Barnyard in a bowl

It’s taken me quite a while to settle in the madness that is Ho Chi Minh but now I feel I’m finding my stride. The place I’ve living is right in plonk in the middle of downtown, which is in the middle of a consumerist explosion. Marc Jacobs and Chloe both opened new stores just around the corner and there are more places to buy pearls than pho but it’s still Vietnam and so there is great food tucked into little corners and alleyways and sometimes sitting in plain sight.

Today it was the xoi ga (sticky rice with chicken) place just two blocks over. I’ve walked by this place a lot and it’s always busy at lunch and I’ve wanted to try it but I have a place I go to that has really tasty cheap xoi ga and delicious che (sweet soup: a drink made with coconut milk and jelly bits and mung bean paste which tastes way better than that sounds), the xoi ga is in the form of nuc mam fried chicken and it’s delish. So faced with the decision of the known, tasty, and cheap vs. the unknown there just is no contest , … until today

And the title of best xoi ga and che goes to old faithfull., Che Xoi. However I may need to create a new category for xoi ga with eggies. Eggies are eggs before they’ve left the chicken and honestly I wouldn’t have eaten them if I’d known that but I didn’t so I did. Tasty little nibblets too. Though now I might have more trouble chewing through the membrane that connects them.

The eggies and sticky rice were snack sized and I was curious about a soup I saw someone order that looked like it had blood pudding in it. So I ordered what turned out to be crab soup. Crab soup with shrimp to be exact, and chicken, and fish, and pork. Banh canh cua has a weird gelatinous texture that I will never be totally at ease with but this was quite tasty with none of the mud flavor that can sometimes accompany seafood streetfood and there was a little piece of blood pudding after all. And there is something so Vietnamese about a soup with five distinct types of meat, though pork is really a vegetable here.

If you happen to be in Ho Chi Minh. The eggies place is on Nguyen Trung Truc and my favorite che place is at the end of Bui Thi Xuan. Enjoy.