THENASTYBITS (25 page)

I love Vietnam. Maybe it's a pheromonic thing. Like when you meet the love of your life for the first time, and she just, somehow, inexplicably
smells
and
feels
right. You sense that given the opportunity, this is the woman you want to spend the

rest of your life with. I'm in town an hour, and I'm already tipsy, delighted, giggly, and elated. In the gray afternoon, beyond the curb, passing vignettes of beauty and color, the usual mad patterns of two-wheeled traffic miraculously weaving through crowded yet fast-moving streets. It's a gray city, Hanoi, old French Colonial architecture, grim socialist monoliths, ornate pagodas, the ultra-narrow multistory and at times wackily ornate new homes of the new not-so-underground economy. The infamous
crachin
of February, a constant spitting mist, has not officially begun, but it is chilly and drizzling ever so slightly. "Good luck for Tet," Linh assures me. The rain and the monochrome of the old city seem only to highlight the supersaturated colors of the flags, banners, clothes, and packages everywhere.

Tomorrow, I'm to be the guest of Linh and family at their New Year's celebration, but today, I'm anxious to get out there and eat. The show I'm in town to shoot is all about Linh, his family food, his local haunts, his favorite places. So after dropping off my luggage at the Metropole, I soon find myself sitting in Hanoi's Old Quarter, hungrily slurping down a bowl of
bun cha.

"I eat here every day," says Linh with pride. "Sometimes twice a day."

An old man grills morsels of pork and pork meatballs over a small, homemade charcoal grill (the
cha)
on the sidewalk, turning the meat with bamboo splints, small plumes of smoke issuing from the glowing coals as juice from the meat strikes them. Just inside an open-to-the-street storefront, his wife ladles out bowls of a room-temperature mixture of vinegar,
nuoc mam,
green papaya juice, sugar, pepper, garlic, and chili, with sliced cucumber at the bottom. The still-sizzling meat hits the table with a bowl of the "soup," accompanied by a plate of lettuces, sweet basil, mint, cilantro, and raw vegetables; side plates of sliced red chilies, salt, pepper, and lime; and a big plate of cold rice noodles. First you drop some pork into the soup, the meat issuing a thin slick of juice into the liquid; then, grabbing a bit of green and herb and a healthy ball of cold noodles, you dunk and slurp.

The place is dark and grim, the floor streaked with charco and littered with the detritus of Vietnamese post-lunch-rus' papers, cigarette butts, empty beer bottles. (Vietnamese litter with abandon, but then clean up scrupulously afterward.) The cooking equipment is rudimentary, the chopsticks look decades old, but the
bun cha
is an amazement: sweet, sour, meaty, crunchy, forceful yet clean-tasting and fresh, with just the right amount of caramelization and flavor from the low-temperature grilling. The cold rice noodles separate perfectly when dipped in the liquid, as they should in any good
bun cha,
I'm told. The proprietor puts down two more plates, fried spring rolls and puffy fried shrimp cakes, also good to dip when the pork runs out.

I begin to understand Linh's passion for the place and why, on his lunch hour, he travels across town to eat here.

By Hanoi's West Lake, families pull up on their scooters am crowd into the temple of Chau Quoc on a spit of land extending out into the water. They are here to make offerings to their gods and ancestors, burn incense, reflect, and hope for good luck, good health, and prosperity for the coming year. I'm here to eat
bun oc,
and I've got my eye on a long, low table under a tarpaulin by the water's edge, where an old woman is carefully arranging two kinds of freshwater snails, crabmeat, noodles, and tomatoes in bowls before covering them with steaming hot pork broth. The smell coming off the simmering broth is maddeningly good, and she's doing land-office business with the crowd returning from the pagoda, so even though this is an unscheduled stop, I quickly duck under the tarp, walk bent over at the waist to the table, and scrunch down and try to find someplace for my knees among a large extended family of Vietnamese. Linh, a fellow foodie, just smiles and shakes his head. I catch the old woman's eye, point to the person next to me, already happily slurping down the last of his noodles, and smile. She beams back at me.

When a proprietor or a server smiles proudly at you like that, when locals are clamoring to get at what they're selling, when your fellow diners' expressions mirror your own, you know that good food is on the way. They do fast food right here. The glorious tradition of "one cook, one dish" continues: one lone artisan, or a family of artisans, making the same wonderful dish—and no other—year after year, frequently generation after generation. That kind of close identification with a particular dish—that continuity—is nearly always a guarantee that one can expect something fresh and tasty.

