Ambulando

Yesterday I was with some couchsurfers, they brought me to an Italian Vietnamese Vegetarian restaurant, and then we went to a bar for some more beers. The usual night out in Saigon, it seems.
Yesterday night I was on my own so I decided to explore and find a decent restaurant for dinner.
I would like someone had written a guide to Saigon’s restaurant which nobody told you about, like the one I bought for Barcelona, Restaurantes de Barcelona donde nunca te han llevado. That guide help me in more than one occasion to find good place and good food. And help me starting moving around Barcelona like a map.
But now I had to do with what I have at hand, and at hand I have the LP. So I decided to see if they were good at food too.
LP afficionados do not struck me as being too much of food lovers.
In the LP under Saigon and in walking distance from my hotel there were two restaurants that got my attention, a thai one, defined as the smallest thai restaurant in town, and an indian one, were I could find a good fish tikka. By chance they were also one in front of the other.
So I put on my best shirt, so to speak (I had just two, the best one is usually the clean one) and went to explore the delicatessen they could offer.
I was not given a chance. Electricity was cut in the street, so the unfortunate customers in both of them were forced to consume their dinner by candle light. Now that’s very suggestive, and romantic if you are sharing your table with a partner, even occasional, but the candle light, I would presume, is not good for cooking as well as it is for eating.
I preferred to wait for a better light.
So I went exploring.
If someone of you has ever come with me for food exploring, they know what I am talking about. In order to search the right place, I am able to walk kilometers, sometime in a circle, just because I DO know there is a restaurant that will suit me better than the one we just passed. It is a long process, if you know place, language and what to expect from a restaurant.
If you do not, like me in Saigon, it will take ages. Or at least a couple of hours.
I did explore every alley around me.
I run away from Queenie and Little Saigon bars where miniskirted girls were too much smiling and too much thin to fulfill the promise of a good dinner.
I passed a couple of ice cream parlour, tempted to start my dinner with the dessert, but kept the address in memory for later on.
I pass the lot of Italian Mexican restaurants promising real pizza and real nachos and Corona for a small mortgage.
The taxi-scooter drivers I think started betting on me. More than one, after a while, instead of proposing me a ride somewhere, just asked if I was lost.
At the end, exhaust from hunger, I decided to change strategy and use the Golden Rule of food quest, slightly modified: when at a lost, eat where truck driver and old people eat. In Saigon it was eat where taxi scooter driver eat.
And that means just one thing: in a food stall by the street.
So I picked one that appear to be the more crowded and set to it to have my dinner. First I was proposed the usual noodles with either beef or chicken, but I was going for fish, having seen a good quantinty of different shell fish.
They had small navajas and a lot of other ones.
I opted for te navajas and a sort of oyster. Both of them to be done bbq.
The bbq was actually a net of a gas stove, so the result was a little weird: the inside was well cooked but the shell was scorched by the flame, so it become crumple.
On the overall, was not a bad choice. They come with a lot of herbs and spice, catalan style.
In one of the best fish restaurant in Barcelona (if you want to know where, I will tell you for a dinner), they teach me that fish need nothing on top. Well, I come from a seaside place too, so it was nothing new, but it is good to be reminded some time.
Also, it give me the opportunity to boast I know one of the best fish restaurant in Barcelona.
Normal restaurant use garlic and spice to cover the fact that fish is not fresh as it should be. Go to some of the tapas place in the barrio gotico and you will see what I am talking about.
So shell fish in Saigon I suspect is more of the type coming from the frezzer than the type coming from the sea.
Anyway I had a good dinner, a little bit too expensive (130 thousand dong, more or less 4 euro, with two beers) considered the fact that it was a stall on the street.
But the atmosphere was fine. A Japanese guy sitting next to me was taken under the good service of the woman running the business, and when he had some problem handling his crab’s “chele”, she took over, and showed him how to open them: she take the chele and actually hammered them on the pavement. Voilà, ready to be eaten.
After that, I went to smoke a sigarette and having some more beers in another street stall, 10.000 dong a Saigon beer.
Tomorrow I will try the thai, or maybe the fish tikka.