Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table by Graham Holliday (PDF)

Description

A journalist and blogger takes us on a colorful and spicy gastronomic tour through Viet Nam in this entertaining, offbeat travel memoir, with a foreword by Anthony Bourdain. Growing up in a small town in northern England, Graham Holliday wasn’t keen on travel. But in his early twenties, a picture of Hanoi sparked a curiosity that propelled him halfway across the globe. Graham didn’t want to be a tourist in an alien land, though; he was determined to live it. An ordinary guy who liked trying interesting food, he moved to the capital city and embarked on a quest to find real Vietnamese food. In Eating Viet Nam, he chronicles his odyssey in this strange, enticing land infused with sublime smells and tastes.Traveling through the back alleys and across the boulevards of Hanoi—where home cooks set up grills and stripped-down stands serving sumptuous fare on blue plastic furniture—he risked dysentery, giardia, and diarrhea to discover a culinary treasure-load that was truly foreign and unique. Holliday shares every bite of the extraordinary fresh dishes, pungent and bursting with flavor, which he came to love in Hanoi, Saigon, and the countryside. Here, too, are the remarkable people who became a part of his new life, including his wife, Sophie.A feast for the senses, funny, charming, and always delicious, Eating Viet Nam will inspire armchair travelers, curious palates, and everyone itching for a taste of adventure.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐As a Vietnam visitor beginning in 1996, and a former semi-expat there, I have huge respect for Graham’s work and for his former blog Noodlepie. What a great thing he’s done in uncovering the culinary delights of Vietnamese food and in particular, the “street food” of the (formerly) ubiquitous carts and streetside sellers of Saigon. (As an aside, in my early trips there, I always ate from the street sellers and sat on their teeny plastic stools without hesitation, and like Graham I was normally the only Westerner at any given cart or hole-in-the-wall restaurant. But in no way did I do this with the focus and determination that Graham did with Noodlepie.)In any case, this book is a departure from those excellent exploratory missions. It’s more of a story about how Graham came to develop the Noodlepie blog, and why. For me – a reader of the blog for years – it’s an interesting background story and it may also be very interesting to those not familiar with Noodlepie. It’s very well written, engaging, and provides a lot of insight into the cuisine of Vietnam, particularly what makes it so unique and so great.Unfortunately – and as Graham anticipates in the book – most of the streetside food sellers of downtown Saigon have been pushed off the streets and sidewalks and into storefronts or restaurants if they’re to be found anywhere at all. That’s a shame – although Vietnamese of my acquaintance think it’s a good thing and that ridding the downtown streets of Ma and Pa food carts makes the city more advanced and “sophisticated”. Still, on a very recent trip I very much missed the early morning pho carts at the back of the Hotel Rex, and I couldn’t find a decent streetside bahn mi anywhere in District 1. Truly disappointing, and something that Graham discusses in this book.But all is not lost, and there’s a good book or blog to be written yet again. Because outside of Saigon’s District 1, and venturing further into the ex-urban and rural streets of Southern Vietnam, there remains a thriving and ubiquitous street food market that offers everything and anything formerly offered in Saigon, and much that is not. I kind of wish that Graham had ventured 20 kilometers outside of Saigon to write about those places, which as before are ubiquitous, awesomely good, and cheap. There is little question that the people of Vietnam still love excellent and tasty cuisine. I wish Graham had written a little more about those places.

⭐As a Vietnamese living abroad, I am always curious about others’ experience and perception of Vietnamese culture. I have to say, I enjoyed reading Mr. Holliday’s book very much. His observation of street food culture in Vietnam is both accurate and hilarious. I thoroughly enjoyed the chapter about the cultural differences between North and South. My parents were from the North, but I was born and raised in the South, and the difference between North and South’s cooking philosophy permeated in every home cooked meal. They would diligently explain how the same dish was cooked differently in each region. Street food was an important part of any Vietnamese growing up. Reading Mr. Holliday’s book brought back a lot of happy memories of the olden days. Although, I would say that this book is strictly about street food. Most of the dishes that the author held dear to his heart are not easily replicate at home (both for the economical and taste reasons). Two important parts of Vietnamese cuisine that Mr. Holliday didn’t explore are the Hue cuisine (imperial cuisine as well as street food), and Vietnamese home cooking. He readily admitted that in his book. Vietnamese home cooking is rich in varieties and taste. Hue’s cuisine is more complicated and time consuming in the preparation process, which, in my experience, makes it hard to find a decent restaurant outside of Vietnam that can recreate the taste. I am sad that Mr. Holliday left Vietnam before he could explore these parts of our cuisine. His curiosity, couples with the journalistic due diligence he did in learning about the food sources and culture transpire in this book. He delivers a fair and accurate view of a part of our culture that a native Vietnamese like me can appreciate. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about Vietnam.

⭐Most of us will not get a chance to travel to remote locations, if we did we would most likely look for anything familiar missing the whole purpose of the trip. In this book, we are not only invited to the taste and smell of another world, we are invited to sit right next to the author in small plastic chairs, as he gags and savors his way though local food shacks. You might wish you missed the section as he describes the texture of pig uterus, because you almost feel and taste it. Don’t worry though, most of the time you will wish you were there as he describes the many pleasures of various soups like Pho and others too hard to spell here. This book is great because you get a first hand tour into the back ally’s, the side streets, and the main drag food shacks you might avoid, places a tour guide would never take you.If you ever do get a chance to travel to Vietnam read this book first. You will want to find as many small alley eateries you can because the author makes these places all too familiar. If you never go you will feel like you have been there. At a minimum, the flavors of American Vietnamese food take on a new dimension. You not only learn about what is in the food but also that there are differences between how the same dishes are prepared between Saigon and Ha Noi. Now that I have read this book I can’t help but wonder now how close the Vietnamese food here is to what Graham Holiday was eating. Can I taste the difference between North and South? Perhaps I should just ask where they are from.

⭐Did not disappoint! Great read. Makes me be more adventurous in my food choices

⭐Wonderful travel and food book. Funny and full of fun food adventure in Vietnan

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