The Irish Stew
Earlier this week, The Cart specials popped up on my Twitter feed and I was happy to see, for the first time, Irish stew among the items on offer. It prompted the post below and the explanation of how it has come to mean more to me than the sum of its potatoes, carrots etc.
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As a foreigner, before you can marry a Vietnamese national, you have to go through the kind of interview best known for its dramatisation in the movie Green Card.
Basically they want to check it’s not just a marriage of convenience.
Having seen the movie, I filled my head with lots of useless facts about her family and her favourite food, cosmetics, TV shows etc. In reality the interview was actually a lot more friendly than I’d imagined.
After a general chat they suddenly hit me with: “When did you realise that you had fallen in love with your wife to be?”
Had I prepared an answer then I may have come up with something that made me look a little less bad. Then again any other answer would have been a lie.
“When she made me Irish stew,” I said.
I’m not proud of it but there was some sentiment behind it rather than just my-wife-as-personal-chef. Honestly we both cook as much as each other.
You see I’d just spent a lonely year in rural Cameroon. A year which in many ways I had chosen to do after the break up of a pretty disastrous relationship.
In my new apartment in Hanoi I was still marvelling that hot water came out of the tap every single time I turned it on. I’d stand there grinning and shaking my head in wonder as the steam rose.
I had just met my now wife and I had cooked for her first. Some days later she told me that she would return the favour but wouldn’t tell me what she was making. I’m pretty good with Vietnamese food but feared it might be something I’d struggle with. Either way I was working down the other end of the studio flat as these amazing smells wafted by.
I kept asking what it was and she’d tell me it was a surprise.
Finally she relented and said: “It’s Irish stew”.
Still bruised from a previous relationship, still grateful for home comforts after Africa, I nearly burst into tears on the spot. Making me food was one thing, going to the effort of researching how to cook something so foreign moved me beyond words.
Now, just over a year into the marriage, I teasingly sometimes refer to the Irish stew moment as being “back then” when she’d do anything for me (and I for her).
“That was my trap”, she says, with a mock evil glint in her eye.
This magic is more than just good weather
We continue to enthuse about Hanoi’s beautiful weather but the more I think about it the more this feels too good to just be about blue skies and breezes.
For a few weeks a year Hanoi becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, the weather is gorgeous but how beautiful can weather be? Perhaps it is the light too. Maybe it’s the air.
It’s hard to know if this atmosphere of romance comes from the all the young couples that appear this time of year or from Hanoi itself. But it’s more than youthful lust and love. It’s optimism too. And excitement and energy.
Does it feel so perfect because the rest of the year is so difficult? If you arrived in Hanoi for the first time today would you still feel it?
These days will be forgotten between the sweats and the shivers of summer and winter and yet, today, it seems like enough to keep me here forever.
It seems like a more than reasonable trade off.
Living with The Cart Nghi Tam
So The Cart Nghi Tam has been open a week and we’re getting used to new customers, new tastes, new opening hours and new staff.
New staff at this point are limited to taking on handyman Tuan Anh who did such a brilliant job in getting the new place ready that we talked him into joining the payroll. His main job is selling Tet trees but there are few more seasonal vocations than that, so for the time being he’s helping us out on delivery. The man is a legend. At one point when fixing the electrics they blew and he climbed up a pylon on the other side of the street to fix it – despite our protestations.
I once saw my father in law do that when the lights blew at Tet – after several shots of whisky.
We’ve also added a local young student who studies morning and helps out in the afternoon and she’s slowly learning the ropes making drinks and cooking. The harder task is finding someone comfortable enough with customers so Loan can leave her front desk spot.
We worked round the clock to get the place open and now she’s working 12 hours a day seven days a week. I’ve got into the habit of getting up with her at six during the week and having my breakfast in the Cart. Then I’m at work well before eight. It means I can reasonably finish by five without any guilt and then I check she’s still standing on my way home before I get in and put the dinner on.
I spent this weekend feeling guilty as she is working while I’m off. She won’t let me work in The Cart so I’ve made myself busy fixing the website and taking photos for the Facebook page. I’ve also got some new shots ready for framing to decorate the place a little. Tonight I had a stirfry ready to go when she got in. Two hours later she’s asleep and I’m typing this. I should also mention sisters-in-law Trang and Huong. Trang regularly works nights elsewhere and days at The Cart. Huong has a very good job in the media but isn’t above helping out in the kitchens.
An incredible family.
