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The New York Times

August 27, 2003

At Ease in Vietnam, Asia's New Culinary Star

By R. W. APPLE Jr.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - IT is enough to daunt all but the most gluttonous of gastronomes.

Right by the door stand piles of rice from several different provinces, some with large grains, some with small grains, some darker, some lighter, each with a wholly different aroma. Down the aisle are banks of vividly green herbs and vegetables, with their hyperintense Asian scents and tastes, stunningly fresh despite the lack of refrigeration because they arrive direct from their growers in the middle of the night.

Many of the vegetables are Asian natives - bumpy bitter melons, lotus stems, long beans, banana flowers, luffa squashes and pungent Chinese celery. But others are European transplants - delicacies like baby cress, escarole, miniature artichokes and exquisite asparagus (which the Vietnamese called "French bamboo" when French colonial officials first imported it).

Over there is a cauliflower the size of a basketball. Over here are mounds of delectable, unfamiliar fruit - enormous knobby durians, which smell like rotting cheese but taste like rich custard, and spiny little soursops, which yield a sweet-and-tart juice that makes an unforgettable sorbet, and horrid lipstick-pink dragon fruit. Breadfruit. Jackfruit. Custard apples. Tamarind pods.

On the other side of a partition are caged chickens and other fowl, squawking noisily, and all kinds of sea creatures - iced squid, crabs tied with red ropes, clams the size of silver dollars with ridged shells, carp swimming in basins and tiger prawns that look as ferocious as their namesakes, all overseen by a raucous corps of vendors in rubber boots.

This is the tumultuous Ben Thanh market, which faces Quach Thi Trang Square in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City. A shedlike building with four entrances, it attests to this country's peacetime bounty. Visit it, look around, join the chattering, jostling crowd, listen to the noodle vendor's spiel, grab a snack. That will put you in the right frame of mind for the splendid meals that await you in a galaxy of attractively designed, mostly new restaurants near the big hotels here.

Restaurant cooking of real excellence has evolved in the last 10 years, and particularly in the last three, with bright young chefs innovating and adapting like their brethren in other major Asian capitals. French and Chinese and Indian influences remain, of course, the legacy of a long and clamorous history, but something new and manifestly Vietnamese is emerging.

Spring rolls and salad rolls on white tablecloths, you ask? Absolutely, and in Ho Chi Minh City's better places they might be filled with squid or grilled fish or chicken instead of crab or shrimp and pork. Chefs have no qualms about serving the traditional alongside the inventive: a plate of fat rosy shrimp with satisfyingly sour tamarind pulp, for instance, together with a plate of tiny quail glazed with star anise and grilled with garlic and paprika.

My wife, Betsey, and I ate those two dishes, among others, at Nam Phan, a luxurious villa decorated with antique ceramics and scrolls. On our table, a single orchid floated in a silver and black lacquer box.

Nothing so deluxe could ever have been found in Ho Chi Minh City's former incarnation, wartime Saigon, where I was based for almost three years as a correspondent. It would have been easier to unearth a truffle. The ingredients weren't available (too many roadblocks), nor were the cooks (in the army). So we hung out in a series of joints that flourished in a world of low expectations and minimal competition.

On my return this year, I couldn't find any of them. Every one has been swallowed up by the 35 years that have passed since I left, but I remember them - a street-corner Basque place called Aterbea, with a jai alai mural, where I ate boudin noir, sautéed apples and mashed potatoes for lunch, because it was good and because the wizened waiters assured me it was what the Foreign Legionnaires had ordered, and Amiral, where the resourceful Morley Safer gave a jolly dinner party the same night that Truman Capote gave his storied Black and White Ball in New York.

Also Cheap Charlie's, where my colleague Charlie Mohr (no relation) taught me to pick up peanuts with chopsticks in a grueling session the night after I arrived; the Arc en Ciel in Cholon, where the taxi-dancers were more interesting than the food; Les Affreux, the Ghastly Ones, a kind of bistro-in-a-bunker run by Corsicans displaced from Algeria; and the Guillaume Tell, down by the river, whose proprietor used to drill holes in the bottoms of fancy bottles of wine and refill them with plonk.

BUT back to Nam Phan, which is the latest venture of Hoang Khai, a young entrepreneur who has quickly assembled a group of a dozen Khai Silk shops, as notable for their décor (a goldfish pond, complete with humpbacked footbridge, graces the interior of one of them) as for the chic clothes they sell. His restaurant, like his silk business, is aimed not only at well-off travelers and expatriates but also at the growing coterie of high-living Vietnamese. With dinner checks averaging $100 or so a couple, without wine, it is the town's costliest place to eat.

