For that kind of money, one can afford to do a lot of drinking at home.
I’m just hoping that, in the future, a night out doesn’t mean you curl up with a gallon jug of Wolfschmitz or a box of wine, turn on the TV, and watch people cooking things on screen that you, yourself, won’t be cooking anytime soon.
On the other hand, this would mean that whatever happens, there will always be work in food porn.
8 Lust
Heavenly wine and roses sing to me when you smile
—LOU REED, “SWEET JANE”
(THE SLOW, BEST VERSION)
It’s Christmastime in Hanoi again and the Metropole Hotel is lit up like an amusement park. In the courtyard, a monstrous white tree with bright red ornamental balls towers over the swimming pool. The decorative palms shine blindingly bright with a million tiny bulbs. I’m on my second gin and tonic and planning on having a third, settled back in a heavy rattan chair and feeling the kind of sorry for myself that most people would be very content with. There’s incense in the air, buffeted about by the slowly moving overhead fans: a sickly-sweet odor that mirrors perfectly my mixed feelings of dull heartache and exquisite pleasure.
I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.
Today, this feeling will disappear the second I’m out the door. Once I’m away from the sight of the other lone Western travelers, each, I imagine, with their own weltschmerz-loaded back story, their own unfulfilled longings, sitting there with their Gerald Seymours and their Ken Follets next to unringing cell phones. After strolling ever so slightly tipsy yet confident through the lobby, the service staff in ao dais and traditional Annanite headgear address me (as they do all the guests) in French: “Bon soir, Monsieur…Ça va?” I’m through the doors, and suddenly the air fills with the roar of a thousand motorbikes and those feelings are gone, replaced by a giddiness, a familiar rush of overwhelming glee at being back in the country I’m crazy in love with.
The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter. To ride in a car would be madness—limiting your mobility to a crawl, preventing you from even venturing down half the narrow streets and alleys where the good stuff is to be found. To be separated from what’s around you by a pane of glass would be to miss—everything. Here, the joy of riding on the back of a scooter or motorbike is to be part of the throng, just one more tiny element in an organic thing, a constantly moving, ever-changing process rushing, mixing, swirling, and diverting through the city’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. Admittedly, it’s also slightly dangerous. Traffic lights, one-way signs, intersections, and the like—the rough outlines of organized society—are more suggestions than regulations observed by anyone in actual practice. One has, though, the advantage of the right of way. Here? The scooter and the motorbike are kings. The automobile may rule the thoroughfares of America, but in Hanoi it’s cumbersome and unwieldy, the last one to the party, a woolly mammoth of the road—to be waited on, begrudgingly accommodated—even pitied—like the fat man at a sack race.
Linh is driving—and I’ve finally, after many hours and many times as his passenger, given up on the strictly Western practice of hanging on. Nobody else does. Not the three-year-old child whipping past me, standing in front of his father and mother. Not grandma, riding side-saddle behind her son-in-law and daughter over there, or the hundreds of thousands of young men and women, chatting on cell phones or exchanging comments from the backs of other bikes. Somehow we all manage to stay aboard without gripping our drivers around the waist or shoulders—or even bracing ourselves from the back. Somehow it all works; we manage to move quickly—sometimes very quickly—through space, together and apart, without flying from our seats or colliding with each other. Thousands, millions of us, a moving conversation of words, glances, gestures, and the shrill honks of our horns with an ever-changing cast of characters snaking through Hanoi’s Old Quarter, around its lakes, weaving through crosscurrents, breaking over and around the bigger, sadder four-wheel vehicles like stones in a river, barely noticing the souls trapped glumly and impatiently inside.
Is anyone in this city over thirty?
It seems not. Statistically, it is said that nearly 70 percent of the population are under that age, and, if the streets of Hanoi (or any city in Vietnam, for that matter) are any indicator, that number seems even higher. Nobody among them remembers the war. They weren’t even alive for it. Much like our post–World War II baby boom, they must have gone straight home from the battlefield and done an awful lot of fuckin’ around here. Everyone—everyone, it seems—is young and either on the way to eat, returning from eating, or eating at this very minute, absolutely choking the sidewalks on low plastic stools, filling the open-to-the-street shop houses, slurping noodles or nibbling on delicious-looking bits, drinking bia hoi, the fresh beer of Hanoi, with varying degrees of joy and seriousness of intent.
