pork

Nov 14, 2007 | Post by: Phil Lees 4 Comments

The Ribs of Sapa

My worthless superpower is the ability to step into any city in the world and find a joint that serves barbecued pork ribs. Sapa in Northern Vietnam is not a street food mecca but ribs were there to be unearthed, alongside the usual assortment of chicken parts and other innards

Read More
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

Read More
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

Read More
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

Read More
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

Read More
Page 2 of 212