1. I neglected to get pictures of a couple of our best meals in Hoi An, including multiple bowls of the famous local specialty, cao lau. Don't miss it. I'm not enough of a gourmand to describe all these soups are different, but believe me, they are . This one is made with a thicker noodle, much like Japanese soba noodles, and must have something other than rice flour in it. It has a wheatier taste to it. Another special ingredient is a kind of crouton fried in oil. The broth has something else going on in it that distinguishes it from pho and bun bo hue and others, but I don't know what it is. Our friends tell us that that cao lau is available in inferior forms in Saigon, but I suppose it's worth seeking out there if you aren't going to be in Hoi An.2. The other local specialty is fin fish or sea food grilled in banana leaves. That's a shrimp version pictured below. It's grilled with a salsa of green onions and garlic and slices of some kind of root similar to ginger but milder. The dish is called ca naong la chuoi.
The best part of going to a beach town is eating on the beach:
3. Pictured above is a snack made of mashed up sweet potato, baked in a fire pit in the sand and kept warm up over the grill. It's called banh dau xanh nuong. You pay about 50 cents for four of them, served warm on a paper napkin.
4. These whole steamed squid are a seasonal specialty I assume, because they are pregnant with roe. The eggs solidify into a filling inside the tube of the body. You chomp through to eat the tail end. That reveals the strip of cartilage that was spine, which you then pull out like a ribbon and then either eat the rest piece by piece or suck out the roe first. It's called muc com.
5. Rice soup with fish. We've had a terrific hot rice soup with grated spices on top a few times and had it again the beach. Before, pieces of white fish have been part of the soup. In this case, you order them separate, and add fish from the plate to your bowl of rice soup. That's the whole steamed fish below. It's called chao ca.
6. We also had steamed corn on the cob on the beach, though there's nothing special about the location in this case. On any sidewalk in Saigon in the evenings you'll find women pushing carts with steaming kettles in the base and unhusked corn tucked into a strainer above. At the beach, we bought a plastic bag of them before settling under our umbrellas and snacked on them before ordering the rest of the meal.
Naturally, all of these are served with a variety of fish sauces, sea salt and lime, chili peppers in soy sauce and so on used for dipping.
