Well-balanced meals
As the Introduction to Vietnam and Hue says, of the countless Vietnamese dishes, there are about 1300 dishes specific to Hue. Of these about 700 are popular among the Hue people. There are three ingredients almost always used in cooking: fish sauce, salt, and shrimp paste. Spices are used in everything, and one dish may have up to 15 spices. The three popular ingredients that form the basis of most ordinary Hue dishes are salted fish, fresh vegetables, and sweet soup. Every dish also requires a different sauce or broth. For example banh nam and banh loc (two kinds of rice cakes in green leaves) are eaten with salty fish sauce, but banh beo and banh uot are eaten with sweet fish sauce. The definitive cookbook is Thuc Pho Bach Thien, by Ms. Truong Thi Bich and Ms. Hoang Thi Kim Cuc, which lists about 600 recipes and dishes.
After trying out twenty or so restaurants in Hue, we settled on five where we regularly ate. The first was the Century Riverside breakfast buffet. The Century Riverside, with its American name, seemed to attract a primarily Asian and Pacific rim clientele. Vietnamese businessmen, Vietnamese families, bus tours from Thailand, Japanese and French tours, some Australians, all joined us for breakfast. Because we stayed at the hotel for ten weeks, with a separate, hand-dated card turned in at each breakfast, we saw all the activity of the hotel at one time or another. Sometimes we ate alone. Sometimes there were over a hundred people from a tour bus. For breakfast, we ate western food (cereal and bread rather than rice porridge), although my favorite day starters were watermelon, dragon fruit and rambutans, followed by crepes with no filling other than a banana honey mixture. The coffee was, by American standards, very strong, although it was neither Vietnamese nor French coffee in either the beans or the preparation.
The second restaurant we frequented was the Bode Restaurant, named for the Bode tree found in front. The restaurant is located on Le Loi, directly across the street from the LRC, and almost every working day we ate lunch there. We typically had noodle soup or pho, with banh uot, and Vietnamese green tea. The restaurant opened almost on the same day we started working in the LRC in early June, and has become well known for its good vegetarian food. It expanded steadily throughout the summer, adding two outdoor eating areas, absorbing a photo shop, adding a cash register, rejecting the cash register, dressing the wait staff in áo dais, rejecting the áo dais, and in general showing the growing pains of a new and overly successful restaurant. The food was consistently good. We ordered almost the same meal every day, despite the many choices of food at the Bode, but there was a certain variety in what was actually served. We finished the meals with coffee, served Vietnamese style, with ice and in my case condensed milk.
When we could not make it to the Bode, we had lunch at the Tinh Tam, a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant closer to the hotel. When we first saw the menu, we were surprised by entries such as “Beef,” “Chieken,” “Venison with rice,” “Ears,” and “Small Intestines.” We inquired of the waiter and discovered that all was tofu. Later, Patrick made a foray to the supermarket and reported that tofu shaped and spiced as pseudo-meat was popular. The tofu beef looked like beef, the tofu ears resembled ears, and so on. I usually had beef.
Our favorite dinner restaurant was the Club Garden, located on Vo Thi Sau street. It is the best of a class of upscale, classic Vietnamese cuisine restaurants, and the dinners were comparatively expensive ($6-7 per meal). There we had fish in a clay pot, sautéed mixed vegetables, squid, shellfish, tofu and various sauces, and a flaming banana in Vietnamese rice wine for dessert. The fish was spectacularly good, and always fresh (alive) when we arrived. Despite obvious differences in the fish from day to day, it was consistently translated as mackerel. There were numerous other restaurants serving similar dishes, but the Club Garden was the best. The beer was Huda, a joint venture of Hue and Denmark (hence the name), and a quick guide to restaurant prices was the Huda index, the price of a bottle of beer. At the Club Garden, Huda was 12,000 VND or $.75, toward the high end of the index.
Finally, for a light dinner we would eat at the Tay Nguyen. It was an outdoor restaurant, with an indoor section where we had dinner for the students early in the summer. On one side of the restaurant were two tennis courts, packed with doubles teams and enthusiastic spectators from 4:00 – 8:00 every evening. The tennis was a joy to watch, because it appeared that every player had been exposed to the same 1960s style coaching. No two-hand backhands, no heavy top spin; instead everything was chip and charge, take the net, and bang away with overheads. On the other side of the Tay Nguyen was the Perfume River, with the green, blinking, neon Huda sign dominating the far shore. The Tay Nguyen could handle a wedding of 1100 or lost westerners eating alone. The menu was also classical Vietnamese cuisine, with few western compromises. There was no coffee after the meal, for example, but the Huda index stood at 7,000 VND. The fish, turtles and eels were available for inspection in the nearby tank. At the Tay Nugyen I had my first and last meal in Hue.
Food in Hue balances yin and yang or hot and cold in the body. Heat is balanced by cold, and Vietnamese dishes strive for balance. Food may be internally balanced or it may balance the body, like medicine. Hue is a wet climate, so Hue food is often hot and bitter. As the Introduction to Hue and Vietnam says, the body must balance hot and cold. Chicken, pork and beef are eaten in the winter because they are hot. Duck is eaten in the summer because it is a cold meat. Hot is the taste of yin, so it must be moderated by something sour. Chili is served with lemon. These distinctions were explained to us at a wonderful meal at China Beach in DaNang with Nga, Hung, and Phuc, where we had seafood and fish, in general cold foods, but finished with watermelon because it is a hot food. Balanced food encourages a balanced body and a balanced outlook.
