Picture
it…A restaurant down a side street off traffic choked Cach Mang Thang
Tam Street deep in Saigon’s District 10. OK. So it sounds like
anywhere in Saigon, right? Well, not so fast there for this semi-open
air barbecue mecca called Làng Nướng Nam Bộ veers far off the normal
trail in the best of ways. A good rule of thumb for finding amazing
food is to follow the locals and follow the locals our Monday Madness
food group did.
Just walking up to this place is a
sensory overload. In a country where most food joints are shophouses
about as wide as a 1978 Caprice Classic is long, this two story palace
rises like some sort of out of scale temple to all things charcoal can
singe. Two grills out on the street, smack dab in the middle of the
entrance where people walk I might add, send fragrant smoke signals all
over the place.
Grilling It Up
Baby boars skewered on pitchforks lining
an outdoor wall like columns of e. coli are what we came for. Oh yeah,
that’s a sanitary sight isn’t it? But who cares…Great taste overrides
any of the nasties we worry about so much in the west. A guy stands out
there in the heat rotating the hollowed out carcasses back and forth as
they make satisfying sizzles and pops over impossibly hot embers.
The sidewalk display of boar is the
perfect only in Vietnam type prelude to some seriously gaudy décor that
is an amazing testament to just how tacky interior design can be. Huge
ornate chandeliers presumably laced with cubic zirconium, plastic patio
furniture, strips of neon and a crappy sound system belting out “Happy
Birthday” over and over again let everyone know we aren’t exactly in
Kansas anymore. I love it. Actually it’s a lot like some Tunica,
Mississippi casino gone horribly wrong but mercifully without all the
slot machines and old women chain smoking through their oxygen masks.
We
took a gamble of a different sort on what to order and ended up with a
table groaning under the weight of grilled chicken, grilled boar and
some sort of beef steak. Of course the chicken looked like someone
hacked a bird with a machete before tossing the chunks including feet
and head on the grill, but great taste abounds once the juicy meat is
carved away from the rest of the crispy and crunchy bird. A marinade of
what tastes like Chinese five spice powder and honey works so well with
the wild boar, too. Of course this was the same boar culled from one
of those salmonella sticks out by the entrance.
Actually the entire meal was amazing
right down to the fried tofu, steamed vegetables and some sort of fried
sticky rice cakes. They even brought out an appetizer of tiny black
and white eggs with the fertile embryo gestating inside. I tried them,
and we’ll just leave it at that.
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