Case in point: A few days later, Linh pulls the car over unexpectedly on the side of a major artery. We head down an embankment to a shabby, litter-strewn neighborhood and proceed down a forlorn-looking alleyway to the smoky back entrance of Luon Nong Ong Tre, the Eel Shop. An open kitchen is heaped with dirty dishes. Two big pots steam on an outdoor charcoal grill. A few hard-drinking Vietnamese men are way over their limit inside, singing and shouting. On worn, brown bamboo matting outside, facing an unpaved intersection of narrow alleyways and disused heavy machinery, are a few low plastic chairs, a ratty umbrella or two, a few wobbly wooden tables. Neighborhood kids, squealing with delight, pick unripe oranges off an anemic-looking tree and hurl them at each other. Linh is rubbing his hands with anticipation.

"What do you eat here?" I inquire.

"Eel," he replies. "This is the Eel Shop. Only eel."

"How did you find this place?" I ask.

"A friend took me here. He knows I like eel—and he heard about it from a friend."

I explain to Linh what the word "foodie" means and he seems very pleased. "Yes," he agrees. "Often, you must go off the road. You must investigate."

As we wait for the food, we watch the comings and goings of the neighborhood, a small, rural village existing in the midst of a major city. A trash collector (a woman, naturally), in peaked round hat, face mask, and gloves, picks up trash bags and piles them onto an overloaded handcart. Bicycles containing improbably balanced display racks of housewares are pedaled slowly

by. Women carry yokes of fresh vegetables and fruit, men sell lottery tickets, a man pulls up on a motorbike to collect spent cooking oil from the eel shop, another takes away edible waste for sale to pig farmers. Aluminum cans are whisked away to makeshift recycling operations, where they are heated in works and stamped on by sandaled feet. The impurities are sold for paint, the metal, of course, reshaped, reformed, reused. Apparently, a number of
viet kieu
(overseas Vietnamese) and the
^:
partners are becoming rather wealthy on the unofficial recyclin, of trash and garbage, prompting, it is said, one Central Committee member to muse chidingly, "We—all of us—always ask only the big questions. It took just one foreigner to ask a small question: 'Where does the garbage go?'"

sauced lightly, and stuffed into lengths of hollow bamboo with garlic. Both ends are plugged with blanched morning glory leaves and the bamboo is charred slowly over the outdoor charcoal grill. The bamboo is then split open lengthwise and served. Ever had
unagi,
the cooked, glazed freshwater eel, at sushi bars? This is better. Tender, flavorful, smoky, sweet, and hearty. We picked the delicate chunks right out of the blackened halves of bamboo, washing it down, of course, with plenty of warm Hanoi beer.

A few days later, I'm back in the Old Quarter. I have to duck my head to get through the low concrete passageway to the home and kitchen of Madame Anh Tuyet and family. Up a steep flight of steps, off with the shoes, and I'm ushered into a typical old Hanoi residence: a living area facing the street, with a small balcony, dining table, vanity mirror in the corner, raised platform in front of the family shrine, which is crowded with photographs of departed loved ones, offerings of flowers, fruit, figurines. Overhead, a sleeping loft, and upstairs, a large, covered but open-to-the-street kitchen where Madame Tuyet and daughters prepare her famous
ca qua quon thit,
snakehead fish stuffed with pork, and
ga nuong mat ong,
a honey-roasted, hacked chicken that has local patrons lining up and down the street when she's open. Madame Tuyet has won numerous gold medals in countrywide culinary competitions, and she proudly shows me her certificates before hurrying to her upstairs kitchen. She fillets the snakehead fish, deep-fries the carcass and head for garnish in a wok full of simmering oil, then sets it aside. She slices the fillets paper thin on the bias, fills them with a ground pork and mushroom mixture as for
paupiettes,
then dips them in batter and deep-fries them before arranging around the now leaping, curved fish body—as if reassembling the creature. Her chicken, which she has butterflied up the breast bone and splayed flat, she slowly roasts in one of a row of small, carbon- and grease-blackened old electric ovens, removing them constantly to shellac with a secret honey-sugar-syrup mixture and covering them periodically with bits of lined white index cards strategically placed to prevent scorching. A daughter effortlessly fills spring rolls with shrimp and pork; fills condiment bowls with chili sauce,
nuoc mam,
vinegar and green papaya, salt, pepper, lime, and chilies. Suddenly there's stir-fried shrimp and vegetables, and spicy beef too, and I'm seated with Linh and the whole family at the dinner table. It being Tet, a
chung
cake is placed center table. No one touches it. Apparently, the
chung
cake is the fruitcake or panettone of Vietnam: gotta have it—but no one really eats it.

We all know by now that Vietnamese food can be great. And I could describe that sensational meal at Madame Tuyet's using all the words you hear so often from travelers returning from Vietnam: fresh, flavorful, vibrant, crunchy, supernaturally bright looking and tasting. But I won't.