But despite a little fatigue we’re delighted with the way the place has been received. There’s been a steady stream of customers and they’re learning about The Cart. In the first couple of days we have to send all the pies to the Au Trieu branch because nobody in Nghi Tam was buying them. Now they’re starting to sell quickly as people return day after day for pies for lunches and takeaway dinners.
Meanwhile my hunch that there was a decent bacon sandwich gap in the market has turned out to be accurate. Lots of Punto Italia coffee being sold too.
In the brief two hours I had with Loan tonight it was hard to switch off. More food options for veggies was discussed and a curried vegetable pie recipe was sought and found. Skyping my parents, my Dad suggested samosas. Great idea.
In one month we’ll be back in the UK for Christmas. We’re going to have to take some hard decisions about running the two outlets then. Right now it seems that staffing problems will mean we’ll close Au Trieu briefly and do all the delivery from Nghi Tam. Most of our customers will be overseas by then. We will lose the walk-ins but continue to keep up the office delivery.
But despite the stresses and strains Loan is smiling. Lots of compliments for her and hew new cafe and she can see that the masterplan is working. We’ve a bottle of champagne in the fridge we haven’t cracked yet. Sometime soon there’ll be a cafe lock-in for the family.
Thanks to all those who have come to eat or who just said hi and good luck. It’s nice to see some faces coming back for a second and third time. We really really appreciate it. Oh and if your local is Au Trieu not Nghi Tam then we do have plans to give the original location some love. Probably in the new year.
Thanks again. Life is tiring but it’s good.
The New Cart Nghi Tam is open (needs staff urgently)
Back at my desk doing my proper job following the excitement of the weekend. But yes, our big news is that The Cart Nghi Tam is now open.
Doubly brilliant for me is that we live round the corner so I picked up an already bagged up latte and muesli on the way to work this morning and had something of a luxurious breakfast while I waited for my computer to boot (it takes a while here).
Anyway this is just a quick in-my-lunch-hour post to say how chuffed/knackered we are in equal measures. The place actually looks better than we ever could have hoped and everyone is telling us what a great location it is and yet it’s also off the Xuan Dieu beaten track.
Chatting with Puku’s co-owner Daragh yesterday we mused on how incredible it is that you can open a cafe in Vietnam in under a month and on a fairly limited budget. Back home the paperwork would probably take twice and the cost would be prohibitive. However don’t ever think it is easy. On Friday night alone signs turned up in the wrong colour, menus turned up full of spelling mistakes suggesting our designs had been retyped in instead of just being printed. On Sunday when we were working towards opening we had three power outages lasting 20 minutes a time.
Right now, still trying to sort out our coffee cup conundrum I’m simoultaneously making enquiries about importing reuseable eco cups while also sounding out other coffee shops owners on the possibility of a collective that could order together in a bulk large enough to make decent paper cup manufacture worthwhile.
But by far the biggest problem is staffing. If I hadn’t heard the same problems voiced elsewhere then I’d be worried that it was us. Typical of our experience was a new recruit who turned up on his first day and then left after 15 minutes never to return again – not answering his phone when we’ve called him. No experience required – there has to be someone out there. If you know someone – get them to ring Loan.
We went out for dinner Thursday night after a quick stroll around our corner of the lake. It was doubley enjoyable because we have little time for each other recently. We both work long hours on our day jobs then spend the evenings on menu design, updating websites and generally working our way through a lengthy to-do list.
Either way it’s been worth it – the new place is great. The coffee is wonderful and we’re so glad we imported a decent machine. The food and drink is the same fresh mix of sandwiches, pies, pasties, cakes and juices – plus a new beefed up breakfast menu.
It’s phenomenally exciting and seeing the cafe open gives you a real sense of pride. I should also remind you that this is not my Cafe, it’s my wife’s. I just help out when I can but Loan’s hospitality experience stretches back well over a decade before we even met.
Our next break is Christmas (staff recruitment allowing) but until then it’s hard to imagine a break from a seven day a week , 12 hours a day cycle.
Luckily I know a great place to stock up on caffeine.
In London as in Hanoi when you’re getting old
From Nick Lowe interview in GQ:
GQ: I’ve always been interested in what it was about London in the ’70s that produced so much great music. What was going on there?
Nick Lowe: London was a real dump in the 70s, when it belonged to me and my friends, because, like most cities, you kind of hand them off. You’re in charge for a bit and then you don’t go out anymore. You say, “Oh god, it’s going to be too crowded,” or “Blimey, not that place again.” So you hand it off to the next blokes, but when it was ours, it was a real dump. In the main, a real dump. Nothing like it is now, with its cafes and its sort of wannabe New York stuff. We had to make our own fun, you know. It was very hard to come by.