The villa housing Nam Phan stands at the center of a walled garden on the busy corner of Le Thanh Ton and Hai Ba Trung, two of the city's main streets. Inside, though, all is quiet. The high-ceilinged rooms are painted in grays, taupes and whites, and furnished with a spare, modern refinement rare in Vietnam; no 1930's nostalgia, no Indochine tristesse here. A series of glassed, backlighted niches, each holding a vase with a single flower, dominates one wall.
said Betsey, who is not easily swept off her feet.

I would say the same about the food, especially the salads. One was made from grilled dried beef and the tender leaves and crunchy stems of water spinach, a relative of the morning glory. It was light and refreshing, just the thing on a warm day. Another, more elaborate and more assertive but equally appealing, included lotus stems, bits of pork and tiny shrimp, fried shallots, chilies, mint, rau ram or Vietnamese coriander and fish sauce. Tangy, fishy, sweet all at once, it had the layers of flavor the Vietnamese love.

Chicken and seafood were ground together to make the unusual, ethereal spring rolls, which were served, sparkling on the plate, in bite-size pieces.

But nothing, for me, matched the shrimp with tamarind sauce. The pulp inside the tamarind pods, which look like giant brown beans, had been sweetened just enough to balance its sourness, and gobs of black pepper added a contrasting punch. The combination was fabulous. I thought of semisweet chocolate, but Betsey put the matter much more aptly. "Spice candy," she said.

The plates and cutlery were good-looking and the service was charming. The only jarring note, at least to us, was the flag that we could see out the window - a yellow star on a red field. Just then, it was hard to believe we were in a Communist nation.

TWO of the other choice spots in town, Mandarin and Hoi An, are located around the corner from each other. Both are owned by another Vietnamese businessman, Pham Quang Minh, and ably managed by an Australian, Frank Jones, a former actor.

Hoi An specializes in the cooking of the central coast town of that name, a photogenic little port whose food and architecture were influenced by the Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese merchants who settled there in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The restaurant is a facsimile of an old dining house, with ideograms on the walls and carved shutters dividing the rooms. Bonsai trees and shrubs decorate various corners. The chairs are ironwood.

In a typical example of central Vietnamese delicacy, the flavor palette in Hoi An's spring rolls is limited to shrimp and pork paste, black sesame seeds and Chinese coriander, and the paper in which they are wrapped, made from rice and cassava flour, is more brittle than most. The salad rolls, which are just as elegant, arrive with a miniature pagoda carved from a carrot.

Shrimp grilled in a banana leaf, another specialty, emerge rich and buttery. Dipped in a concoct-it-yourself sauce of lime juice and salt, they spoil you forever for shrimp cocktails. Sumptuous, chili-laced beef and onions, served inside a coconut, is vaguely South Indian in style; could that be the influence of the Portuguese?

Though the rice noodles are not authentic (only those made with water from a particular Hoi An well get the nod from the purists), the ca lau here is luscious all the same: thin slices of baconlike pork, butterflied shrimp and crushed bits of crunchy sesame cake are piled onto the broad noodles, and a bowl of clear, fragrant marrow-bone broth is served on the side. The dish reminded me again of the Vietnamese genius for making a lot from a little.

We went to Mandarin at the suggestion of Loren Jenkins, a colleague of many years standing who is now the foreign editor for National Public Radio. "As good a Vietnamese meal as I've ever had," he announced when we ran into him in Hue, and he was not that far off.

Mandarin brims with class. A pianist, a cellist and a violinist play downstairs in the four-story, skylighted building; dinner is served on big, handsome blue-and-white plates; and shellfish, the house specialty, are delivered directly from Nha Trang on the South China Sea several times a week. Premium ingredients like abalone and shark's fin dot the menu, at a price.

Throwing self-control to the winds, and fortified by a couple of bottles of well-chilled Alsatian riesling from Gustav Lorentz, we managed to work our way through creamy, juicy bay scallops grilled in their shells and dressed with chopped scallions, peanuts and herbs; a tuna salad, served in a green mango, to be spread on rice crackers with a chili sauce - that familiar Vietnamese blend of spicy, fishy, salty, sour and caramelized tastes again, with so much ginger that it left a stinging sensation on the lips; a few pickles and other tidbits; and then a pair of gargantuan crabs steamed in beer.

The crabs left a lasting impression, to say the least. They had thick shells and big claws, like stone crabs, and they gave up firm, moist, glacier-white lumps of meat, as big as cherries, as sweet as you could ask.

En garde, Baltimore!

I MUST admit I wondered what I was getting us into when we walked into Blue Ginger, a place with Italianate arches and a tile floor. A "traditional" Vietnamese band was having a go at "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."

But the menu held out promise, and the kitchen made good on it. Beef rolls flavored with turmeric and lemon grass, among other spices, wrapped in peppery la lot leaves and grilled over charcoal, got us off to a good start. Long, thin purple eggplants, roasted to a smoky, melting succulence, combined beautifully with crumbly, spicy pork. Fried chicken - we called it Eastern fried chicken - was suffused with the heady taste of lemon grass.

