Primordial Soup

In the course of doing a little check-in with myself yesterday over a plate of Nom Du Du (green papaya salad with dried beef), I find I've been truant when it comes to my grand eating project. I've been too reliant on my Rough Guide which, for its many virtues, plays it easy on its restaurant recommendations, preferring to list places where you can get spaghetti and meatballs or a steak, or otherwise thoroughly westernized Vietnamese food. Witness last night's dinner at a place called "Little Hanoi" in the Old Quarter: I ordered the "traditional Vietnamese shrimp cake", which turned out to be 6 flat rounds of fried batter with a shrimp pressed into the top of each and, pinwheeling from the edges of the rounds were a dozen french fries. It wasn't horrible, it was just a little TGIFridays, which I needn't fly around the globe for.

So, having an unexpexted extra day in Hanoi before moving on to Halong Bay, I resolve to be a little more agressive and adventurous in my eating. I've listed a dozen (actually traditional) things to eat and drawn a little map for where to get those items. The rule I've made is that I won't go anywhere that has an English-language name: no Little Hanoi, 69 Bar, City View Cafe, etc etc. No places where groups of Americans and Australians sit around playing cards over plates of fries. If the kitchen serves only 1 item, and all ordering is done by pointing, all the better.

Deciding there's no time to lose on the matter, I head out to a place down the street from my hotel. The kitchen is at the intersection of several very busy streets, facing the Hang Da Market. Though recommended by Rough Guide, there is certainly no English menu to worry about, and nary a white person to be seen. Tiny plastic tables and chairs (what in Seattle would be considered little kids' booster stepping-stools) spill out of the crowded kitchen. The dish I'm here for is Mien Luon, which I understand will be "spicy noodles with crispy eels". Well, it was that, but so much more. I was brought a bowl of soup with a great nest of mien noodles (thin, translucent, flat, and gummy - not to be confused with bun noodles), a spicy & briny broth (much lighter than that of pho), the obligatory fresh herbs and bean sprouts, and last but not least, a whole school of dark, crinkly items about the size and shape of anchovies, but dark green: the eels. Whether these were many little eels, or several long thin eels sectioned into 3-inch lengths, I'm not sure. They'd been dredged in flour and fried; very chewy, they gave me more time than I needed to linger over their slightly brackish flavor. There were people already queueing up for the tables, and eating dinner somewhere much more metaphorically hectic than Grand Central Station wasn't really conducive to lingering, so I added my chilis and pickled garlic and dove in. If eating pho is (in Bobby Radboy's words) like "eating an ecosystem", then mien luon is like eating the precontinental primordial ooze: with its seaweed-like swamp of noodles, and its sea serpents. The matter of whether or not I liked it, exactly, seems a moot point. There's food, and then there's Erlebnis-food. Meanwhile, the scooters blazed all around me, the walking market of fruit-hawkers passed by, taxis blared their horns as if that would part the crowds, as I perched on my little plastic stool in the middle of Hanoi.


TOMORROW: The Great One-Woman Hanoi Street Food Derby!