I survived most of my trip through Bangkok, Laos and Vietnam on street food, and although many other travellers – as well as friends back home – told me how “brave” they thought I was, I had no problems. Eating alone in restaurants always feels a bit strange to me, but there is no such stigma with regard to street food, so there’s a kind of social comfort factor. The street is also the place where you can fill your stomach for less than a dollar.

When I happened to look at the menus of Thai or Vietnamese restaurants, the selections did not seem all that different from their San Francisco counterparts. It was on the street where I felt like I could find something really new and different.

I also really liked how out-in-the-open these places were. On the streets of Hanoi, people cooked outside, ate outside, washed up outside – familes and vendors alike, on the busy sidewalks.

Even in my Hanoi hotel, when I ordered the traditional Vietnamese breakfast of pho bo (beef noodle soup) or chao ca (fish porridge) each morning, someone from the staff would carry an empty tray out the front door of the hotel and return a few minutes later with my food. Everything else on the menu came from their own kitchen, but for Vietnamese food, they knew they couldn’t beat what I could get on the street.

From spring rolls to sticky rice, it’s a street food paradise!

On my first day in Laos, beside the Mekong, I had an unbelievable papaya salad. There was a whole strip of vendors along the river, and I hardly ate anywhere else the whole time I was in Vientiane. I had fresh orange-pineapple juice, salt-encrusted grilled fish stuffed with lemongrass, rice noodles with sausage, peanuts, tomatoes and herbs.

Laos and Vietnam were both French colonies, and although that legacy is not without its bitterness, one thing the French left behind is the art of baking. French bread from a burlap sack on a Hanoi sidewalk – still warm in the early morning – easily rivaled what I’ve had in France, and the tarts and cakes from a small patisserie in Hoi An were as beautiful as they were delicious.

In frigid Sapa, my breakfast each morning was a fist-sized ball of steaming sweet sticky rice, wrapped in a banana leaf. I’d wash it down with a cup of Vietnamese coffee – strong and sweetened with condensed milk – and each time I’d swear to myself I’d never have coffee any other way for the rest of my life.

I also had the most unbelievably fresh fruits from beginning to end, including some I’d never heard of before. My favourite discovery was a Vietnamese fruit that’s called chiku in Singapore. I can’t remember the Vietnamese name for it, but the taste lies somewhere between a mango and a pear, laced with a very slight touch of cinnamon.

Hoi An is where I ended my street food spree. I ate my dinners in restaurants there, and I made a habit of buying chiku during my days and asking my waiter or waitress to please slice it for my dessert.

They happily complied with my unusual request, and more often than not, they sat down to share it with me.

The other day in our food court at Singapore Airlines, I bought lunch at a stall called Fish Head Noodles. That’s not such a notable thing to people from this part of the world, but in the US, fish heads sort of, well, freak us out.

Tracy was the one who made me aware of the fact that I ordered my lunch from Fish Head Noodles. I was not even aware of it, which makes it all the more notable. The very fact that we are working in a place where Fish Head Noodles is the most popular stall used to give us a good chuckle. Not because it’s weird or wrong, but just because it’s so different from what we’re used to seeing every day.

In the Suntec City mall food court, there is a stall called Pig Organ Soup within eyesight range of an Auntie Annie’s Pretzels stand. That nicely encapsulates Singapore I think. It’s Southeast Asia with lots of ex-pats – ex-pat people, ex-pat food, ex-pat brands… Asia for Beginners, I’ve heard it called.

So maybe I’ve reached the point where I can order fish head noodles without thinking twice, but there are some things I still have some trouble with. For now, I think I’ll stay away from pig organ soup.

In Laos, I saw several street vendors selling grilled birds on a stick. I’m talking about three or four little songbird-sized birds, grilled on a stick, satay style. I saw an Aussie gobble one of these down.

I’m a pretty adventurous eater I think, but the songbird satay was a bit too fear factor for me. In Bangkok, late one night, I ate a handful of roasted cockroach-sized beetles that I bought from a street stall. I’m not sure why I find this less freaky than songbird satay, and I can’t satisfyingly explain to an orthodox vegetarian why any one meat is better or worse than another. Food literally becomes, well, us, and in that sense maybe our connection to it is too deep and innate to be fully explained.

You end up saying, “it’s just how I feel dammit.”

Anyway, beyond steamed chicken feet and foul-smelling durian fruit, there are a few less obvious things I’ve had trouble eating in Southeast Asia. The first one that comes to mind is cooked iceberg lettuce, which is almost always in porridge or congee. It’s all a discovery process, and it’s a whole lot of fun.

Monday. That means all-you-can-eat dim sum style pizza tonight at Goat Hill Pizza! Basically, that means they serve all their regular pizza varieties, but they walk around like dim sum servers, offering little slices to the salivating throng.

And pizza, of course, means… beer!

Beer lovers, check out RateBeer.com, the creation and pet project of one Joseph Tucker. I interviewed him once, for a job at Vodafone. He was tremendously qualified – far too qualified to work for the likes of me – and he seemed like a super nice guy. He told me he created the site simply as a place where he and a few friends could talk about their favorite beers, and now…

“RateBeer is widely recognized as the most accurate and most-visited source for beer information. RateBeer is an independent world site for craft beer enthusiasts and is dedicated to serving the entire craft beer community through beer education, promotion and outreach.”
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