The Irish Stew
Posted: November 29, 2011 Filed under: family, Food and drink, getting married, Reflections, The Cart | Tags: cart, food, irish stew, wife 1 Comment »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.
***
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.
A New Cart: We’re building something here. All the pieces matter.
Posted: September 27, 2011 Filed under: Food and drink, ho tay, nghi tam, tay ho, The Cart, work | Tags: coffee, food, ho tay, nghi tam, tay ho, the cart, westlake 9 Comments »
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.
Fruit *is* rock n roll
Posted: March 24, 2011 Filed under: Food and drink, Stories | Tags: food, fruit, stories, vietnam 1 Comment »
Once, for reasons to long to go into, I found myself on the “tour bus” of a relatively famous Vietnamese girl group.
We picked them up on the way to the gig – there they were all hot pants, high heels and inch thick make up.
Phew rock n roll, I thought. Later they were to perform to a group of sex-starved teenage boys at a detention centre. I don’t like making war film comparisons when writing about Vietnam but it was hard not to think of that scene in Apocalypse Now as they strutted their stuff as the sun went down.
Anyway, earlier the three girls has settled themselves into their bus seats and delved into handbags and brought out…fruit.
Then with inch long red nails they proceeded to peel, separate and share it.
Rock n Roll, not so much. These were no wildchilds. There were to be no lines snorted up 500,o00 dong notes.
At the gig the young boys were beside themselves as the girl group sang and gyrated – although strangely they didn’t storm the stage until we had an apple eating competition. The lure of fruit.
Elsewhere I see fruit being the central part of teen picnics. At a workshop I attended today, fruit was already peeled and plated for us. Dessert options are limited in Vietnam – but there’s always fruit.
Nothing says, well, anything like fruit.
I have a rough awareness that certain fruits are considered hot, that others are believed to give you spots. The whole business of eating fruit is more complex than you might imagine.
But I’ve also met men who are less willing fruit eaters. Fruit and tea for girls, cigarettes, coffee and beer for men. We get the better deal – they get better skin and longevity.
It’s possible to buy pre-peeled and segmented pomelos, but mostly fruit is bought by the kilo – sometimes it’s so much that you literally have to share or let it rot.
Well-written, funny, accurate, useful, meh, FAIL!
Posted: February 25, 2011 Filed under: expats, Food and drink, Reflections | Tags: expats, food, new hanoian, social media, the cart 25 Comments »It has come to my attention that this post is one of a couple of posts on this blog being used to promote a personal attack on the people behind the New Hanoian. I wanted to distance myself from that and clarify that while I have a number of issues with the site and the culture it promotes I actually have a great deal of respect for its founders who I believe are good, well-meaning people. In addition, any problems I have with the site I have taken it up with them directly. My thoughts on this, and any other subject are always published with my name, Steve Jackson or occasionally versions of the Ourman name (possibly Ourmanwhere or Our Man in Hanoi).
Being so close to a Vietnamese business has been an eye opener.
To quickly recap, The Cart, a bakery, sandwich delivery, coffee shop etc is my wife’s place. She was originally in partnership with a very good and old friend who sadly died. She took it on and my assistance has been minimal – just a little bit of marketing here and there.
Vietnam is just so entrepreneurial that it’s easy to believe that doing business isn’t hard but it is. The very biggest problem is that your building can be taken away from you at a moment’s notice by the landlord. Build up a business and the plot becomes more valuable and you, seemingly, have more money to extract. Often too much of a temptation for a property owner.
Where do you start after that?
Recruitment is a nightmare in Hanoi. Anyone working in retail or hospitality will tell you the same. It’s hard enough to find people, even harder to retain them.
Decent kitchen equipment has to be imported. At Christmas we lugged back at 10 kilo juicer, paying 100 euros extra baggage for the privilege. It effectively added 30% to its price. We’ve travelled to Bangkok just to buy coffee cups.
Lose electricity for the day and half of what you can offer the customer is gone – not to mention the stock in the fridge than can be damaged.
In the rainy season a downpour can leave the whole place underwater. Constant building work in their alley, as in any other in Hanoi, means it’s difficult to keep the place free from dirt and dust.
In a wider business context there are tax shakedowns – a set amount regardless of income. Inflation is currently so rampant that while turnover is going up, profits are going down. Butter, a key ingredient of cakes, pies, pasties etc is now so valuable that blocks of the stuff in supermarkets have security tags. I kid you not.
Next week petrol goes up 24%. The Cart offers free delivery.
Over the near three years my wife has been in business she has built up an excellent staff. She had no intention of making it a family business but turned to two of her sisters when she failed to be able to recruit elsewhere. They have done her proud.
Alongside her another member of staff, who has long worked with my wife, has become family.
The newcomer is the young man who came in to do delivery. Unlike others before him he has stuck. He wants more money and more responsibility. He’ll get both in time.
