Nov 07, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 11 Comments

Let’s consume ethnicity!

Each Sunday in Bac Ha in mountainous Sapa, Vietnam, subsistence farmers from the surrounding hills descend on the normally sleepy market to watch tourists perform feats of amateur ethnography and find new ways to trivialise their culture. Local hilltribes get into their Sunday best to hit the market mostly for

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Nov 06, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees No Comments

On the beaten path, Halong Bay

At Hang Dau Go (Wooden Stakes Cave) in Halong Bay

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Nov 03, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 8 Comments

Drank in public

There’s two ways to enjoy beer. Firstly, the late and sorely-missed Michael Jackson in his apophthegmatically-titled Beer suggests that for proper close examination, beer is best enjoyed in the privacy of one’s own home, lest the neighbouring drinkers think that he or she is the sort of person that would

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Oct 29, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 8 Comments

Cha Cha Cha

Putting the char into bun cha bun cha is a blunt instrument. For all the subtlety engendered by Vietnamese cuisine, bun cha acts as a counterpoint: blackened rissoles of pork teamed with charred slices of pork belly in a thin fish sauce, vinegar and sugar stock with sides of bun

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Oct 29, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees No Comments

Handy establishing shot

Guess where I am. I’ll be running a pool in the comments.

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Oct 26, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 1 Comments

Defeated in Hue

I generally don’t fail when I’m hunting for street food. I take wrong turns, missteps into blind alleys, but for the most part I find something worth eating. Hue in central Vietnam defeated me. My schooling in Vietnamese cuisine is more weighted towards the South than the North, due to

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Oct 18, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 3 Comments

Pimp my regional cuisine: Hoi An

Hội An in Vietnam openly pimps out its regional specialties with flagrant disregard to public taste, be it inferior tailoring, Vina-Franco-Sino-Japanese architecture or local food. The tourist-focussed restaurants that don’t offer bland facsimiles of hoanh thanh (wantons, generally fried), banh beo/banh vac (a steamed rice-flour wonton) and cao lau as

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Oct 14, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 3 Comments

Dalat Market (Chợ Đà Lạt)

Vietnam‘s hill resort of Dalat is a horticultural wonderland. The cool tropical microclimate endows its market with the best of both worlds: tropical fruits from the lower hillsides combined with more European fare from the cooler climes. Fresh strawberries sit alongside avocadoes, artichokes, beetroot and dragonfruit; with vendors keen to

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