Development Working
I always took the word “developing” from an NGO point of view to be something of a polite euphemism.
After all, “developing countries”, was a phrase that was coined to replace “third world” which had little suggestion at all of any positivity. As a kid watching Bob Geldof plug Live Aid the Third World to me was starvation and flies.
So “developing” for the most part seemed like doublespeak. Surely the whole point was that the third world wasn’t developing – that was the problem.
The year I spent in Cameroon saw a country not so much developing and unravelling.
But Vietnam, as ever is different. Even the people who introduced the use of “developing”
couldn’t have imagined anything like this.
My wife’s family home is in a small suburb on the outskirts of town. It used to be in the countryside but urban sprawl caught up with it. The footprint of the house is about the size of a badminton court and there are four floors which housed, at one time, seven of them.
As people do in Vietnam they built their own home – or rather saved for, oversaw and organised its construction. Until recently I had always assumed that the fairly grand house I saw was how it had always been.
Later I learned that, little more than a decade ago, they all lived on the ground floor. So did all their neighbours. There wasn’t one two-storey house in the neighbourhood. Beyond that toilets and washing facilities were external and often shared.
What’s amazing is not how their family has prospered but how all the families have prospered. All houses are now several stories high. Beyond that houses are now being extended further.
The location out beyond Big C is a huge growth area so the neighbourhood is ringed with high rise tower blocks.
Multiply this on a grand scale and this is what is happening in Hanoi. Relentlessly upward and outward. Coping with migration to the cities coupled with a population explosion.
A colleague tells me that, as a kid, Westlake was like the sea. They couldn’t see the other side simply because there was nothing to see. They couldn’t view it from any height because there were no tall buildings.
Development in Vietnam really means development.
Weighted luck
There’s no polite way of putting this – I’m an utter arsehole in Vietnamese supermarkets and the like.
Its just the layer upon layer of irritation. The too-loud music on a loop is bad but go to an electrical shop and they’re liable to have four sound systems playing four separate tracks competing with each. All that with the in-store muzak on top.
Then there is the paying. You’re taken to a distant counter which needs to process an incredible amount of paperwork. You then have to take that paperwork to another counter on another floor to get your goods. If you want the guarantee then that’s yet another counter and more in-triplicate paperwork.
Normally they also insist on checking each item before you leave so it has to be unpacked and plugged in and you have to nod your head in agreement that, yes, it does work.
Bizarrely it was corruption that rescued us from the sheer irritation of Nguyen Kim electrical store and had us smiling as we left the store today. Having bought a Philips juicer and blender for the new Cart we were allowed a go for each item on the lucky spinning wheel.
I took the first spin, spinning it anti-clockwise until it all but stopped on a prize, before lurching a full half turn back clockwise and settling on the free glass option. Curious.
The next time it slowed a full half turn away from the glass before again spinning backwards to the glass. We scoffed.
We already had an audience of numerous shop assistants who were slowly realising that the in-store Philips promotion was a bit of a scam. Just to test it we had a third, fourth and fifth go and every time it swung back to the glass. Laughing shop assistants queued up to have a go as the Philips promotions girls became more and more sheepish.
Considering that the best prize we could have won was a thermos mug it was hardly worth complaining about. In fact we left the place giggling and, as we travelled down the escalator, we could clearly see the back of the spinning wheel. There, obviously where the glass was located, was the large outline of a weight.
“I gave up my life as a nomadic traveller to become a corporate cog”
These days there are more versions of the backpacker than ever before. There are “location independent professionals”. There are the social media types who are somehow miraculously supported by their blog and the occasional writing commission that comes their way. There are the underqualified English teachers at the subsistence end of the scale. There are the people who reinvent themselves as everything from film makers to artists.
I’ve recently hit 40 and to recap I spent three and a half years of my thirties doing volunteer work with Voluntary Service Overseas in Vietnam and Cameroon. I spent another six months in Nicaragua woefully underemployed as “independent volunteer” and occasional writer. All of that was inspired by eight months travelling through South East Asia and Central America.
That may add up to less than five years but it was spread out between 32 and 39 effectively dominating a decade.
Now I am sure there are some people who make this all work and achieve some kind of enlightenment along the way. I learnt some incredible life lessons not least that so much of what we worry about in the west just doesn’t matter. That’s truly a backpacker cliche but it’s true.