Once when they had staffing issues I took a turn answering the phones. I was worse than hopeless. It turned out that so many of their customers were regulars that names and addresses were hardly needed when ordering lunchtime deliveries.
Teachers, office workers, NGO employees rang expecting to speak to my extremely capable wife and instead they got me, asking them to say that again or, worse still, spell it out.
But now we’ve reached a point where my wife no longer needs to put the pies in the oven herself at 7am as she can trust staff to open up for her. Just as well because when I get home in the evening she’s doing the books, or looking over recipes for the next day’s specials or chopping up veggies for soup.
Those regulars are a loyal bunch but I’ve also heard Loan and her sisters tell some horrific tales of customers.
One guy requests delivery across town and then regularly asks for a discount of a couple of thousand Dong once they arrive. On one occasion he swore poverty despite the fact that they could see the 100,000 Dong notes in his wallet.
Once my wife’s sister climbed up a dozen floors to deliver to an apartment because power meant the lifts weren’t working. A tip would have been nice. Thanks would have been great. They complained she was late.
It’s a successful business, although you could argue that it makes my wife a reasonable local living rather than an “international” one. It’s the kind of money volunteers would refer to as a stipend.
Personally I love the place. Now I’m working I miss mid morning coffees there. I miss being a customer rather than the bosses’ husband. Real customers get priority – I just get in the way.
For my wife there’s been no doubting the single hardest thing to deal with and that has been the New Hanoian. I say that despite knowing and liking the guys who set up the site and also realising that publicitywise The Cart has benefited far more than it has suffered.
When one reviewer said they had been in with their whole family and ordered meals and drinks and found, apparently, nothing was edible we were flabbergasted – not least because surely staff would remember that many left platefuls. We contacted them, they said perhaps it wasn’t last week after all. Maybe it was last month or the month before that.
Someone who didn’t know last weekend from three months earlier still apparently remembered enough details to publicly trash the place. And yet we still couldn’t work out when she might have eaten there. But the one star damning review remains.
One guy gave us one star because we wouldn’t deliver him a single $2 pie 5KMs to his house. Our website says we don’t do that – if we did we’d be out of business by now. But the review remains.
We always used to write to the negative reviews to try and explain and or apologise. We got the impression that they were embarrassed that we even noticed as all but one didn’t write back. I assume they thought that their criticism was playing to an expat crowd and that Vietnamese owners wouldn’t ever know – let alone call them on it.
Most recently someone who “knows a thing or two about falafels” because, apparently, he was from New York, slated The Cart version. We’d just added it permanently to the menu by genuinely popular request. It was gratifying when a regular suggested online that the original reviewer might be better off going back to New York.
Not that all less than positive reviews are unwarranted. We’re in the process of ordering new covers for the well-used furniture after an New Hanoian complained about our “cozy room”. They were right, it was looking a little shabby.
One reviewer gave us one out of five because our cakes weren’t as good as the (five star) Metropole. Expats can be brutal. To my mind we are so overly respectfully treated here that it’s easy to forget we aren’t experts at everything. My wife hates the fact that reviews regularly suggest that western entrepreneurs “deserve support” while Vietnamese aren’t afforded such a courtesy.
Despite all of the above The Cart averages a very solid four of of five and currently nestles at a very respectable 11th out of nearly 300 cafes listed throughout Hanoi. The Cart has some very very good reviews including one from me – back when I was just a customer who liked the look of the owner (and her cakes).
But we know it’s not for everyone. It’s cheap, fresh food, simply done, with little pretension. That is all.
I try to remind my wife that the places we like and frequent are often way below us on this league table and come in for even worse hammerings than us.
Like pretty much every expat in town I find the New Hanoian addictive reading, incredibly useful and frequently maddening. I used to review regularly, even gaining “elite status”. However since then I have seen tears, near-sackings, upset and whole weeks lost trying to get to the bottom of just why would someone say that – as a result of reviews. Well, I’ve lost the will to do that to anyone else.
After a hard week my wife would be in pieces from a review. I’d try to calm and reassure her despite being furious myself. I know the arguments in favour of it but it doesn’t stop it hurting. We reached a point where even positive reviews were a double edged sword because they’d inevitably spur someone else to mark us down. Perhaps they wanted to represent themselves as having higher standards than the previous reviewer.
One expat entrepreneur told me about his surprise and horror at being reviewed in this way.
“I’m not an actor,” he said. “I just want to run a shop.”
Even in this social media, peer-reviewing world – it’s a thought that has stayed with me.
Business isn’t easy. Not here, not anywhere.
But The Cart goes on.
Update: As the lunacy surrounding the issue posted at the top of the blog continues and as allegations become increasingly deranged (on whichever site) I’m switching off comments on this post as the last thing I want is for it to become another place for for and against factions to battle. Hopefully I can switch them on again once this blows over.
