A Cook's Tour (35 page)

     Nice curl on the waves. No reason at all for Charlie not to surf. I’m sure he must – somewhere. Some American soldier must have left an old longboard behind. There must be a Vietnamese surfer somewhere. Next time, I’ll check Da Nang. I stay in the water for a long time, finally coming back ashore, to find Linh, stripped to his undershorts, energetically jogging down the beach, doing calisthenics, looking as happy as I’ve seen him. He smiles at me and charges into the surf. The women have given up on us. Now they just sit and watch, without much interest.

     Progress has certainly passed this village by. I can’t imagine what must happen during the rainy season, when it can pour for weeks and weeks without pause. That ditch must become a torrent. The houses – already tilting on broken stilts and crumbling into the water – must flood. The roofs and walls, such as they are, can in no way keep out the rain. I see no animals, no crops or gardens. Other than the lone
thung chai
, there are no boats. I ask Linh later, ‘Who are these people? How do they live?’

     ‘Very poor people,’ he says. ‘Fishermen families.’

     When we’ve finished up, it’s back to the leaky launch. The trip to the boat is pretty dicey: straight into the surf, water up to our shins, waves crashing over the bow. There are open spaces between the planks, and I can’t see how we’re staying afloat. Aft, one man furiously yanks a single oar back and forth, propelling us into the waves.

Hon Mieu, only a few miles away, is a completely different story. I can see another village of low ramshackle structures on the shore, but the bay is filled with tourist boats and water taxis, fishing vessels and
thung chais
, women shuttling visitors to shore. As we draw closer and tie up alongside another large water taxi, I can make out a strip of waterfront restaurants. Crowds of Vietnamese tourists fill long tables on their raised decks.

     ‘This way,’ says Dongh. Linh, Lydia and I follow, climbing from boat to boat across the bay until we come to a series of large floating docks, a maze of pitching, rocking walkways built around square openings that have been sealed underneath with fishing net. A whole enterprise floating a mile out to sea. Boats are tied up, fishmongers argue over prices, and customers cluster around large underwater pens containing the most astonishing array of live seafood. I stand there in bare feet, trying to keep my balance with the rise and fall of the planks beneath me, looking at enormous squid and cuttlefish, a pen filled with thrashing tuna, grouperlike fish, sea bream, and fish I’ve never seen before. Giant prawns, huge blue-and-yellow spiny lobsters, and crabs scuttle about just below the surface, awaiting my selection. I kneel down, reach underwater, and pull out a three- or four-pound lobster. Linh picks out some squid and some tuna while Dongh makes arrangements for our transport to shore. Lydia and I walk out to the end of a swaying collection of planks and climb very carefully into a
thung chai
; the two women in charge show us just where to sit, indicating that we should balance on the narrow lip, to best distribute our weight. Linh and Dongh take another boat in.

     It seems like the most poorly designed vessel ever dreamed of. Absolutely spherical, like big Ping-Pong balls sawed in half and thrown into water, the boats bob and pitch with every move inside or out, threatening to toss one into the sea at any moment. One woman paddles, leaning ahead over the side, while another, directly opposite her on the other side of the boat’s circumference, paddles in the opposite direction. Back and forth, back and forth, in a zigzag pattern to shore. I take an immediate liking to my skippers, two ruddy-looking ladies in the standard conical hats, which are tied tightly by sashes under their chins. They chatter cheerfully all the way in. As we disembark, carefully, very carefully, standing up and stepping onto a slippery dock, everyone remaining in the boat has to move around quickly to compensate for the changing distribution of weight.

     In one of those magic moments that makes you want to hug the whole world, when Dongh (landlubber from town) and Linh (Hanoi city boy in nice white shirt) try to leave their little round basket boat, Dongh loses his footing and pitches face-forward onto the dock, nearly capsizing the boat – and just escaping a good knock on the head. All the women burst out laughing. From other boats nearby, people hoot and tease, really enjoying Dongh’s embarrassment. It goes on for a long time, all of us laughing hysterically. Every time any of us catch another’s eye, it starts again. One of those rare crosscultural moments where one realizes we’re not that different after all.

