Return to Vietnam

          In the taxi racing toward town from the airport, I worry that the languor and charm of the Hanoi I loved so much in 1997 will have fallen to the warrior gods of progress and globalization. Will we still find our favorite bun cha canteen? I’m haunted by the memory if its fragrant pork patties, caramelized in the grill and served on a stew of pork bits whose rich broth is cut by the tangy freshness of papaya. I fear that Vietnam’s drive to leap from the Third World to the 21st century, its fascination with fast food and a veneer of worldliness, will have forced small restaurateurs into poverty and discouraged the sidewalk peddlers of summer rolls and meat-filled buns. I’ve never been able to resist the mingled sweet, sour, and salt of Vietnamese cuisine, with its powerful flavors of tamarind and ginger and fish sauce and the imperative crunch of raw sprouts mixed with shiso, mint, and purple and green basil. 

          As the cab finally lurches into Old Hanoi and the famous “36 Streets,” which date from the 13th century, I see that the area has been violated by only a smattering of computer cafés and a few billiard parlors. Three generations still squat over pho bo (beef noodle soup), still barbecue evening snacks and brush their teeth in front of houses without plumbing. With the help of my companion, Steven. I quickly find the summer-roll lady I remember from our last visit, in precisely the same spot. But there’s also good news for travelers who happen to be less daring than we. Vietnam’s flirtation with capitalist suitors has spawned a host of excellent upscale hotels and restaurants with global reach and modern sanitation. Culinary vagabonds, extreme high-risk gourmands, and even fussbudgets can eat surprisingly well (and cheaply) in today’s Hanoi. My advice: Go now, while the old town survives. And whatever your cholesterol level tells you, don’t miss the pork bun cha.

          You don’t need me to tell you about Cha Ca La Vong; you’ll find it in any guidebook. It’s been in the same small “tube house” so long that the street has taken its name. An hour after checking into our hotel, we’re climbing the stairs to claim a scruffy table in the smoky room sardined with foreigners and decorated with a mix of cheap china and plaster of paris Buddhas. There’s just one dish — cha ca (fried fish) — and it’s brought almost as soon as you sit down and specify beer or soda. The bite-sized bits of mild white fish sizzle away in turmeric-scented oil on a black iron brazier over glowing coals. (That’s why the room is so smoky.) The dish is served with bowls of dill and scallion to toss into the pan, plus a thatch of cool noodles and tiny saucers of peanuts and chiles. 14 Cha Ca St.; 84-4/825-3929; lunch for two $10, no credit cards. 

          The two of us love food alleys and tiny shops like Dac Kim (1 Hang Manh St.; no phone; lunch for two $10), specializing in barbecue pork with crab spring rolls, or Banh Cuon Nong (17 Cha Ca St.; no phone; lunch for two $10) for delicate meat-and-mushroom-filled crêpes. But if you’ve just arrived and your innards haven’t had time to acclimate, there are safer alternatives. At Spices Garden, which opens into the courtyard of the Hotel Sofitel Metropole, a trio of women in country headdresses and long purple skirts dish up traditional street food to order. One slivers a chicken thigh for my bowl of pho. Another barbecues pork patties only slightly more gentrified and less greasy than the ones at our favorite bun cha parlor. Salads are especially delicious here, all crunch and tangled flavors: banana flower, seaweed, green papaya, shrimp with rice noodles. Sticky-rice desserts are an acquired taste, but before you reach instead for a slice of apple tart or coconut cake as chewy as a candy bar, do try pomelo in coconut cream. I wish I’d eaten two. 15 Mgo Quyen St.; 84-4/826-6919; lunch for two $25.