Like this:
#whatieatinvietnam
Posted: February 8, 2011 Filed under: expats, Food and drink, Hanoi | Tags: food, Hanoi, streetfood, vietnam 7 Comments »
#See the end of this piece for more #whatieatinvietnam from other bloggers.
There’s such a focus on food among expat bloggers and tweeters in Vietnam that it’s almost a given that you’re a serious street food eater.
The truth is I’m not and never have been. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional helping of bun cha or pho when it’s a little cooler. I’ll also happily down anything from a banh cuon to a banh mi but I’m neither an expert nor a regular.
In particular over the cold weather I found that local foodstuffs just didn’t quite sit with me. I needed sticks-to-your-bones stuff. Assorted lemongrass, ginger and coriander flavours didn’t cut it when all I wanted was meaty, hot and stodgy.
At other times I reach fish sauce overload and I can’t stand to even smell the stuff. That basically means having to give all Vietnamese food a wide berth for a while. I recall one month-long stretch during my first time in Vietnam that I just couldn’t look at any local food. Happily it passed.
That’s not to say that, for the most part, I’m not happy enough to sit on a plastic stool and I’m getting pretty adept at shovelling rice with chopsticks but one-up-manship street food eating is not for me. It’s pretty easy to tell the real local food lovers from the fakes.
That said you won’t find me at the other end of the spectrum either. Expat mag articles on “the best burger in…” are just irritating. Likewise the New Hanoian contributors on what is or what isn’t the best pizza, burger etc can grate. Also the near hysteria that accompanies any new western food joint soon gets tired.
Putting aside Vietnamese food which does play a significant part – probably the main difference between what I eat here and what I eat in the UK is that I everything I eat in Vietnam is freshly made. I eat virtually no processed foods.
If I’m eating at the in-laws they know that I love the spring rolls but I’m less of a fan of the boiled chicken. I’m a big fan of ribs too but they’re hardly the most challenging Vietnamese food. Rice is good. Shellfish too. Hotpot is hit or miss for me but can be great.
I do very much enjoy the wide selection of Japanese food here. It’s certainly not cheap compared to a bowl of pho but it’s a whole lot cheaper than home. I recently tried Korean food for the first time and loved it and I intend to be back.
My favourite restaurant here is actually Moroccan, Le Marrakech works for me every time. If I want comfort food I’ll happily cross town to R&R. If I want to meet friends at a hangout then Puku does the job. The Indian food at Foodshop 45 is a regular treat too.
There are certain expat staples that don’t sit well. A certain pizza/burger chain seems to have become big by just removing salt, taste and decent ingredients from it’s food. Western food for the international palette. The blander the better.
The Metropole Chocolate Buffet and Love Chocolate and all that, each to their own, but it seems like decadence for decadence sake. Just how much chocolate can you eat in a buffet? Is it the food or the idea that appeals? And if it’s the idea then why exactly?
At Love Chocolate I also find the Vietnamese staff outfit of maids uniforms slightly freaky too though I am not entirely sure why.
Certainly it’s not luxury I have a problem with. We’ve splashed occasionally on the Sheraton Lobster Buffet. Well, twice, the first time we made the mistake of ordering a bottle of wine too and nearly bankrupted ourselves. Recently we made a repeat visit and stuck to water instead while hoovering up assorted lobster, crab, sushi and steak.
Lunch is normally a sandwich from The Cart. Yes, it’s my wife’s business and I (mostly) don’t have to pay (sometimes she makes me) but I’m pretty sure I’d still order lunch from there more often than not. Where I work there aren’t that many options nearby and it’s easier to order. I’m biased but for what it is – simple food at a good price – I think it takes some beating. But I’ve spent the majority of the past 20 years eating a sandwich for lunch so it’s a hard habit to break.
I still struggle for a bar that I’m comfortable in. Le Pub Xuan Dieu is local but a little too smokey and a little too cliquey though it has great staff. R&R is too far away. I’m more than happy to drink bia hoi but there’s no regular hangout. I really love the Windmill, a microbrewery with pretty decent food too.
For coffee, an Italian latte in the winter and a Vietnamese cafe sua da in the summer does the job. It’s far from a sophisticated treat but I’ve a soft spot for Highland Coffee’ Cafe Freeze on warm days.
Finally I don’t do shock eating – whether it’s bugs, dog, snake or whatever for varying reasons. Frankly eating a dog is no more wrong to me than eating beef but when tays eat that stuff it’s normally a “look at me” thing, accompanied with the inevitable YouTube video. I have enough friends working for environmental NGOs to know how damaging the whole “make you strong” snake blood-drinking ethos is. It’s bad enough when it’s being devoured by a bunch of rich, arrogant and ignorant government comb-overs, seeing it eaten, blogged and YouTubed by backpackers is really disheartening.
I may try and expand on that paragraph at a later date.
In short, though, I love eating in Hanoi, even if it’s not always Hanoian food.