But I also learned that most of the people who tell you that they were making money along the way and they “don’t need much” were either living in utter squalor, somebody else was bankrolling or they were living off previously amassed savings.
I learned that a large part of a decade without paying into your pension or forking out on a mortgage felt great at the time and less so afterwards. I learned that no one smart takes time out in their thirties. The drop outs tended to be much older or much younger.
Or to put it another way – they either still had time to make money later or they’d made it already.
Because whatever anyone tells you about living on a stipend salary, or paying your way with jobs along the route, or learning to live with very little etc etc – you are subsidising how you live. Living in $5 Thai beach shacks may not make much of a dint in bank balance but it isn’t boosting it either and after a while that hurts.
Equally my VSO living allowance did keep me in rice and bia hoi but it didn’t pay for Christmas. It didn’t pay for that extra flight home when it was that or lose it in rural Cameroon. Despite some small grants available it didn’t pay for my laptop. It didn’t pay for the crawlingly slow internet that I’d have completely imploded without.
No complaints now but at the time I kidded myself that I was living cheaply. My day to day spends were covered but I was still bashing the bank account for everything else.
So so far so dull. I’m 40 years old and I got married and now I am lecturing. Fair enough. And I suppose I’m saying that in the end we still need to get a job, buy a house and settle down. A cliche, right?
Except it’s not. Increasingly the cliche is the drop out, the flaky view that we need so little, the idea that we’ll get by somehow then hope we die before we get old. Travel companies, travel blogs, gap year companies, volunteer orgs – this is what they’ll tell you.
The truth is, perhaps, we get only get one retirement in life and we can choose when to take it. As much as I enjoyed mine it’s only now dawning on me that I may not be able to afford another. In the end you’re only ever delaying work you’re not avoiding it.
We hear a lot about western living not being sustainable but there’s nothing sustainable about having nothing.
A New Cart: We’re building something here. All the pieces matter.
We’ve long been looking for a site for a second Cart in the Westlake area.
Yesterday, having handed over a cheque for three months rent (ouch), we were able to announce our plans to open in Nghi Tam, the small corner of the Tay Ho area where we live.
The property was so right for us that we had no time to waste. Financially it probably would have been better to leave it six months but we should just about be okay to get this place up and running.
Why so right? Well Nghi Tam has a real identity and sense of community and yet doesn’t really have its own cafe. We had looked at places on Xuan Dieu that were wedged in alongside competing businesses and we would have had to pay for that privilege.
We’d also looked at a couple of empty lobbies in newly built apartments. Surely a coffee shop would add a little value for the residents. Better than just leaving it empty, no? But we were always quoted thousands and on two separate occasions we heard “I’m hoping my daughter might like to open a cafe here”.
We’ve asked ourselves what defines The Cart and what we’re really trying to provide is a more homely and wholesome version of fastfood. It’s never going to be a place where you spend the afternoon with your laptop. In fact in fitting out the new place we’re asking ourselves whether providing WIFI is a good idea at all.
If online reviews of other outlets are anything to go by then customers elsewhere seem to be put off by tables dominated by laptops and long drunk drinks.
If we could get the balance right then The Cart would be a place better for reading than working. More of a meeting and eating joint than a hang out. We’d be happy with that.
World domination is not in our plans but it would be remiss of us to open without trying to ensure some kind of consistency. Not so much with what has gone before – more with what could be in the future. There’s also a possibility that the original Cart in Au Trieu will one day be remodelled accordingly. But to answer the question that many have already asked us – no there are absolutely no plans to close the original.
In many ways, in taking over the premises from Nghi Tam’s very popular corner shop, the dynamic is already there. Reliable and friendly service on your doorstep. A coffee and a bacon sandwich on the way to work. A lunchtime bowl of soup. Mid afternoon tea and cake to boost flagging energy levels. A takeaway pie for a quick snack before going out in the evening.
If everything goes to plan we can open inside a month. However current issues we are wrestling with include: the heartbreaking price of espresso machines, sourcing quality takeaway coffee cups, finding a decent juicer that could live up to the awesome one we carried back from the UK, finding staff who can learn quickly enough to hit the ground running (any advice or assistance on any of these would be very welcome).
As ever, the most fun job is making the music playlist. We get a lot of compliments for our choons (a different playlist everyday – you won’t hear the same track twice in one week).
Oh and while we might fit some tables outside – inside will be entirely no smoking.
All in all – these are very exciting times.
