Stomachs on legs are proud to present

So before we left Bangkok for good, we went to Hanoi.I had always wanted to go to Hanoi. I'd been to HCM some years back and was always told that while the pho in HMC was ok, Hanoi was better. Hanoi was firmly on my must go list. So we went and although there were a few highlights of the trip (see below), I can safely say I would happily never return to Hanoi again unless paid to go. I have never been glared at, short-changed, ripped off and generally made to feel unwelcome so systematically on my travels elsewhere in the world as I was here*. We had the lowest strike rate on restaurants (my advice, don't even bother following the lonely planet guide) which were bad quality and over-priced. The French food was especially terrible (much better in Siem Reap Cambodia). Most shocking however was the aggression of taxi drivers. On our last night our taxi driver stopped on the side of the street, and asked us to wait 2 minutes while he popped into some dodgy kareoke bar (kareoke bars in Asia tend not to be merely for harmless drunken fun). We said no and were treated to a torrent of bullfaced yelling and screaming. The day that we left to the airport, our taxi driver nearly had a scrape with another taxi and proceeded to jump out of the car with a huge steel rod in hand and kicked and shoved the other driver.


LOWLIGHTS

Mentioning I liked fresh rice paper rolls and having a Vietnamese colleague order a table full of them. I appreciated the gesture but given the short time we had in Hanoi it would have been nice to try something different.



Green Papaya - Good service....terrible, even laughable, over priced food


Hanoi Garden - poor quality seafood, horrible hard rice, rip off prices


Wild Lotus, stunning decor pity about the medicore over priced food




What we did enjoy was Maison d'Hanoi Hotel, although I still have my gripes regarding service, prices, and room cleanliness. Overall a cute hotel though albeit with limited windows. We also enjoyed the fact that when we arrived Girl Talk was playing that night in Hanoi and we go to see him play for $8 US dollars each. We also enjoyed street noodles, Bun Cha (beef noodles outside on the street - the best meal we had) and I did like Cha Ca La Vong although the portion served was miserly for the price and we were never offered a second helping.



HIGHLIGHTS

Girl Talk


First impressions of Hanoi? "Great buildings, horrible people" to steal a line from Joannes, actually a lot like France.



*I found out later from a friend who worked in Vietnam that it is quite common for people who look half Vietnamese to be treated with complete scorn. So I am assuming that people were assuming that I was a returnee. Note to Vietnamese people, not everyone who looks Asian is Vietnamese.

For a while now I've been reading the columns of Village Voice writer Robert Sietsema. He is absolutely one of my favourite writers, partly because like fellow V-Voicers Nina Lalli and Lynn Yaeger he can use a word like 'dope' without any awkwardness. He can be Jeffrey Steingarten-esque, a goliath. But you still get the feeling he wears hoodies and has a friendly pair of spectacles. Maybe that's the sign of a good food critic. They might know when to call a Nepalese restaurant on the authenticity of their dishes, but they are a sort of everyman. Sietsema is a food critic Zelig.

When in NYC we followed a trail of his restaurant recommendations. It never really occurred to me that he might be in one of those restaurants. We look through his eyes, so to us he exists as a meta-text. When I looked around Paris Sandwich in Chinatown though, I thought that going by his reviews alone, he could be that precocious 16 year old Vietnamese b-boy waiting for a sandwich. He could just as easily be that 30-something bookish-looking African American gentleman. His reviews hint that he has many friends from many cultural backgrounds. In this week's Voice he describes hunting for the perfect Taco, and says: "Included in our number were an attorney, a cheese-monger, some students from Sarah Lawrence College, a chanteuse, a tutor, a historian, and a newspaper real-estate editor. Several of us thankfully possessed an idiomatic command of Spanish." Sietsema knows everybody, and he talks to everybody.

Anyway, just having fun with the idea of Sietsema. I suppose that most people outside of NYC have not heard of him, and yet in NYC his columns and publications are regularly spread all over the city. Everybody in NYC knows him. But, to paraphrase Howard Moon, do they REALLY know him?

When you're in a city for only four nights, you just don't want to risk a bad meal. You need to know exactly where to go for Malaysian or Ecuadorian. This doesn't leave you much basis for comparison or ability to judge whether your favourite reviewer's tastes are truly meritorious.

There were times when I disagreed slightly with Mr. Sietsema. In his review of Paris Sandwich he said "the crusty loaf is the star": well, I wouldn't have gone that far. It was crumbly and just ok, and nothing Parisian about it. But again, I have no basis of NYC-offerings for comparison. Another petty point to haggle over was his feeling that the 'vegetarian chicken', greasy tempeh, was closer to pork in taste. I thought it was kinda chicken-ish. Anyway, all that's beside the point. Overall, it was very yummy! The hot lemonade with salt was good, and the green tea waffle was dope too. ("You don't need no hope, all you need is...")

