The honking gets to you after a while, especially after a long day banging around Hanoi, which manages to leave you gritty and dirty from the humidity and dust and miscellaneous unidentifiable culinary delights smoking from improvised sidewalk coal stoves, despite the still-overcast skies and comparatively cool temperatures (“oh, it’s usually never like this.” Gee, thanks, tell that to BBC weather and their week’s worth of bleak, rainy forecast.)
The city has a certain charm to it, although living here would drive me bananas from the (almost never aggressively meant) honking and pestering by tiny women clad in conical Non La hats, carrying massive baskets of various goodies on shoulder poles. The latter don’t miss a beat in between delivering lunch to roadside shop vendors (all shops here seem to open directly onto the sidewalk, with the few air-conditioned multistory “Western” stores generally empty and manned by puzzled staff who seem at a loss about what to do whenever a customer walks in) and trying (and in my case succeeding) to extract extortionate prices from the goofy-looking tourist taking photos of everything.
In this case, thankfully, “extortionate” was entirely relative, as about a dollar for some pineapple is well within my abilities, but I was still rather proud of having talked her down from her initial demands of four times that amount. What did our negotiations professor tell us about fixing a price? Bad, bad, bad. Still, I did manage to dodge the kid trying to sell me NUMBER ONE SHOESHINE VIETNAM for about 5 blocks of countering my pathetic attempts to escape by dodging in and out of traffic. That was impressive enough that I would have hired him, had I been wearing shoes worthy of a shine.
Lunch at Quan an Ngon, by almost all accounts one of the best restaurants in Hanoi — high expectations, after a string of disappointments brought on by either lackluster service or bland food, in places supposedly at the top of the line. Small tip to aspiring chefs: ditch the attempts at “luxury” — your patrons are going to be arrivistes one financial step up from KFC. Keep it real, and make it spicy, you’ll be loved for it.
Quan an Ngon was, in short, awesome. The decor (it’s a bustling zoo, with a huge outdoor patio and innumerable nooks and crannies, multiple kitchens and prep areas in various parts of the joint) was authentic and attractively classic, the service superb, friendly and fast, if occasionally a bit confused, the food inexpensive and of astounding quality. If we’d found this earlier, I could imagine eating all of our lunches here. I was sorely tempted to try the “glutinous rice doughnut fried meat cake”, if only for the name. Reason prevailed.
The rest of the day we spent shopping/sightseeing (insofar as you can call looking for teensy temples hidden between “the electric generator shop” and “the mattress shop” and “the glittery fabulous princess boa shop” by that name — rather, you just kind of stumble around and take it all in.) Forget about trying to find shops mentioned in any guidebook — anything you end up finding will be by sheer chance. Maybe you’ll even find that electric generator you’ve always wanted on the mantlepiece.
Oh, and of course it’s new year’s eve. I suppose Tet is the big deal around here, rather than December 31, but that’s not going to dissuade us from a proper tear. We reserved at Bobby Chinn’s, in the Northwest of Hanoi; he’s a mixed Chinese-Egyptian American who’s, in his own words, been “off the radar for 14 years” in Hanoi. In the process, the guy has built a restaurant with an extremely well trained staff (although they did on occasion exhibit the uber-hierarchical behavior we’d seen in other Vietnamese environments that deal with foreigners, and, one supposes, our perceived obsession with absolute perfection, with the obvious alpha dog occasionally barking out orders to his underlings, to the point that we had to assure him that no, really, the service is magnificent, please carry on).
The food’s amazing as well, as is the layout, with every table in the two small dining rooms seemingly “the good table”. I don’t remember much of what we had, thanks to the copious amounts of vodka martini, champagne, torrentes, sauternes, malbec, more champagne, and whiskey (supplemented by our newfound Mexican acquaintances from lunch by several rounds of tequila lasting until 4 a.m. that we thankfully ducked out of), but it was all perfect, beautifully cooked and presented, with top ingredients. It’s clear the owner put an insane amount of thought into making sure everything was just right, and it is.
The several bottles of champagne we finished off after midnight, with the Mexicans, the owner, his drop-dead gorgeous German/Chinese girlfriend, and some random types from the US embassy and chamber of commerce who ended up dropping the kind of inappropriate comments one would expect from government slobs laughing it up on the tax dollar. Stay classy, Uncle Sam. Stumbled home around 3, and had an altogether magnificent start to the new year.
Quan an Ngon
18 Phan Boi Chau
Hanoi, VN
+84 (0) 4 942 8162 (don’t bother reserving, just go)
Bobby Chinn
1, Bà Triệu, Q.Hoàn Kiếm
Hanoi, VN
+84 (0) 4 3934 8577 (reserve, but avoid Mexicans)
www.bobbychinn.com
