirl, and the heady insect aroma wafts up.
  
  Yet, while the serving of the dish maybe simple, its preparation is a closely guarded secret that causes the restaurant owner to give sideways, “who’s asking?” kind of looks. It’s a matter of pride for him that he is not only the sole purveyor in town, but that nobody really knows how he does it.
  
  Long a delicacy served to kings, ca cuong is said to hail back to around 270 BC, its potent powers withstanding the test of time. This unlikely additive is touted with the usual “good for men” lines, meaning it’ll give some prowess in the sack.
  
  It is also said to be good for women, helping regulate their monthly cycle. Its powers are attributed to cleansing of the kidneys, a common benefit among medicinal herbs found in Vietnamese food and liquors.
  
  There’s no such thing as a free lunch though, and the little beasts are worth their weight. While a female bug goes for VND20k a pop, the male of the species fetches a sterling VND50k.
  
  So the bug juice isn’t cheap. As the local saying goes, it’ll cost you a ring, at about VND800k (a little shy of US$50) for just one cc. You wouldn’t have thought a bug would fetch such a pretty penny, but sadly the bug is feeling the pressures of progress, as expanding city limits gobble up the ponds they were once found living in.
  
  But what’s it like? A wide variety of comparisons have been made on its flavour, ranging from pleasant bouquets to cheap perfumes. The proof is in the tasting, and ca cuong is surprisingly delicate, definitely erring towards the bouquet. It sits romantically hand in hand with the banh cuon, although their torrid affair can leave an undesirable aftertaste. There’s something definitely buggy about the taste, but all over a very pleasant dining experience, so long as you don’t ask to examine the merchandise.
  
  The pork sausage floating in the buggy brew picks up a lot of flavour, but if used as a dipping sauce for the banh cuon, it is subtle and sweet, oddly reminiscent of a summer’s day.
  
  A simple meal to flush out bia (beer) tortured kidneys, it’ll do a number on your wallet too, but it’s well worth that little extra. Later in the day the test subject experienced some mild dizziness, although it was later attributed to excessive caffeine intake. Please be aware of any allergies you may have before munching on entirely new food groups, such as water beetles or scorpions (don’t eat the tippy tail bit).

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belostomatidae
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca_cuong
• We tried this stall on 14 Hang Ga (if i remember correctly, there's a Giordano (!) just opposite it)

• A lady sits in front of 2 steamers and scoops batter onto her steaming contraption. After a while she uncovers it and deftly lifts it off with a long stick. Passes it to her partner who sprinkles some cooked minced meat, gives the whole thing a little roll and cuts it into manageable pieces. Another person sprinkles what we think are fried shallots and hay bee & a couple of mint sprigs then serves it to us.

• A girl scoops the dipping sauce (which really is pretty much diluted fish sauce) and sets it in front of us. She serves the other customers something that looks like meat. And when she started to unwrap some small leaf parcels – I got a little worried – told sister that I’d freak out if that was the beetle!
• Just when I thought I wasn’t gonna get what I really came for,the girl comes by with a teensy vial and a chopstick and gestures to our dipping sauce. I point to my bowl – sister declined. Girl dips chopstick into vial and swirls it in my sauce. Then I notice a chemical smell – rather similar to the solvents we encounter in a chemistry lab, a bit like nail polish…then I realize that it’s coming from my sauce. O, so THAT'S ca cuong! I was expecting something more musky, more like…B.O. Tasted ok lah, nothing really fantastic. See this person’s blog – I think they may have actually gotten the REAL thing http://eatzybitzy.blogspot.com/2006/01/hanoi-better-late-than-never.html
• Cost : 10K dong per person, an additional 1000 dong for the essence de bug
• Our neighbours had some grilled meat but we didn’t know what kind of meat it was. (I refuse to try dog meat!)

Cha ca ("chah kah")

• at 14 Cha Ca St, the famous Cha Ca La Vong
• Cha ca simply means grilled fish; it's s'posed to be a Hanoian specialty
• You can get cha ca at other stalls but CCLV is s'posed to be a Hanoian "institution" - well, so are my callused feet!
• When you reach the restaurant, there's nobody downstairs. Don't bother looking for a doorbell or searching for life-forms there. We climbed up a staircase so narrow & steep it may as well have been a ladder to find some bored looking people.
• Anyway, they sorta precook the fish with something we presum to be turmeric, and then bring the charcoal brazier with the frying pan to your table and stir in heaps of herbs/garnish (this time we had a lot more spring onion and dill) and give it a couple of obligatory tosses that are s'posed to pass for "we cook it right at your table!".
• Present again are the diluted fish sauce and bun, as well as peanuts.
• You're s'posed to take some fish, herbs, peanuts and fish sauce and mix it with some bun and chow down.
• Well, we found it too oily and too tasteless and waaay waay OVERHYPED. This must be The Most Over-Rated & Over-Priced thing in Hanoi. Plus, the floorboards were incredibly creaky - you really ahve to wonder if the place is holding up!
• 70K dong (SGD7!!) per person!!!
• Interesting that you can have 3 restaurants but no branches...hmmmm...
• And the strangest thing : the palce got really crowded real fast and we noticed that the crowd was mainly locals!
• GIVE THIS A MISS!