     Right next to the dock, up a few slimy wooden steps, a cook from the Hai Dao restaurant gravely examines the sea creatures we’ve brought and then weighs them on a scale. One pays for one’s dinner by weight. Seated at a large uncovered table, Dongh, Linh, and I are soon joined by the pilot of our water taxi. At Linh’s urging, we order a bottle of Nep Moi, Hanoi vodka. A waiter approaches with my lobster, still kicking, holds it over a glass, and thrusts a short knife into its sexual organs. A transluscent, slightly milky white liquid pours out – and is quickly mixed with the vodka.

     ‘
Ruou tiet tom hum
. . . lobster blood,’ Linh volunteers. ‘Makes you strong.’

     The Hai Dao is packed with customers, every table filled with enthusiastic Vietnamese families chowing down, some visiting from America, some vacationing from Hanoi and Saigon. Everywhere, there is the sound of those plastic packages of cold towels popping, the floor littered with discarded lobster shells, cracked crab claws, fish bones, cigarette butts, rolling beer bottles.

     Food starts to arrive at our tables:
tom hum nuong
, my lobster, grilled over a wood fire;
muc huap
, steamed squid with ginger and scallions;
ca thu xot ca chau
, tuna braised in tomato and cilantro;
banh da vung
, rice cakes studded with sesame seeds, in a bundt mold-shaped hot pot over a little gas burner at the center of the table;
mi canh ca
, a sweet-and-sour soup of fish, noodles, tomato, onion, cilantro, pineapple, and scallion, and a few humongous green crabs, overstuffed with roe. It is the perfect setting for a damn near perfect meal. I am now totally indoctrinated to the casual Vietnamese dining experience. I love the way you garnish and season your own food: the ground black pepper and lime wedges you mix together into a paste and dip your food into, the dipping sauces and fish sauce with chili paste, the little plates of tiny green and red peppers, the bottles of soy, the plates of chopped cilantro and scallions.

     Dongh has made it his personal mission to make sure I fully enjoy every scrap of Nha Trang’s bounty. He refuses to let me touch the lobster or the crab until he’s tunneled through every claw and spindly leg and removed every micron of meat. When he lifts off the carapace of a jumbo-sized green crab, he beams at me as he points out the beautiful, fantastically plump roe, the crab backs swimming with delicious fat.

     We eat with chopsticks. We eat with our hands. We smoke between courses. We smoke during courses. We drink vodka and beer, scattering our refuse all over the table, like everyone else. The food is wonderful. Nothing but happy faces as far as I can see, children and grandfathers avidly sucking the last bits of meat out of crab legs and lobsters, picking out the good stuff from between fish bones.

     I am ecstatically happy. I love it here. I love this country. I consider, for the fifth or sixth time at least, defecting.

     What else do I need? Great food. The South China Sea’s beautiful beaches. An exotic locale. An element of adventure. People so proud, so nice, and so generous that I have to keep a cover story on tap, should a cabdriver or shopkeeper invite me to his home for dinner (bankrupting himself in the process). It’s a wonderland of food and cooking. Everybody has an opinion. Linh, naturally, says the best food in Vietnam is in Hanoi. Dongh sneers dismissively and argues for Nha Trang. They have definite opinions in Can Tho. And Saigon speaks for itself. To the Saigonese, North Vietnam is a joke – unfriendly, uninteresting, filled with stuck-up idealogues who underseason their food. Anyplace where everybody feels so strongly about their particular community, their cuisine, and their cooks, you know you’re going to eat well. I could live here. And it smells good. I’ve already come to like the odor of durian and fermenting fish sauce, promising, as they do, untold delights, constant reminders that yes, yes, I’m in Vietnam! I’m really in Vietnam!

     But TV makes its own rules. When I get back to the Bao Dai Villas, still reeling from the feast, they’re preparing something for me in the kitchen. Chris is still out of the game for a while. (In coming weeks, he became thin and pale, unable to eat, constantly feeling ill.) But Lydia has arranged for a meal of the dreaded bird’s nest soup.

     ‘You’ve been dreaming of bird’s nest soup,’ she begins.

     ‘No, I haven’t,’ I say, interrupting her. ‘I don’t give a fuck about bird’s nest soup. I thought this was settled . . . I’m absolutely stuffed. I’m feeling a little seasick from the trip back. Please don’t ask me to choke down bird’s nest soup. I just had one of the great meals of my life. Don’t ruin it. Please.’