Vietnamese food can be great in Texas, or Minneapolis. But Vietnamese food in Vietnam, when outside the window it's Hanoi—a slice of an apartment building with faded, peeling facade just visible across the street; women hanging out laundry; the chatter of noodle and fruit vendors coming from one flight down; the high, throaty vibrations of countless motorbikes; Madame's two daughters giggling upstairs, perhaps laughing about the freakishly tall, unbelievably hungry American who sits

2.01

downstairs, ineptly struggling to eat Mom's still-bone-in chicken with chopsticks—at such times, Vietnamese food tastes even better.

Linh is happy. We're getting into shots of
nep moi
now, the vicious, delicious Hanoi rice vodka, and everybody at the table is in a festive holiday mood. Chris and Lydia finally put down their cameras and join us hungrily at the table. When we are finished with this, there will be tea, and Madame's award-winning blend of fresh roasted coffee, and 555 cigarettes, and Madame's lighter-than-air, crunchy coconut macaroons.

Tonight, as the camera crew and I sit in comfortable rattan chairs at the Bamboo Bar of the drenched-in-history Metropole Hotel, drinking vermouth cassis and reviewing the day's events, we will all smile, and nod silently to one another—maybe uttering an occasional "Oh yeah!" to commemorate the day's events. We know we've got it good. We're happy to be alive. And still in Vietnam.

zoz

DECODING
FERRAN
ADRIA

EVERYBODY WANTS IT.

"It's the most magnificent book you can find—anywhere in the world," says Eric Ripert, chef of Le Bernardin in Manhattan. He's talking about Spanish chef Ferran Adria's mammoth cookbook
El Bulli 1998-2002,
the first of three volumes that will track backward the development of recipes and procedures at the famed Spanish three-star restaurant. Currently available only in Spanish and Catalan, costing about one hundred seventy-five euros and weighing in at nearly ten pounds (with its accompanying guidebook and CD-ROM), it seems more the mysterious black monolith in
2001: A Space Odyssey
than a cookbook. It is also the most talked-about, sought-after, wildly impressive and intimidating collectible in the world of professional chefs and cookbook wonks. If you're a hotshot chef, even if you can't read it, every minute without it is misery.

Science-fiction and space-travel metaphors come up frequently when discussing it. "There's no cookbook like it. I love the fact that it's like
Star Wars,"
says Wylie Dufresne, an unabashed fan of Adria whose WD-50 menu in New York was unapologetically created under the controversial Catalonian chef's influence. "He's going
backward^"
(The next book will cover the years 1994 to 1997.) "We're all looking at Spain. And Adria's ground zero."

For years now, I'd been hearing from chef friends about their experiences at El Bulli. Some, like Sydney's Tetsuya Wakuda, had clearly had life-changing experiences. (He immediately s about designing an upstairs "laboratory/workshop" along t' lines of Adria's.) Others, like Scott Bryan of Veritas, wer dazzled but confused by the experience.

"It was . . . like . . .
shock value.
I had
seawater sorbetV
Y
been gaping with a mixture of fear and longing at The Book fo some months when I finally decided I was way past due. The was a massive, shameful, and gaping hole in my culina education. There were things I needed to know. It was tin to investigate the matter.

Ferran Adria sat at a small table in the closet-size back roo of Jamonisimo, an Iberico ham shop in Barcelona. He was nearl vibrating with enthusiasm as he held a thin slice of Salamanc ham in his hands and rubbed it slowly on his lips. At exactl blood temperature, the wide layer of white fat around the lea turned translucent, then melted to liquid. "See! See!" he e claimed. We had already polished off a bottle of Cava, sever glasses of sherry, a plate of tiny, unbelievably good tinne Galician clams, some buttery also-straight-from-the-can toro-quality tuna from Basque country, some anchovies—and numerous tastings of hand-cut Extremadura and Salamanca ham. The man generally thought of as the most innovative
an
^J
influential chef in the world was not turning out to be th detached, clinical, mad scientist I'd expected. This guy like food. He liked to eat. And he neatly linked the "scientific approach of some of his cooking to simple pleasure: "What' wrong with science?" he asked. "What's wrong with transform ing food?" He held up another slice of ham between his finger" "The making of ham is a 'process.' You 'transform' pork. Iberic ham is better than pork. Good sherry is better than the grapes it' made with."

At El Bulli Taller, Adria's laboratory/workshop in a restore Gothic palace in Barcelona's old quarter, metal shutters rolled up to the touch of a button to reveal a panoply of gadgets an utensils. A worktable slid back to uncover an induction stov top. Cabinets opened, displaying an impressive hyperorganize