          Tamarind Café is vegetarian, but the fierce carnivore with whome I travel isn’t suffering at all in this handsome oasis of wicker furniture and terracotta tile. Here you can sip a cappuccino and eat fruit crumble or banana crêpes, linger to read a whole novel or write one, and listen to the Beatles or the sound track of Pulp Fiction. Steven loves everything we eat and so do I — pineapple-ginger smoothie, wonderful taro spring rolls, and savory “Veggy Babels” (towers of vegetables and pineapple fried tempura-style) with sticky-rice triangles, each plate a careful still life. Both times we drop by — late for lunch, early for dinner — the cozy booths in the handsomely lit back room are empty. Visitors doing the 36 Streets tour will be happy to find it. 80 May May St.; 84-4/926-0580; lunch for two $10.

          After a week of total immersion in spring rolls comes a moment when nothing will do but a juicy burger or a real Caesar salad. The Press Club Deli is that taste of home, only much cheaper and maybe better. The $4.50 prix fixe lunch includes soup, the sandwich of the day, a bottomless Coke, coffee, and house-baked cookies. Swift and savvy servers in black pajamas and silk ao dais tote tuna salad on crisp baguettes, authentic Reubens, and serious burgers and fries. Name your cravings: Greek or salade niçoise, a Middle Eastern meze plate, lasagna, salmon and cream cheese on a toasted bagel, Coney Island hot dogs, New York cheesecake, or breakfast any hour of the day. Upstairs, at the Press Club Restaurant, a star chef from California named Donald Berger does rather expensive new American fusion for the town’s diplomatic crops. Join the Friday happy hour if you want to mingle with a gaggle of expats. 58A Ly Thai St.; 84-4/934-0888; lunch for two downstairs $15, dinner for two at the restaurant $75.

          Fleeing the aggressive quartet churning out traditional Vietnamese music at Sunday’s dim sum buffet in the Nikko Hotel, we hop a cab and discover how much better dumplings can be when they’re cooked to order in the serenity of Peach Garden, in the Meritus Westlake Hotel. Graceful waitresses in silken peach tunics and pajamas deliver crabmeat dumplings in superior soup, shrimp and crystal-shrimp dumplings, pork ribs in black bean sauce, steamed pork buns Shanghai-style, and, finally, a trio of noodle soups. Everything is fresh, hot, and really delicious, for only $8. Our guest, an old Hanoi hand, is impressed that we — newly back in town — were the ones to discover this hidden gem. 1 Thanh Nie Rd.; 84-4/823-8888; $16 for two.

          If you want to feel rich and colonial surrounded by carved mahogany, silk cushions, and lush roses, join the crowd at Emperor. Not far from the Metropole, it’s where the hotel’s concierge will send you (and where the embassy crowd takes affluent guests). It’s a safe place to drink a margarita, and I suspect that the typical client, wowed by the Raffles-like setting, is not unhappy with the food. But I find the kitchen inconsistent. Our seafood rolls are Mrs. Paul’s fish stick look-alikes. A lively beef salad makes the insipid green-papaya salad seem even wimpier. And so it goes. Still hungry, we try the steamed garupa, a mild fish in “slightly dark sauce,” suggested by our waitress: it’s a winner. 18B Le Thanh Tong St.; 84-4/826-8801; dinner for two $40. 

          Most of the grander temples of Vietnamese cooking waffle foolishly, trying to please timid tourist tastes. Not Cay Cau, off the lobby of the boutique Desoloya Hotel. The kitchen is poky and the server is sassy, but all’s forgotten when salads arrive, deliciously crowned with nuts and shallot crisps: goi buoi Cay Cau (grapefruit), goi ga bap chuoi (chicken with banana flower), goi bmuc sot mam me (squid with pineapple), and goi rau muong bo (beef with bindweed, a kind of green). Our friend, the savvy Hong Kong woman who led us there, touts the sensational cua rang me, crab painted with sticky tamarind. Chicken with lemon leaves is a miracle of moistness. For me a day without eggplant is like day without ice cream: tonight it takes the form of pork-stuffed eggplant and a side of mustard greens stir-fried with garlic. 17A Tran Hung Dao St.; 84-4/933-1010; dinner for two $20.

