At a street kitchen, everything is literally done on the sidewalk… the prepping, the cooking, the serving, the eating and the cleaning. They are usually operated by an entire family, and often they are located right in front of the family’s home. Sometimes they spill over into the family’s downstairs living area, which in that case is open to the sidewalk as well but most of the activity still takes place outside. That may sound unsanitary but I’ve seen the inner guts of restaurant kitchens in Europe and America and quite frankly, I prefer the open sidewalk where at least I can see what’s going on.
These are also the best places to find Vietnamese food that hasn’t been watered down for sensitive Western palates. The food at street kitchens is so authentic the proprietors are surprised when a Westerner sits down at one. The dish of the day is as likely to contain blood cake or tendon tripe as it is to contain beef steak and they know that most of us are not into that kind of stuff.
It’s risky to eat at a street kitchen. It’s not easy to tell just by looking whether a grill is cooking up pork or dog. Can you tell the difference between beef balls and chopped cow’s testicles when they’re bobbing below the surface of your soup? I can’t. Translation is everything. But I don’t want to be so squeamish that I miss out on the real tastes of Vietnam, either. I proceed with caution when eating street food but I do eat it, and gradually I discover some ways to figure out where my meals come from and make sure they stay where they belong after I eat them.
Most street kitchens have only one thing on the menu. That’s good for us foreigners because translators are scarce. We wouldn’t know what to do with options if we had them, anyway. Because everything is cooked outside, it’s easy to study the ingredients before, during and after the cooking process. It’s also easy to check out the final product on people’s plates. The most important thing I learn is simply to trust my instincts. If something looks and smells appetizing, like the perfectly seasoned flame grilled white meat I find near the corner of Hang Bac and Hang Be in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, it will probably taste good, too.
Depending on my mood, I usually want to know what kind of white meat it is before eating it. Only slightly less important than instinct, then, is vocabulary. I learn to recognize (but not necessarily pronounce) a few critical words of Vietnamese: thịt bò (beef), thịt heo (pork), gà (chicken), thịt cay (dog), hải sản (seafood). That still doesn’t tell me what part of the animal is being served, or whether the hải sản still has its eyeballs attached, but it’s a start. At least I know which categories I want to avoid altogether… gà because I’m not sure whether I need to worry about bird flu, and thit cay because I have a hard time seeing dogs as anything other than companions.
Considering this is a Communist country, people have a surprising amount of freedom here. They can smoke where they want, drink where they want, ride their motorbikes on the sidewalk, set off fireworks in the park. They can go into business for themselves just because they think they’re good at something. As long as they don’t piss off the police, which means they may have to pay a few people off here and there, they can pretty much do whatever they want. Live and let live.
They are also free to get themselves in trouble, and that includes tourists. No signs warn pedestrians about cracks in the street. No one forces drivers to wear their seatbelts. And diners won’t be suing anyone if they get sick from the thịt bò. It pays to take a moment to check out the cooking methods as well as the ingredients. Whatever it is I’m proposing to eat, I want it well done. This is no time for rare meat… I want it thinly sliced and flame broiled before my eyes. If there is broth involved I want to see steamy hot pots of boiling liquid… the health guides suggest ten minutes to kill most bacteria that might be in the water and twenty to kill the cysts that cause amoebic dysentery. That’s not usually a problem because the broth pot at most street kitchens has been boiling all morning and soups are served piping hot.
Once I’ve found something that gets my taste buds going and doesn’t look like it will turn my stomach later on, I resist the urge to get creative. I probably don’t know how it’s supposed to be eaten anyway so I just find someone who seems to be working on a complete set and point to it with a hand gesture that says, “I’d like some of that, please.” So easy.
Finally, since the Vietnamese don’t seem to understand the Western aversion to water, I tactfully pat dry any damp green leaves or other raw vegetables with a tissue. Fresh greens are everywhere here, and such a part of the food that it would be a shame not to eat them. In Huong’s or Van’s kitchen I know it’s safe to eat vegetables still moist from the tap water they were washed in because their tap water is run through a purifier. Anywhere else, and especially at a street kitchen, I play it safe. I probably look ridiculously paranoid while I pat my greens dry but it works. I haven’t had so much as a tummy gurgle since arriving almost three weeks ago.
The best part of eating at a street kitchen is the flavor. A close second is the atmosphere. And a close third is the price. Breakfast is a big bowl of hot noodle soup with various kinds of meat, served with coffee, baguette and bottled water, and I’m out the door for 15,000 dong. Less than a dollar. Lunch at the grill is a little more, maybe 20,000 with a cold beer. Dinner is 27,000. One could eat well here for less than $5 a day. I write my friend Kris a letter over a bowl of flame grilled pork with rice noodles. Under a bowl of pork with noodles, I should say, since the letter acts more or less as a placemat and the fact that I am eating while I write it lends it atmosphere that Kris, a gastronome, will appreciate.
Writing a letter is like hanging out with a good friend. I write email, too, but email is just words. Communication is about more than words. For me it is at least as much about physical presence and I can’t get that from an email. When I miss the companionship of someone, writing a letter is the thing that brings her, or him, closest to me.
Like my voice in conversation, my handwriting reveals my mood… fast and sloppy when I am excited, the ink thin and dry because my pen can’t keep up. Slow, neat and bold when the thoughts come more leisurely. I pause now and then as things distract me and may digress to comment on them. Writing to Kris, I can imagine her answers, hear the tone of her laugh when I make a catty remark about the woman at the next table, and it all makes her presence palpable, as if she were right there breaking blotted green leaves over her pork, too, even though she’s really half a world away.
When Kris reads my pork-stained letter, she’s not just reading words, she’s noticing the smudges where my hand, damp with humid tropical air, rested on the page. She’s smelling the cigarette smoke so thick it permeated the paper I wrote on. She’s noticing the texture of my Vietnamese stationery, the brightly colored stamp with strange words on it that stood out among the bills and advertising slop in her mailbox.
Writing a letter is a tactile act. My hand holds the pen, warms the ink… if I’m writing to someone I’m intimate with my mind wanders to the last time that same hand felt his thigh buried in the warmth of my own familiar blankets. I remember the way he smelled and the way we made love the night before I left. I imagine his hands when he reads my words, passing over the same warm ink, the same paper, passing over a piece of me that appeared in his mailbox.
Email is fast but it is just words. I can’t send an embrace, or the aura of a Vietnamese street kitchen, by email. I can’t feel the presence of a person I miss. Sometimes traveling alone just gets lonely, and for me, writing a letter is the only cure.
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