     But Lydia’s like a dog with a bone between its teeth when she gets a concept in mind. She’s shot a lot of odd bits of film, close-ups, kaleidoscopic scenes on ‘progressive scan,’ which she’s convinced, after some additional
Apocalypse Now
-type footage of me lying in bed, shot from behind a slowly revolving ceiling fan, will make hilarious viewing.

     ‘You’ve been dreaming about bird’s nest soup,’ she begins again, undeterred. ‘It’s the dream sequence.’

     Far be it from me to stand in the way of art. I like Lydia. At the end of the day, I always end up doing pretty much whatever she asks. Looks like I’m eating bird’s nest soup. And not just any bird’s nest soup. Bird’s nest soup from the same kitchen that put Chris on his back for the last twenty-four hours.

     What the hell is in bird’s nest soup? Bird’s nest, for one. After cooking, it has the flavor, consistency, and appearance of overcooked angel-hair pasta or cellophane noodles, slightly transluscent and, overall, pretty inoffensive. The chunks are the problem. Bird’s nest soup is made by hacking up a whole rock dove (pigeon), putting the meat, bones and all, into a drained coconut, and then cooking it with the soaked nest, an assortment of Chinese medicinal herbs, dates, scallions, ginger, and the swallow’s eggs. The coconut milk is poured back in and the whole thing is steamed for four hours.

     It’s disgusting. The nest tastes fine. The broth has a sweet-and-sour taste that’s not too bad. But I just am not ready for the chunks. Not after my enormous seafood lunch on the island. Not ever. I struggle with chopsticks to pick my way through all the hard-cooked eggs, slurp strands of nest dutifully, if unenthusiastically, managing to gnaw the meat off a few stringy bits of thigh and breast. But when the pigeon’s head, beak, eyes, and all, comes popping up between the eggs and dates and bones and the rubbery sheets of coconut meat peeling off the shell, I have had enough. Linh and Dongh are digging into theirs as if they, too, have not just wiped out a monster-sized seafood feast. I eat as much as I can and hurry back to my room to lie under the mosquito netting and groan and toss, feeling like I’m going to die.

     Two hours ago, I was dancing on the moon. Now? The horror. The horror.

West Coast

San Francisco, as its residents like to remind you, is nothing like Los Angeles. Anytime a snide, wise-ass New Yorker like myself starts slagging California, someone points out that ‘San Francisco is different.’ It’s pretty. There are hills. Unlike LA, you can, on occasion, actually hail a cab by sticking a hand out in the street. Other than New York, it’s probably got more talented chefs, and a more vibrant culinary scene, than any other American city. A good argument could be made that the whole renaissance in American restaurant cooking emanated outward from San Francisco, starting with Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower. It’s got a shabby, bohemian appeal, a rich tradition of bad behavior, good local ingredients. ‘You’ll love it,’ my friends always told me.

     So how come I can’t fucking smoke? Somewhere north of San Francisco, I was sitting at the bar of a ramshackle roadhouse that, from all appearances, was exactly the sort of place I like. The bartender, ‘Lucky,’ or something like that, is in her fifties. She has a hoarse, rasping voice, two missing teeth, and a tattoo of a winged phallus above her wrinkled left breast. Charlie Daniels plays on the jukebox for a small group of regulars drinking bourbon and rye with beer chasers at ten o’clock in the morning. A chopped Harley sits out front and probably belongs to the guy in the cut-down denim jacket to my left, who offered to sell me crack a few moments ago when we passed each other in the septic bathroom – and I get the general impression that if I were to slide over to the left or the right, buy a few rounds for my fellow citizens, I could probably acquire an illegal handgun or two. This was the sort of place where I could walk over to the jukebox and play a couple of Johnny Cash tunes and nobody would say boo. Hell, they might even like it. This was the sort of place that when Johnny, singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues,’ comes to the line, ‘I shot a man in Reno . . . just to watch him die,’ people will sing along, getting wistful over similar golden moments in their own pasts.

     On my second pint, I was getting into the ambience: the familiar smell of decades of spilled beer, a hint of Lysol, chicken wings in the deep fryer. Somebody down at the other end was drunkenly insisting, ‘I barely touched the bitch! It was a fuckin’ accident! Why she’s gotta go and get a goddamn restraining order!’ – before bursting into tears. I took another sip of beer, reached automatically into my shirt pocket, and fired up a cigarette. Lucky the bartender looked at me as if I’d just taken my pants off and begun soaking myself down with gasoline.