I preferred the tempeh to the sweet BBQ pork. We really enjoyed our sandwiches, and if we are back to NYC anytime soon will definitely go there again and go the whole hog: the baguette with pate, pigs' ears and 'head cheese'.

We tried following a few other online recommendations for NYC too – some New Yorker readers' recommendations from the Zucchini & Chocolate blog – those didn't hold up so well. My feeling is, if you are travelling to New York, and like the kind of food I do, it's better not to trust recommendations from anybody except the guy who Nina Lalli calls "Our Man Sietsema".





Paris Sandwich
113 Mott Street
212-226-7221

I just made a banh mi from the left over chicken I had in the fridge from noodles the other night...was super yummy

But I forgot to take a photo for y'all to see....so I stole this one off google images



I had my first ever banh mi when I lived in Melbourne, we would hop on a tram down to Victoria St to go here Pho Dzung Tan (aka Chicken and Cow on account of the chicken and cow pictures they have on the front window), afterwards we would wander down Victoria and pick up asian ingredients at the different stores down there are buy a banh mi at one of the Vietnamese bakeries to take home as a snack for later.

The banh mi we had were always pork....and included an array of pork products, first the bagguette was smothered in butter then pork pate, then roast pork and sliced pork sausage. Then they add crunchy pickled veges, scatter through bullet chilis and sprigs of fresh corriander. Lastly it is seasoned with maggi soy sauce (must be maggi), fish sauce and white pepper.
The bullet chilis in the bun add an element of excitement...it's like russian roulette with a baguette....also on account of the fact that some people have been known to have gotten food poisoning from them....so double the roulette factor.

My version is much more simple

sliced cold chicken, preferably chicken that has been cooked asian style or with asian flavours (poached in water flavoured with ginger, fish sauce, garlic cloves, white whole pepper corns, corriander roots, light soy)
fresh baguette,
crunchy carrots and cucumber marinated in rice vinegar, fish sauce, chili, lime and garlic
sliced bullet chilis
sprigs of corriander
mayo (kewpie will do just fine)
maggi soy sauce
fish sauce
ground white pepper

Take baguette smother with mayonnaise, put in chicken and veges, add sliced bullet chilis and whole sprigs of corriander and then season with maggie soy sauce, fish sauce and white pepper

Feel self satisfied

Another good meal we had in Singapore was here. It's on Hok Lam St.



They serve an excellent bowl of Teo Chew (Chaozho in Mandarin or Chiuchow in Cantonese) beef noodles.



The noodles are somewhat similar to a bowl of pho bo but much much richer with a far more deep fragrant herbal broth, my guess is probably more cinnamon, more star anise and probably some shaoxing wine.

Teo Chew cuisine is renoun as a herbal almost medicinal version of Cantonese food. Other famous Teo Chew dishes include a herbal pork anise stew, a great steamed fish in herbal ginger broth with wolf berries and chinese prunes, and dishes such as what is known in Thailand as goong woosen, frangrant glass noodle and prawn claypot, goose feet noodles and fried oyster omelette. Teo Chew people hail from Northeast Guangdong, they are the original rice smugglers and triads (yes the original gangstas) of China and make up the majority of the Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia, thus most of Southeast Asia now has regional variations of Teo Chew dishes, I'm thinking of Thailand's Khai Paloo and Singapore's Ba Ku Teh. Thailand also has a beef noodle dish that is similar to above said noodles, but it's sweeter and they put Thai basil in it.

My Thai/ Chinese side of the family are Teo Chew, that's how come I know this shit.

Anyway, if your interested in learning more wiki has some info although I'm not sure about the fruit carving comment, this is prevalent everywhere in asia, not specific to Teo Chew people

My favourite sandwiches

- lamb shwarma from the middle eastern cafe on Albert St, Auckland
- felafel sandwich
- zucchini fritter sandwich Victoria markets Melbourne
- smoked chicken on vogels with coriander pesto and tomato relish
- Vietnamese banh mii


It's hard to believe that some places in the world are still sandwich-less. When Hock first arrived in Cambodia, one day he was making himself a sandwich and his Khmer chefs gathered around and asked "what is that?"
"This my little chef's is what I like to call a sandwich"

It's all relative though, I've never had a Philly Cheese-steak sandwich :( or a Maine lobster roll.





