What I like about Vietnamese food is how diverse and interesting it is usually using only a few simple ingredients. One of my favorite dishes is grilled squid with chili lime sauce. The name pretty much tells you all there is to know about it and it's so delicious. Many Vietnamese dishes are served with a sauce on the side and chili lime and chili soy are 2 of the most popular. The chili lime sauce usually consists of salt and black pepper in addition to a fresh chili pepper and a fresh lime wedge which you mix together yourself. I always find myself repeatedly sampling the sauce by itself, never sure if it's considered gauche.
There's one type of Vietnamese food that really stands out and that's Hue (Huế) cuisine originating from the city of the same name in central Vietnam. Hue cuisine was developed to please the pallates of the Nguyen (Nguyễn) royals when Hue was Vietnam's capital from the early 1800's to 1945. I'm sure the French who were controlling Vietnam during that period had some influence on the development of Hue cuisine and it's not difficult to detect the French quality of today's Hue cuisine which emphasises more elaborate preparation and sauces than other Vietnamese cuisine.
In theory Vietnamese food is very healthy. It could and should and probably often is healthy when prepared naturally with quality ingredients. But there's a problem. Actually a few problems. A lot of Vietnamese food is not prepared naturally, a lot of the ingredients are not as natural and as healthy as they could be, and sometimes the environment at restaurants, especially the sidewalk variety, is not so sanitary.
The idea of organic doesn't really exist in Vietnam or at least it's not prevalent. Years ago I imagine all the food in Vietnam was organic by default just as it once was everywhere else in the world. But in Vietnam technology and advances in anything and everything are enthusiastically embraced and this can sometimes be more of a negative than a positive as we all know.
When I go food shopping at any of the local supermarkets I often inadvertantly stumble into what can only be called the aisle of horrors. There it is, shelf after shelf of bags of white powder, quaintly referred to as sweet powder (bột ngọt) in the local dialect. No, it's not cocaine, it's worse, MSG, and it's used liberally and copiously by many of the restaurants in Saigon and Vietnam. Many may not care about its use but for me I just don't like the idea of dumping chemicals into food because someone thinks it makes it taste better and furthermore if I get a large enough of dosage of it it puts me into a semi-comatose state for a few hours.
I knew that MSG was often used in restaurants in Saigon both because of seeing how much of it is for sale in the local supermarkets and because of suffering the aforementioned physical effects numerous times after patronising some restaurants. I brought it up with a Vietnamese friend of mine and she tried to tell me that no, restaurants wouldn't use MSG because sugar is cheaper so they would just use sugar if they wanted to add something to the food to improve the taste. Yeah right, so much for local knowledge. Supermarkets wouldn't dedicate so much shelf space to a product that doesn't sell and it's only used for one purpose.
One of the worst offenders are the numerous 'Office Rice Lunch' joints that permeate the city. These are cheap restaurants catering to the lunchtime Vietnamese office worker market and they're always jammed at lunchtime doling out various rice-based dishes from large steaming pots. I once ate at one of these establishments with 2 Vietnamese friends and enjoyed a rice dish for about $2 US. Wow, what a bargain! But it's not such a bargain when you save a few dollars but then lose 4-5 hours of your life trying not to nod off due to the fuzzy haze your head is immersed in from the overdose of MSG you received. And of course there are undoubtably long-term effects that are not widely known. I'm not aware of any but don't kid myself that they don't exist. In general the cheaper the restaurant the more likely it is they use MSG.
It seems most Vietnamese are immune or oblivious to its effects as I've never heard any of them even so much as mention its existence. Bottom line is that it's good or even necessary for business here. If one joint is using it and getting more customers then there's no doubt that all of them will also use it simpy to stay in business. It's analogous to the 'speaker wars' that sometimes erupt along city streets in Vietnam when a shop blares loud music out onto the sidewalk from speakers placed outside its doors and it somehow apparently draws in customers. Well, it doesn't take long for every shop on the street to engage in the tactic with the easily predicted result of an escalating volume of noise pounding from speakers in an attempt to get more heads to turn in their direction. Eventually it gets so bad that complaints start until eventually the authorities show up to put an end to it.
