Saturday, August 25, 2012

Hoi An & Hue: Where we slept, ate, and shopped

An Air Asia promotion (RM 59 one way) in 2011 enticed us to travel to DaNang in 2012. We split our time between Hoi An (3 nights) and Hue (4 nights). Our biggest problem - not enough time to try all the tempting foods or to fill up on dishes that hard to find in KL.
Hotels:

We used Booking.Com for the Hoi An hotel and Agoda for the Hue Hotel. We looked for a reasonably priced hotel close to the city center. We read reviews to identify hotels with great prices and serious flaws. Both hotels included breakfast (individually prepared eggs, a Vietnamese noodle dish, fruits, bread, and cheese), WiFi, and cable television. The down side of eat breakfast at the hotel is that we lost 7 opportunities to indulge in a morning pho or banh mi. Both hotels had complimentary fruit plates and complementary water.

Elephants in Bangkok and Romantic Swans in Hoi An
Hard to shower & ruin the artistry

In Hoi An we stayed at the Hai Au Hotel (USD 37). It arranged our airport pick up (USD 16) and our later trip to DaNang's railroad station. The front desk staff was exuberant. They learned our names immediately, oriented us to the city, arranged tours, and answered questions. The readily gave advice on various plans. For example, we booked a 5:00 a.m. tour for My Son. The staff told us that the heat could become oppressive if we tried a later start. A staff member called us at 4:30 a.m., waited with us until the bus came, and told us that we would have food on the bus and also be back in time for the hotel breakfast. The hotel was fine, but it is the staff that would bring us back there.. (Nothing to do with the hotel but too memorable to ignore was our My Son tour guide - he  gave a largely scatological presentation, full of innuendos, on the lingam.)

In Hue we stayed at the Camillia (USD 32).Very different from the Hai Au, more like a business hotel. Our room was spacious with a complete range of amenities. For some reason the hotel had adopted a love theme. Its breakfast/dining room was in pink. Fortunately it had a good view of the city to distract us from the decor. We used their travel desk to buy stamps, arrange a tour guide and driver to visit the emperors' tombs (our guide's  English was mediocre) and book a car back to DaNang. The staff were pleasant, but the travel staff did not have the finally tuned sense of how to match a tourist with available tours and services.




Food and Restaurants 



Everywhere pho is sold and served on the street. In 2002 when we visited Hanoi we were reluctant to sit on a small stool next to the road. Not this time! We didn't eat pho in Hoi An because we were either coming from a meal or on our way to one.  Hue was a different. Hue restaurant menus tended to give generic descriptions, so we easily changed our plans if something else came up. Hoi An restaurant menus  gave full details - a much more seductive approach that had us salivating throughout the day. In both places we had dishes that we virtually dissected to identify the ingredients including the spices. Restaurant prices, especially alcohol and beer (USD 0.75), are 1/3 to 1/2 the price of comparable KL restaurants.

Where we ate
Good local recommendation  (From Camillia Hotel, turn left, walk
several blocks, Chau Loan Pho on right hand side - near corner)
Not as iconic as the pho are the lemon juice drinks - cool, biting and refreshing. On a similar vein I found mocktails and combination fruit drinks too sweet.

On a walking tour of Hoi An we stopped at a merchant's house (over 200 years old). A family member was making these white rose dumplings. This family is the only one that makes them and sells them to Hoi An restaurants. A treat exclusive to Hoi An.


We ate at the Secret Garden, were so happy with the meal we returned later for another dinner. On our second visit we revisited two dishes from our first meal and found them equally satisfying.

 5 rainbow salad  revisited - sea food (shrimp, octopus, calamari) carrots,
cabbages, spring onions, lime fish sauce dressing sprinkled with 
 peanuts


Sour beef roll ups (again)
Snake Head fish (yes, it can be eaten and
it is delicious)


Fish Remains



Not pictured was a seafood soup. It had calamari, octopus, and shrimp in a flavorful seafood broth and consistency similar to egg drop soup, not to track down a recipe for the various items.

In between dinners at the Secret Garden we ate at the Sakura restaurant. It was close to an ice cream stand, which we intended to visit after the meal.  We had a (1) mango seafood salad, (2) green salad with sour sauce, (3) tiger prawns stuffed with crab, and (4) grilled fish fillet in banana leaf. The "sour sauce" was a nice tangy vinaigrette. Everything was well prepared and tasty. We never got around to eating ice cream.

Grilled fish in a banana leaf

Tiger Prawns - aptly named

In Hue we scanned the menu at L'Aubergine, saw the tarte flambe and vowed to visit when we were ready for a "snack". Our snack evolved into a lunch with grilled chicken with lemon leaves and a tomato salad. The tarte flambe was fine, but it was the chicken and tomato salad that brought us back a second time. The tomatoes in the tomato salad tasted like tomatoes used to taste. The second time we reluctantly skipped the chicken and had chicken with chili and lemon grass and caramelized fish. No complaints if we had more time we would have explored more of the menu. (The biggest issue was to eat a "regular" meal or search out another bowl of pho.)

Caramelized fish



Grilled chicken with lemon leaves

Chicken with chili and lemon grass. The 'flower" is fashioned
from the outside of a tomato. 
For our last meal we went to the Villa Hue, run by the Hue Tourism College. The winner of the evening was the beef la lot (la lot are wrapped with betel nut leaves - although the menu described the leaves as "herbs"). Our major disappointment was that they were out of the three flavor creme brulees (ginger, cinnamon, - can't remember the third). Our conclusion is that Sunday may not be the best night to go if you crave something on the menu.

Here the beef la lot looks like slugs - really tasty

Hungry yet? You can see why we have been cooking a lot of Vietnamese meals since we returned.

Shopping

Hoi An is described as a "shopper's paradise." It certainly seems so if you want clothes or shoes or want to have something made. A glance in a shop window will bring out a staff member say "take a look" or the more striking "buy something." We did want to pick up some things for our "gift drawer" to have an inventory of holiday gifts and small token gifts.


On the food side we bought 100 gram bags of Trung Nguyen (easier to get recommendations for snacks than for coffee; Trung Nguyen seemed to dominate the market) along with several traditional coffee pots. (We bargained and got the pots for about USD 1.50  b/c we were buying several.) In Hoi An we bought Banh Dau Xanh a biscotti-like cookie (USD 1.50 for the cookies or USD 2.00 if they are in a box). In Hue we bought Dac San Hue, a sesame seed candy (sweet and gummy) (USD 0.60 in a grocery store, more at mini-marks and still more at the airport). We also bought Hee Dau Phong similar to a peanut brittle. Tasty, but pieces where not individually wrapped that meant tossing left overs in a purse was a bad idea. For ourselves we bought different coffee blends, nuoc mam, chili sauce, and chili pho sauce.

In Hoi An we also bought some kitchen tools - a scrapper that has proved to be excellent to julienne carrots,  and cucumbers, a gadget to make decorative spring onions (it will be the first to go) and an industrial strength peeler.



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