Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
aimedatwealthyWesterners,theabsurdnumberoftailorshops,andthepro-communistgov-
ernment slogans on banners stretching over the street, you've got one of the oddest towns in
Asia. It's a place trying so hard to seem “authentic” that it becomes wildly inauthentic, like
somekindofculturally dissonantthemepark,collectively dreamedupbyHoChiMinh,Karl
Marx, Milton Friedman, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
One person who caught the tourist wave early is Hoi An native Trinh Diem Vy, who opened
Mermaid, her first restaurant, in 1991. The place served a menu of Vietnamese staples and
Hoi An specialties, including cao lau, and over time Ms. Vy, as she is known locally, built
up a mini empire that now counts a handful of restaurants, a cooking school, and a new book
called
Taste Vietnam
. She has become the culinary face of Hoi An.
While Thao was at workone day,Imet with Ms.Vyat Morning Glory,her cooking school
and restaurant, which specializes in dishes inspired by street food and old family recipes. We
sat at a small table next to the kitchen. Lines of Western tourists snaked through the high-
ceilinged front dining room on their way to the upstairs classroom-kitchen. Ms. Vy had a
bowlofcaolaubroughtovertome.Becausesheprefersanextradoseofcrispytexture,ithad
rice crackers among the toppings in addition to the fried noodle-dough croutons. The key to
goodcaolau,Ms.Vysaid,isthepork,barbecuedintheChinesestylecalled
char siu
.“Thisis
what I call 'tourist pork,'” she said, jabbing a chopstick at a thin slice resting atop the mound
of noodles and herbs. “Fatty pork is better—it just melts in your mouth—but I fear my cus-
tomers won't eat it.”
As for how the noodles are made, Ms. Vy said she didn't know the secret. But she told me
that two branches of the same family make them, and she gave me a lead: I could find Ma-
dame Trai, the matriarch of the family, selling cao lau noodles at a stand in the central food
market.
After finishing my bowl of extra-crunchy cao lau with Ms. Vy and watching more tourists
flow through her restaurant, I walked to the central market. More than a few food stalls had
hand-lettered signs advertising cao lau and pho. Pangs of nervousness poked at my stomach.
This, I thought, could be a defining moment in my hunt for the secrets of cao lau. At the end
of the lane, I came to a table with piles of brownish cao lau noodles stretched across it. A
teenagegirlbehindthetablemadeeyecontactwithme.“MadameTrai?”Iasked.Shenodded
toward a plump sexagenarian sitting at the other end of the table. The woman looked like a
rotund hen sitting on her eggs. The scowl on her face made her a forbidding presence.
“Xin chao,”
I said, “hello” in Vietnamese.
She hardly moved, and uttered nothing.
“DoyouspeakEnglish?”Iasked.MadameTrairemainedmute.“Caolau,”Isaid,pointing
to the noodles on the table in front of her. “I want to know about cao lau. Can you tell me