A tureen of sweet-and-sour soup was dazzling in its complexity, a far cry from the derisory brew served under that heading in tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants around the world. Among its ingredients were fiery bird's-eye chilies, coriander, Thai basil, lime juice, fish sauce, tomatoes, onions, star fruit and tiny, tender clams closely resembling Neapolitan vongole.

The stylish Temple Club, one of the older upscale restaurants in town, is an immensely cheerful place, where the merest acknowledgment of waiters and busboys produces faces creased with smiles. The hallway is lined with ceramic elephants, lighted by oil lamps, and more lanterns burn inside, casting dancing, romantic shadows onto the bare brick walls.

First things first: the martinis were world-class. We hugely enjoyed the black-lipped clams, steamed with a chili-laced broth in a clay pot; the maître d'hôtel said they had come from Vungtau, at the mouth of the Saigon River. Duck breast, flavored with ginger, grilled over charcoal, was served rare; in southeastern France, it would have been called magret, and it could have been no better. All Vietnamese fowl are free-range birds, and they taste it.

Camargue is another matter altogether, a thatched, two-story open-air pavilion where the European accents are in the foreground. Seated upstairs, we dined by candlelight with palm fronds dangling near us, overhead circular fans beavering away and billiard balls clicking downstairs. Feeling as louche as Bogart, we started with foie gras (cool, firm, brightened by a Sauternes jelly, and altogether respectable, if not quite up to the standard of Chez L'Ami Louis) and vitello tonnato, as good a dish as we tasted in all of Vietnam during a 10-day stay.

Large prawns, listed on the menu as gambas, grilled and set on edge around a heap of remarkable, tarragon-infused ratatouille, not only tasted fresh from the sea; they had the supple texture that disappears in a split-second when our own gulf shrimp are flash-frozen. One flaw: A lemon butter sauce, which might have been fine in Lyons, seemed far too heavy in the tropics.

But other things were just as they should have been: quick, competent service from nattily uniformed waiters, crusty mini-baguettes and the best wine list in town, with plenty of classified-growth clarets (a rarity in Vietnam) and a crisp, racy Pouilly-Fumé from Henri Bourgeois, a top-flight grower.
Betsey and I were constantly reminded of New Orleans as we moved through the languid streets that for me will always constitute Saigon. It was all there: the humidity lying over the city like damp cotton, the slow-moving river lined with decaying warehouses, the oleander blossoms, the scent of jasmine in the air.

And like New Orleans, Ho Chi Minh City is blessed not only with terrific big-time restaurants but also with worthwhile smaller ones tucked into nooks and crannies.

Got a lunch date? On Nguyen Thiep, a narrow street a couple of blocks from the Caravelle Hotel in the center of town, you will find three worthy choices.

Lemon Grass, a long room with minimally adorned white stucco walls, does a mean green mango salad, with slices of the fruit mixed with chopped peanuts, shallots and fish sauce, and herb-scented grilled chicken kebabs. (Green mango is not unripe, by the way; it is a special variety, bred to be green.) Whole crab in pepper sauce is terrific; the leathery fish cakes are not.

Globo, a bohemian bar and restaurant done up in black and white, with zebra-striped fans and Tunisian folk art, is a hangout for expats from all over, and Augustin, a bistro you might think had been transported intact from 1930's Paris, with a clientele that might very well have made the trip with it. You will recognize a lot of old friends on the menu - salade niçoise, entrecôte bordelaise, profiteroles - and they are all well executed.

Cup of coffee? Brodard, established in 1932, will serve you a fine one, with a perfect head of crema, with a slice of house-made chocolate cake if you want. Drink a Pernod if you are in the mood, or a delicious citron pressé (freshly made lemonade, best with soda water). Or order one of the juiciest steak frites in the city.

The place to go for a Vietnamese iced coffee, made by the drip-drip-drip of water through an individual aluminum filter, flavored with condensed milk, is Givral, cater-corner from the Caravelle. Now as always, it is a headquarters for young, giggling schoolgirls, a few of whom, thank goodness, still wear the long and graceful ao dais.

If old-fashioned cafes turn you off, head for the I-Box, not far away, a youthful spot with a wildly funky décor.

Ice cream? The best you will find is at Kem Bac Dang, which has several locations around the city. Try the longan, kiwi, coconut or coffee, or spoil yourself with a luscious soursop milkshake.

They used to call Saigon the Paris of the Orient because of its lovely, tree-lined boulevards. The way things are going, with eating out here becoming the kind of preoccupation it already is in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore, they may one day call Ho Chi Minh City the Paris of the Orient because of the quality of its restaurants.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company