My old favorite, bun cha—juicy hunks of pork served in room-temperature, sweet-and-sour green papaya juice—are grilling over charcoal by the curb; bowls of bun oc, the bright, reddish, steaming mix of snails, noodles, and crab roe–infused broth are recognizable from the hunks of fresh tomato on top as I sweep by. Sizzling crepes; banh mi sandwiches—crunchy baguettes overloaded with headcheese, delightfully mysterious pâté, pickles, and, often, a fried egg; bun bo Hue—a sort of heartier, more highly testosteroned version of pho (noodles heaped with slices of beef and pork); slabs of blood cake—and nearly every delicious goddamn thing you can think of. Tiny electric-red slices of chili peppers, crunchy sprouts, Thai basil, roughly yanked cilantro, mint, green banana slices, wedges of lime everywhere. Everywhere.
Parties of ten, twenty Vietnamese cluster around and hover over hot pots of beef parts and whole fish.
Or they just ride.
If you’re in a car, you’re fucked for any of this. Most neighborhoods have no room for your spaceship to touch down. At best, you can glide slowly by, face pressed to the glass, or—if you care to torture yourself—open the window for a moment, let your nostrils fill with the complex admixture of a thousand and one delights, most of them unavailable to you. Sure, you can park a few blocks away, maybe—but then you may as well have walked. For the scooters and motorbikes, however, there’s the convenience of valet parking. Oh, yes. Since nearly every available square foot of sidewalk is packed with tables, there is precious little space for bikes. But not to worry, because every little com, coffee shop, street stall, and eatery has a kid outside who will helpfully take your scooter and helmet, scrawl an identifying mark with chalk on the seat, and find some way to jam it in between the scores of others out front. It’s the only way the system works. When you’re done? He will helpfully extract it and have it ready for departure.
Some things never get old. Some things are just…classic. You never lose appreciation for them. Your enthusiasm may wax and wane ever so slightly, but you always come back. Whether it’s the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” or doing it doggie-style, good is simply…good. There may be other things in life, but you can pretty much spend eternity considering the matter of the former—or latter—and you’d be hard-pressed to improve on either of them.
I feel exactly like this with Hanoi-style pho. I may love the Southern versions of this spicy noodle soup fiercely, and appreciate—even need—from time to time the difference, the rougher, spicier, less subtle charms of Saigon’s often cloudier, more assertive sisters. But I wouldn’t marry any of them.
Using sexual metaphors to describe food is a practice blithely, even automatically employed by most food writers—yours truly being a frequent perpetrator. But it seems particularly appropriate when describing pho in Hanoi—even though it’s usually a morning routine, as opposed to a late-night, post-bar, fall-into-sloppy-embrace kind of a thing. Visiting a popular pho shop, particularly later in the morning, after the first waves of hungry people on their way to work have been through, resembles
nothing so much as the set of a porn shoot.
Here, as there, the landscape of desire is strewn with crumpled tissues, the spent expressions of human lust. Short pink plastic trash baskets overflow with little white paper balls, wet tumbleweeds are littered everywhere. Walk three feet up to the counter and they will cling embarrassingly to the soles of your feet, trail back to your table as if you are hurriedly exiting a peep-show booth. Unlike with sex, however, this walk of shame comes before touchdown. For one’s efforts, after a long wait on line, the handover of a few dong (the unfortunate name for Vietnam’s unit of currency), a jostle, and a squeeze in between strangers at a low table on a sidewalk, one is rewarded with perfection.