You can request that your food not be prepared with MSG by saying, or probably better and easier writing and showing, to your server 'Không bột ngọt'. I've done it before but of course you may never know if they actually complied with your wishes. For soups like pho (phở) there's usually nothing that can be done as it likely went in long before.
Recently Vedan, a Taiwanese company, was fined for dumping waste water directly into a waterway in southern Vietnam. What's the product this fine environmentally-conscious enterprise produces? MSG. If anyone can see any redeeming value in this company's existence, please point it out to me.
You can read about the wonderful contributions that Vedan has made to the Vietnamese economy and environment here.
Vedan
So you might already be thinking that the obvious solution to avoiding MSG intake is to simply prepare your own food and I guess you'd be correct about that. But then the next problem with food in Vietnam comes to the fore and that's how it's produced. While there is some regulation and enforcement regarding the use of chemicals such as pesticides in food production in Vietnam I don't have a lot of confidence in its effectiveness. I hope my doubts are misguided and I sincerely hope that there will be more public awareness and demands regarding the safety and healthiness of the food that's produced and served in Vietnam.
The problems don't stop with food, they also appear in Vietnamese beer. This one could all be in my head (one way or the other it is!) but I could swear that when I drink the locally produced Saigon beer, either Red or Green, even if I have only 2 bottles I get a headache the next day and it's not from a low alcohol tolerance. Sometimes it also happens with locally produced Tiger beer whose company is headquartered in Singapore. I've heard rumors that formaldehyde finds its way into some beers here. Again this is all unsubstantiated but I know how I feel and I now stick mostly to locally produced Japanese and European beers that seem to have a higher standard of quality and have yet to cause me any headaches.
When I first arrived in Vietnam I eagerly embraced all the food and drink here but have grown much more cautious and circumspect about it in the 3 years since. I now avoid street food even though I used to laugh at the squeamish tourists who were afraid to try it. I feel my former adventurousness was enough and now find little to justify eating and drinking anything that might be of a dubious source or quality. Sadly, it's difficult (foolhardy?) to believe that anyone is looking out for your best interests here.
The food in Vietnam should and could be more natural and healthy and I continue to hold out hope that the general populace and especially the urban will begin demanding it more.
One of the people that I share the house with that I'm currently living in goes to great time and trouble to buy and prepare almost all his own food. He's a vegetarian so it requires a lot of preparation. He does this at least partly out of concern about the unhealthy food many restaurants serve. Yet this same individual doesn't hesitate to spray Raid around the shared kitchen when he feels he's been seeing too many cockroaches. This strikes me as highly contradictory.
Recently I ate at a hotpot (lẩu) restaurant with a Vietnamese friend and was amazed and a bit taken aback at some of the ingredients that were dumped into our little boiling caldron for our consumption. The 2 most startling were some animal's brain and the bloody fetal ducks cracked directly out of their eggs over the bubbling concoction. The brain belonged to a pig I later was informed by my friend and that along with the aborted ducklings went into her mouth and not mine! Of course I consumed some of all of it by ingesting the rich soup. The fetal duck eggs (vịt lộn) are a popular street food in Vietnam but it's not something I've ever been able to think of as something I want to eat. I like duck and I like duck eggs but just not when they're one and the same!
Recently while visiting a Vietnamese friend who works in a shop, her goofy funny friend admitted that she had eaten cat meat before but never dog. Scruples? I don't know. She said it tasted good.
You see a lot of hotels with this name in Vietnam. It's especially amusing when there are also hourly rates posted outside! In Vietnam, like Japan and other places, 'love hotels' are common as there's often little or no privacy in residences due to the density of people living there. Hồ means lake.
I've always liked this little church on Nguyễn Trãi street in district 1. Note the Westerner sitting in front giving a wave!