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When I was doing field work in Cambodia last year I travelled around a lot in big white four wheel drive landcruisers with Khmer project staff. We generally listened to Khmer music. The older Khmer guys loved listening to a form of Khmer folk music called "talking the blues". It has a Southeast Asian country style to it. Occasionally, they show the music on Bayon TV. It's usually 3 people, a couple of old timers guys and a woman. One plays the Chapei Dang Veng (long neck guitar). They'll talk/sing and intermittently stop for the audience to holler out "Ja ja" or "Bart bart bart" (female and male forms of yes in the Khmer language) - its a bit like when you listen to a live Curtis Mayfield album and the audience yells out in the background "I hear you brother"

The guy pictured below is considered to be the foremost virtuoso of singing the blues in Cambodia. He is known in expat circles as the Ray Charles of the Khmer blues (I tried to find some online but no luck).



Anyway, on one particular occasion, we were travelling to Prey Veng and listening to some Khmer blues and I asked my Khmer colleague "what is this song about?" (my Khmer isn't that good). Knowing the history of the country, of the killing fields and of the Khmer Rouge, American cold war bombing and repeated invasion and civil war, I expected the response to be about a tale of incredible suffering and hardship. If anyone has cause to sing the blues I thought, it's the Khmers.

"The song is about a man who bought some noodles, from his friend. The noodles are not good. And so he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know if he should take the noodles back and risk upsetting the friendship or whether he should just keep the noodles. The noodles were expensive and his friend promised him they were great, so now he sings about his worries"

"oh"

And that's when I realised that the appeal of the blues is not to relive horrific events in one's life or the history of the country, but to talk and settle the ethical and moral problems of everyday life and relationships. How to deal with friendship relations and trade, what to do if your sold a bad bunch of noodles.

Contrary to common perception noodles are not native to Southeast Asia. Instead they were bought to Southeast Asia by successive waves of Chinese immigrants moving, trading and settling in the region. Rice noodle making as pictured below is labour intensive. It takes about 1 hour of pounding this rice and water mixture to get a kilo of noodles that are sold for about 1000 riel or $0.25. At the other end of the pole 2 small children peddle the log to pound the noodles. Generally most Cambodians make noodles only for the new years, which I think is another tradition picked up from the Chinese. Chinese serve noodles in the new year as they signify longevity.



I found generally that in-village noodle making occured in denser villagers with more spare labour and more often in villagers closer to townships. More noodle machines were spotted in villages closer to Vietnam also, where the ubiquitous pho noodle reigns supreme. (This was just my noodle observations, they may not be true).

But despite the fact that noodles are not indigenous to Cambodia, this is where I picked up a recipe for one of my most favourite at home noodle dishes. I got the recipe from the owners of my favourite Japanese restaurant in Siem Reap where I often went to dine on their Umeboshi Cold Udon. Luckily I never once was faced with the dialemma of being served bad noodles.

Cold Umeboshi Plum Udon Noodles Recipe for 1 - 2 people



Udon noodles (portion per person)*
Japanese Sesame Dressing
Spring Onion chopped
Daikon raddish (cut into batons)
Cucumber (cut into batons)
Ginger (cut into batons)
Umeboshi Plum

Japanese Sesame Dressing
You can buy this at the store or you can make it yourself. I usually just buy the dressing and then beef it up a bit.

- sesame paste 2 tblspn or so
- sesame oil couple of drops
- minced ginger (1/2 tspn)
- minded garlic (1/2 tspn)
- wasabi paste (little blob)
- mushed up umeboshi
- garlic powder
- sesame seeds whole
- japanese rice vinegar
- little bit of honey or sugar


Boil udon until cooked and plunge into ice cold water. Arrange batons of veges and sprinkle over spring onion. Top with an umeboshi plum and serve with sesame dressing

* You can use cold soba or somen too

Work days in Cambodia generally start pretty early. Cambodians tend to awake at the crack of dawn and generally go to bed just after sundown. The 7am work-starts (yes, that's starting at 7am) didn't sit too well with me unless I had copious amounts of coffee. Coffee in Cambodia has a strange vanilla flavour. I always used to assume that it was just some sort of Cambodian preference for vanilla flavoured coffee; until I found out later that the preference emerged from manufacturers trying to mimic the taste of the world's most expensive coffee, weasel coffee, or civet cat coffee. Yes, that's right, civet cat coffee. If you don't know what that is, let me enlighten you. It's the world's most expensive coffee, collected from the droppings of the civet cat (aka weasel) which prefers to eat the sweetest and the ripest coffee berries that fall to the ground, and then shits out the beans; which are by this point slightly fermented. Poor Vietnamese labourers pick through their pooh and collect the precious beans that are worrth up to $600 USD per kilo....and then they make coffee....

Vanilla flavouring aside, I know how I like my coffee: and it ain't out of a cat's anus.