Broth—usually (but not absolutely always) the savory-sweet extraction of many beef bone, heavy on the marrow. Not too dark—definitely not too light. Chances are, there are three or four enormous pots of the stuff going now behind the counter, steam rising to the ceiling, the proprietor ladling the stuff straight off the top. Locals will tell you it’s all about the broth. If the broth isn’t right, the best ingredients in the world aren’t going to save it. Rice noodles. And they’d better be right, too. Too soft, too old, or too cooked? It’s shit. Too chewy? Same. Handmade and cooked to order—or at least in constantly ongoing batches, please. Classically, in Hanoi, the meat component is beef—and beef tendon, but preferences vary as to the exact mix. The counter behind the glass of my favorite place in the Old Quarter is stacked with pre-boiled beef shoulders: the perfect balance of lean and fat; and many prefer this—and only this: sliced ever so thinly onto the surface of their broth, where it wilts and relaxes and nearly dissolves into sublime tenderness. Some purists, however, insist entirely on raw beef, sliced at exactly the right degree of thinness and at the very last minute, added to the broth on the way out, so that the customers can “cook” it lightly themselves in the hot broth of their bowl by simply tossing it gently with their noodles. I, like many locals, prefer a mix of raw and cooked. The unattractive-sounding tendon, cooked properly by a master pho-maker, should be the best thing in the world—even for the uninitiated. Rather than being rubbery or tough, as one would expect of tendon, it should have just enough bite, just enough resistance, dissolving into fatty, marrow-like substance after just a few chews—a counterpoint to the wispy, all-too-brief pleasures of the beef. There’re usually very few of the slender, translucent little tubes in one’s bowl, and if you’re unhappy to discover one on your spoon, then they’re doing it wrong.
You complete pho at the table—and unlike with many similar dishes, where everybody’s got their own way of doing things, in Hanoi there seems to be an accepted orthodoxy. A dot or two of chili paste, a tiny drizzle of chili sauce, a generous squeeze of lime, toss lightly with chopsticks in the right hand—and spoon with the left. Ideally, one wants a perfect marriage of beef, broth, and noodle in each mouthful. Slurping is encouraged. As is leaning down into your bowl. As is lifting the bowl to near your mouth.
There will be a generous plate or basket of greens, herbs, and sprouts next to a bowl of pho—usually Thai basil, mint, and cilantro—and one adds as needed, periodically incorporating elements of freshness and crunch and a welcome bitterness to one’s mix, and one can pick idly at the occasional leaf as well, as kind of a palate cleanser.
I am hardly an expert on this subject, by the way—merely an enthusiast. But this is what I have observed and been told, over time. What is not debatable is that a perfect bowl of Hanoi pho is a balanced meeting of savory, sweet, sour, spicy, salty, and even umami—a gentle commingling of textures as well: soft and giving, wet and slippery, slightly chewy, momentarily resistant but ultimately near-diaphanous, light and heavy, leafy and limp, crunchy and tender. There—and nearly not there at all. Were this already not enough to jerk a rusty steak knife across your grandma’s throat, empty her bank account, and head off to Hanoi, consider the colors: bright red chilies; the more subdued, richer-red toasted-chili paste; bright green vegetables; white sprouts. Pinkish-red raw meat, turning slowly gray as it cooks in your bowl, the deep brown colors of the cooked meat, white noodles, light amber broth. Nearly all God’s colors in one bowl.
This is a sophisticated and deceptively subtle thing, Hanoi pho. I do not pretend to fully understand and appreciate its timeless beauty. Here, describing pho as more like love than sex would be more accurate—as there is simply not enough time on this planet, I think, to ever truly know it. It is an unconditional kind of love, in that it doesn’t matter where you enjoy it—elevated only a few feet off a dirty street corner or at the sleekly designed counter of an overdecorated lounge. It contains, like the man said, “multitudes.”
Sometimes I think I should feel a little guilty about writing stuff like the above.
It’s porn. Albeit food and travel porn.
I had it, I lived it—and, chances are, most of the people reading this have not.
It seems ungracious to share some experiences. Though I’m sure it’s difficult to accept, my parents brought me up to believe that showing off was a bad thing, a sign of generally bad manners. (I’m not saying those values took hold, just that I might have heard them mentioned.)
Some things I’ve seen, some experiences at tables and counters around the world, I feel a little bad telling people about. I may not hesitate to put them on TV at every opportunity—but that’s…different somehow, in that it’s somebody else, the evil camera people, the editors, doing the telling. This conveniently lets me off the hook.
But writing about sights and sounds and flavors that might otherwise be described as orgiastic—and doing it in a way that is calculated to inspire prurient interest, lust, and envy in others…that raises more questions in my mind as to…I don’t know…the moral dimension.
