Home > Vietnam > Vietnam Travel News > Vietnamese restaurant gives a taste of home in Paris |
Vietnamese restaurant gives a taste of home in Paris
You never truly appreciate your hometown's food until you travel
abroad.
In Ha Noi, I don't limit myself to eating pho and rice. But after navigating
through France's notorious railway strikes for days, exhausted from walking, all
I wanted was a hot bowl of noodle soup.
We began our European travels with sandwiches, churros and paella, followed by
quiche and salad, crepes and galletes. When we got to Paris, however, we started
to crave Vietnamese food.
At the Opera Metro station in the heart of Paris, we spotted a white chalkboard
advertising a Vietnamese restaurant. It was a strange location, as most
Vietnamese dining places are located in the 13th arrondisement.
Inside, the dimly lit eatery was unremarkable. There was a small altar and signs
in Chinese characters. As in Viet Nam, where green plastic pine leaf decorations
and ABBA's "Happy New Year" song pop up all year round, Christmas decorations
adorned the ceiling. The server spoke only French and English but managed to
pronounce the dishes correctly in Vietnamese.
We ordered one bowl of pho and another of bun bo Hue, which is made with rice
vermicelli rather than pho noodles, although the difference between these soups
is far more nuanced. While pho is subtly flavoured, bun bo Hue has the strong
flavour of shrimp paste and lemongrass due to its origins in the former royal
capital city of Hue. In Viet Nam, these two dishes are never served in the same
eatery, because the stocks used to make them are so different. But in Paris, I
was sure that the stock for these two distinctive dishes came from a single pot!
A Vietnamese friend who lived in Berlin for more than 20 years once took me
around the Dong Xuan market there, trying to make the case that the pho soup's
quality was far superior to the Vietnamese version. "Look at the bones! The beef
bones here are very clean and when people make the stock for pho, they use lots
of good bones with marrow, so the stock tastes very good, even better than the
stock you have in Viet Nam."
Similarly, when my Vietnamese friends living abroad come home to Ha Noi, I take
them out to have pho or bun thang, a Ha Noi-style rice vermicelli soup with
shredded chicken and pork sausage. But sometimes they tell me that the pho here
does not taste as good as the soup they ate abroad.
Sure, the bones may be cleaner and better overseas, but the stock must also be
made with authentic ingredients. Pungent shrimp paste baked in a banana leaf
over charcoal fire may not sound very appetising to some western readers, but
it's an integral ingredient for bun bo Hue. Pho gia truyen, which translates to
"traditional family pho," comes from Nam Dinh province in the north, where
families have their own secret recipes that are passed down by mothers to
daughters-in-law.
However, maybe I was being too picky. In Paris, could I really expect authentic
flavour like the soup in Ha Noi's Old Quarter?
A Vietnamese saying goes, "One bite when one's hungry equals a package when
one's full." The meal by the Paris Opera might not have been the most delicious,
but it was at least a satisfying taste of home.
Source: VNS |
High Quality Tour Service:
Roy, Spain
Fransesca, Netherlands
A member of Vietnam Travel Promotion Group (VTP Group)
Address: Room 509, 15T2 Building, 18 Tam Trinh Str., Hai Ba Trung District, Hanoi, Vietnam (See map)
Tel: +84.24.62768866 / mail[at]tuanlinhtravel.com
Visited: 1967