The Billiken's Bluff

The Sunday Time's Travel section features an article extolling the virtues of Vietnamese Cuisine. The Saint and I visited many of the cities and ate at some of the same markets and food stalls that Taylor Holliday mentions in the piece.

Holliday suggests that you save the package tours for another country and instead explore Vietnamese cuisine by getting your hands dirty and keeping your ear to the street. She writes, “Some people prefer to earn their food epiphanies the hard way, knowing that great pho tastes even better with the added thrill of finding it yourself.”

I couldn’t agree more. So I was surprised when I saw that Holliday failed to include Hanoi’s 1km Dog Street, featuring vendors who serve nothing but canine cuisine, on her tasting tour. You can't get more authentic than eating a dog.



Another can't miss stop while traveling up the countryside is a junket to Hoi An for some rice vodka. I negotiated the price of the fermented rice liquor down under $1.



I felt as if I had done some top-notch bargaining, until I opened the bottle and realized that Vietnamese Rice Vodka tastes something like formaldehyde. You live and you learn, but that's all part of the excitement!!!

Holliday was pretty high on Nha Trang's fishing villages. She had some crab and rice cakes that she enjoyed. I had a slightly different experience. A woman in the fish market tried to give me a "very cheap, low price" lobster for only 720,000 Dong, which is a lot of Dong, about $50 dollars worth.



The woman, dejected, after I told her that her price was preposterous and I would not pay.

Holliday's trip did unearth this gem of wisdom.

There we met up with Ms. Vy, as she calls herself, a third-generation restaurateur describes the importance of rice, she said, "The wife is rice, and the girlfriend is noodle soup, so the wife must feed her husband rice three times a day so he doesn't go out for noodles."

Ladies take note. Ms. Vy is dropping some serious knowledge. Keep your man happy or he will get out looking for noodles.