Hanoi Delights: Fried Chicken with a View, Fermented Shrimp Sauce, Too.

In our perambulations around Swan Lake, we discovered a new restaurant and a new Hanoi Delight: chicken fried with salt and pepper. Very crispy and flavorful, not at all greasy. The best part is the crispy bits of garlic, ginger, lemongrass, chile, and scallion that come with it. Like all meat dishes here, the chicken is cut into seemingly random chunks, making every bite a potential hazard, with jagged bits of bone lurking to puncture the unwary palate.

The restaurant is built out over the very lake where John McCain was shot down, which adds a bit of piquancy to the meal. There are always fishermen out on the lake and lining its banks, though the water is pretty nasty looking and the surface sparkles with the silver carcasses of dead fish. We remarked that eating freshwater fish here is a rather unappealing idea.

And then the next night, I had lake fish for dinner. I'm teaching a small private class at a local tool import business, and the three women in the class wanted to take me out afterward to sample one of the local delicacies. We went to a little hole in the wall in the Old Quarter that was packed with tourists. Apparently, the restaurant serves only one dish and is mentioned in all the guidebooks. They set up a charcoal burner in the middle of the table, on it they put a skillet packed with chunks of white lake fish lightly coated with tumeric. As these sizzle fragrantly, the women add chopped dill and greens and green onions. Once this is cooked, it's ladled over bun (rice vermicelli) and topped with fresh chopped chiles, green onions, roasted peanuts, cilantro and other herbs, and capped with a dash of fish sauce or a grayish, lumpy, very pungent fermented shrimp sauce. My students told me that most foreigners can't eat mam tom (said shrimp sauce), so, of course, in spite of my trepidations, I had to try it. It was delicious, adding a tangy savor to the medley of flavors. This is what I like most about Vietnamese food--every bite has a multiplicity of flavors and textures, that may seem incongruous in the abstract, but blend marvelously in reality.

P.