          Wandering in and out of the stylish stores near St. Joseph Cathedral, we stumble on our beloved sandwich shop, No Noodles, relocated to a spiffy and spotless storefront. I sublimate my shopper’s cravings for a more primal need: an unusually crusty baguette stuffed to overflowing with richly mayoed tuna and thick, chewy bacon. Steven demolishes smoked beef with tomato, lettuce, and mustard. A week later, while stuck packing for the next day’s 6 a.m. flight, I find No Noodles’ card in my wallet — “Eat In, Take Away, Delivery” — and call to order: chicken club for me, more smoked beef for Steven. Amazingly, there is no language hurdle and our supper arrives by motor scooter at the hotel’s front desk in exactly 15 minutes — for $4. Nha Chung St.; 84-4/928-5969; open 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

          Only a two-hour flight from Hanoi, this frenetic metropolis (officially Ho Chi Minh City) seems a world away in style and attitude. Faster, bigger, brasher, more aggressively cosmopolitan than its northern counterpart, Saigon is a hodgepodge of modern development; its anonymously posh hotels could be anywhere in the world. Not that I deny the appeal of skyscrapers, neon, or even platinum blond perms, but when I travel, it’s in the hope of finding foreign lands uncorrupted.

          Old Saigon may have gasped its last, but its traditional cuisine is still vibrantly alive and well. The city’s affluence and climate have always shown in its cooking, which is lighter, more diverse, and spicier that Hanoi’s. Vietnam’s ubiquitous nuoc nam (fish sauce) has more power in the south. Exotic fruits from the Mekong Delta fill the markets, and the greens and leaves are more varied than anywhere else in the country. Steven and I seek out vestiges of the old city, like sprawling, chaotic Cholon, Vietnam’s biggest Chinatown, and Binh Tay market, where foodie friends send us for sensational seafood noodle soups and dumplings from a street stall. We grab two stools and point. Here are four more of my favorite meals in Saigon:

          Upscale restaurants in Vietnam must have music, it seems — high-pitched, atonal, and usually intrusive. I normally cringe and look for th exit. But the three young graces wresting dissonant chords from ancient instruments in the pleasant, brightly lit dining room at Song Ngu Seafood Restaurant (70-72 Suong Nguyet Anh St., District 1; 84-8/832-5217; dinner for two $20) are reasonably subdued. So we stay for some of the best seafood I’ve tasted in Saigon: steamed curls of squid with ginger and garlic, crabs in tamarind, crisp-fried squid with deep-fried onion rings and herbs, ethereal Saigon shrimp rolls to be wrapped with mint and basil and lettuce, and “drunken shrimp” (marinated in wine) in the shell.

          Stop by the stylish Temple Club (29-31 Ton That Thiep St., District 1; 84-8/829-9244; dinner for two $20) and take tea on the veranda, sink into a big leather club chair for an aperitif and a snack, or stay for a Vietnamese dinner. After dark, candlelit miniature ceramic elephants line the path from a Hindu temple across to this vintage guesthouse, an oasis of nostalgia where businessmen and expats share martinis with affluent saigonnais.

          Our friends in Saigon were happy to join us at Asian Reflections (19 Lam Son Square, District 1; 84-8/823-4999; dinner for two $22), atop the Caravelle Hotel. This is about as suave as service gets in Vietnam. I was won over by the appetizers — salmon tartare with smoked salmon; spiced and blackened ahi tuna; Szechuan-pepper-seared beef salad with lotus stems — followed by Shanghai-style duck with a pineapple-kaffir lime glaze and macademia nut-crusted softshell crabs. Fusion fans should not miss it.

          Noodle soup — or pho — is the local breakfast of champions. And now there is Pho 2000 (1-3 Phan Chi Trinh, District 1; 84-8/823-4294; lunch for two $4), a spacious, no-frills canteen inspired by McDonald’s, where a swift-moving crew in pink polo shirts and baseball caps serve up big bowls of soup, spring rolls on vermicelli, all sorts of rice dishes, and fresh fruit shakes (most items cost less that $1). President Clinton’s visit in 2000 is memorialized in photos on the wall. Apparently, his culinary appetites went beyond doughnuts and french fries.