Like most expats here, I work in an office side by side Vietnamese people who are always eating things I have never seen before and couldn’t even guess at the origin of. Strange things in bags, wrapped in banana leaves or floating in glasses; all kinds of interesting and downright puzzling food passes under my nose during an average working shift. It was not until I had been here for a year that I finally plucked up the courage and started accepting the offers from colleagues to try what they were eating.

Of course by that time I was eating more pho than you could shake a chopstick at, and I was proud of the ‘adventurous’ banh mi I was eating every morning, even if I had to painstakingly pick out every bit of pork fat and chili before I took my first bite. But the desire to go beyond these staples of accessible Vietnamese cuisine escaped me. My rule of thumb was, If you can’t translate the word into English, then don’t eat it; my options were understandably limited. It was almost too easy to be so unadventurous, as my friends were just as bad, give or take a few experiments with dry squid and duck stomach. But when hunger strikes and torrential rain gets between your office and the nearest fast food outlet, it’s time to experiment. So I took the plastic bag of odd see-through paper and fierce chili sauce, which I now know to be banh trang, and tried it. At first I was nervous as the eyes of my Vietnamese colleagues were on me, waiting for me to tell them how gross it was. But in actual fact the mix of searing chili, shrimp salt and chewy rice paper didn’t taste bad at all. It is difficult to explain the sensation of having your mouth simultaneously burned and filled with flavor at the same time, but in the end, with a glass of milk to kill the chili, I finished the bag and promptly finished a few more. This was the beginning of something good. I didn’t stop there, my Vietnam experience had changed and I now realized that for very little money, I could eat a highly addictive snack and fight off hunger until the end of my shift. So I moved on to the more obscure food stuffs, like banh gio; an incredibly tasty meat and gravy filled pyramid of sticky rice served warm inside a bright green banana leaf. Not forgetting my first forays into the whole other world of Vietnamese candy and desserts that I had so often turned my nose up at before. Being handed my first piece of O Mai candy, a sticky mix of liquorice, peanut and ginger, it resembled something brown and hairy and not that appetizing, I took a tiny bite and it tasted so good I finished off the 500 gram bag with a speed that amazed onlookers.

Dried Plum - Licorice (Source: http://o-mai.com)

Dau hu, a type of che eaten hot or iced in the morning with silken tofu and ginger syrup is warm, comforting and a dessert everyone should try at least once before leaving Vietnam. Sometimes difficult to find, it is worth trawling through early morning markets and keeping an eye out at the side of the road while driving around your district. The list of great local snacks available is endless, but that is not to say that everything I have tried has been delicious. Dried squid is definitely an acquired taste, and after one bite, left me wanting someone else to acquire it so I didn’t have to. Another memorable misadventure has to be bitter melon which more than lives up to its name and is an attempt that yielded only confusion, shock and eventually an after taste that I am to this day haunted by.

I have eaten great things and terrible things, I have felt so full I couldn’t move, spat out more than my fair share of new food stuffs and it all started with a small fiery bag of banh trang, eaten in a rain storm. Branching out surprised me, I even learned a few new words along the way, and found myself unwittingly participating in an important part of Vietnamese culture that is more about sharing and socializing than about stuffing your face.