Sitting here, choosing words, letter by letter, on the keyboard with the explicit intention of telling you about something I did or something I ate and making you as hungry and miserable as I can—surely that’s wrong.
But fuck it.
Who doesn’t like a good wank now and then?
Imagine…
There’s a roast goose in Hong Kong—Mongkok, near the outskirts of the city, the place looks like any other. But you sink your teeth into the quickly hacked pieces and you know you’re experiencing something special. Layers of what can only be described as enlightenment, one extraordinary sensation after another as the popils of the tongue encounter first the crispy, caramelized skin, then air, then fat—the juicy, sweet yet savory, ever so slightly gamey meat, the fat just barely managing to retain its corporeal form before quickly dematerializing into liquid. These are the kinds of tastes and textures that come with year after year of the same man making the same dish. That man—the one there, behind the counter with the cleaver—hacking roast pork, and roast duck, and roast goose as he’s done since he was a child and as his father did before him. He’s got it right now for sure—and, sitting there at one of the white Formica tables, Cantonese pop songs oozing and occasionally distorting from an undersized speaker, you know it, too. In fact, you’re pretty goddamn sure this is the best roast goose on the whole planet. Nobody is eating goose better than you at this precise moment. Maybe in the whole history of the world there has never been a better goose. Ordinarily, you don’t know if you’d go that far describing a dish—but now, with that ethereal goose fat dribbling down your chin, the sound of perfectly crackling skin playing inside your head to an audience of one, hyperbole seems entirely appropriate.
It’s nighttime in Puebla and there are a taco lady and her husband standing behind a cart, one naked lightbulb dangling overhead, serving tacos de lengua, strips of beef tongue, seared with onions on a griddle. When the edges of the tongue are browned and the air fills with deliciousness, she scrapes them off the hot metal with a spatula, drops them into soft, still-warm corn tortillas, double layered—and quickly drags a spoon of salsa verde across them. She sprinkles them with fresh cilantro and a little raw, chopped onion and hands them over on a paper plate s
o thin it barely supports their weight without buckling. You quickly shove one of the tacos into your mouth, wash it down with a big pull from a can of cold Tecate—which you’ve previously rubbed with lime and jammed into a plate of salt, encrusting the top—and you can feel your eyes roll up into your head.
Standing there in the dark, stray dogs cowering expectantly just outside the corona of light from the one bulb, you’ve got all sorts of scary, blissed-out expressions flashing across your face. A father, mother, and two kids sit on kitchen chairs that the couple has dragged out into the street for their customers—and you hope that the kids, catching a look at you in the weird light, aren’t frightened by what they see.
It’s a fucking Everest of shellfish, an intimidating, multilevel tower of crushed ice and seaweed, piled, heaped—festooned with oysters from nearby Belon, and slightly farther away Cancale. There are periwinkles, whelks, palourdes, two types of gargantuan crabs—their claws reaching angrily for the sky over the carcasses of many lobsters, a tangle of meaty claws—their large bodies surrounded by the smaller ones, beady-eyed prawns and langoustines scattered about like the victims of a bus crash. What’s striking is that everyone in this small café has an identical mountain range of seafood in front of them: the older couple at the table next to you, tiny figures at the next table, silently cracking and slurping their way through an ungodly amount of seafood—they look too feeble for the kind of damage they’re doing, but mais non, the waiters scurry to keep up with the ever-filling discard bowls of empty shells. The elegant-looking woman eating by herself, the large table of Parisians—down for the weekend—they’ve ordered more. Everyone is drinking wine—whites and rosés—and, with incongruous delicacy, smearing local butter on little slices of the thin but dense brown bread before returning to the carnage that ensues when they grab a hold of a lobster tail and yank, with one jerking movement, tailmeat from the shell—one brutal movement—or gnash and suck their way through the broken carapace of a spider crab, dripping eggs and back fat onto their hands without care. This, too, is a good place to be. You will be in need of a nap after this. A small hotel by the port, perhaps. Pillows a little too hard, a redundant bolster, and sheets that smell slightly of bleach. The people around you, however, will be going out for dinner.
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