Banh chung (bahn choong)

• "Bahn" is Vietnamese for either cake or rice cake (I can't remember!)
• Banh chung is sticky rice stuffed with mung beans and pork, then wrapped in banana leaves. Sounds and tastes pretty much like ba chang.
• We bought this from one from one of those ladies walking around with a bamboo yoke & 2 baskets hanging at the ends.
• She tried to sell it to us for US$1 but the hotel receptionist had already told us not to pay more than VND 5000 so...
• Disappointing : it was incredibly bland

Pho (say "fur", not "foeh")

• So much for getting excited at the chance to taste authentic pho.
• Maybe we didn't try the right stalls. Oh well!!
• We had pho twice : once at what appears to be a branch of the Hoa Sua School on Van Mieu Road (just parallel to the Temple of Literature) and again somewhere near the northern tip of Hoan Kiem Lake (near the part of the Old Quarter that has lotsa shoe stores).
• Verdict : BLAND. Both times, the stuff didn't come with the veg and herbs that we usually see with the Singaporean version. The bee tai mak I eat when I'm sick was more tasty than this! It looks and tastes just like a bland version of kway teow tng. (But I guess it is still pretty good for sick people)

Com vong (com is pronounced "kom" with less accent on the "k" and intoned like "boing", yes, the sound of something bouncing)

• Well, "com" means rice, and "com vong" means young rice, which is green.
• It isn't actually on the "must eat" list of the travel guides but it was something I came across on the Net. Apparently there's a village near Hanoi that produces really good com vong and the name of the village is "Vong" so.... It's supposed to be a seasonal thing and just so happens that now was the season so...
• See this page for more details on com vong http://english.vietnamnet.vn/lifevn/2005/06/448271/
• Needless to say it was tough hunting it down.
• I saw a lady in a shop eating it and she told me to get it from one of those baskets-on-bamboo-poles ladies.
• That's easy enough - just try to ask each and every one of the zillions of such ladies who don't speak English if they're selling green rice!
• We spotted a dried goods stall in the Hang Be Market selling uncooked com vong so we bought some (haven't got the foggiest idea how to cook it though)
• Well, the hotel receptionist was nice enough to buy us a packet the morning we left. How sweet of him! He did say that there's a lady who sells this and comes by the hotel at 5am almost everyday. He also told us that it should be eaten with bananas and sugar
• Well, finally!
• The lady will scoop the rice onto some lotus leaves, wrap it and tie it with a stalk of the rice plant (how quaint!)
• The lotus leaves give the rice a nice fragrance.
• We finally tried it at home. It's green and has a toasted, nutty taste and is chewy.
• Must look for a recipe!

Coffee or ca phe (KAre Fay)

• I'm not a coffee person - it usually leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
• But it's be quite a travesty to leave Vietnam without at least trying one cup of their famed kopi.
• We went to Trung Ngyuen, Vietnam's answer to Starbucks. It was a wide but narrow, 3-4 storey establishment; not air-conditioned so you can enjoy your kopi and the pollution (noise and dust) all at once.
• Well, me being me, die-die must try weasel coffee. So that's what I ordered, noting also that while a cup of ca phe chon sua da cost only 13K dong, the regular ca phe cost only 8000 dong. hmmm.
• Ca phe sua da is coffee with condensed milk and ice.
• The coffee is dripped from the percolator into a cup with some condensed milk. A cup of ice is served with it.
• The coffee was so thick the consistency was just like tee chneo!!
• So here's my cup of poison (the ice looks murky cos I'd already used my spoon to stir the kopi and then dunked it into the ice)
• It was rather nice but me being totally clueless about coffee wouldn't really know any better.
• In any case, Trung Ngyuen's weasel coffee is supposed to be a synthetic version.
• Did find some stalls selling the coffee powder in the Old Quarter - bought some for friends but doubt the authenticity. Each 100g packet only cost 12K VND yet ca phe chon is supposed to be "rare" and "expensive"......

Baguettes

• Yes, no Delifrances round the corners but it's not difficult to find one of these hawkers selling warm baguettes.
• A legacy from their French past. The baguettes we had in various places beat Delifrance's hands down - the crust was, well, crusty, without being hard and the inside was rather fluffy - good even without butter.
• We bought these on our way to the water puppet show.