Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table

by Graham Holliday, Anthony Bourdain (Foreword by)

Overview

A journalist and blogger takes us on a colorful and spicy gastronomic tour through Viet Nam in this entertaining, offbeat travel memoir, with a foreword by Anthony Bourdain.

 Growing up in a small town in northern England, Graham Holliday wasn’t keen on travel. But in his early twenties, a picture of Hanoi sparked a curiosity that propelled him halfway across the globe. Graham didn’t want to be a tourist in an alien land, though; he was determined to live it. An ordinary guy who liked trying interesting food, he moved to the capital city and embarked on a quest to find real Vietnamese food. In Eating Viet Nam, he chronicles his odyssey in this strange, enticing land infused with sublime smells and tastes.

Traveling through the back alleys and across the boulevards of Hanoi—where home cooks set up grills and stripped-down stands serving sumptuous fare on blue plastic furniture—he risked dysentery, giardia, and diarrhea to discover a culinary treasure-load that was truly foreign and unique. Holliday shares every bite of the extraordinary fresh dishes, pungent and bursting with flavor, which he came to love in Hanoi, Saigon, and the countryside. Here, too, are the remarkable people who became a part of his new life, including his wife, Sophie.

A feast for the senses, funny, charming, and always delicious, Eating Viet Nam will inspire armchair travelers, curious palates, and everyone itching for a taste of adventure. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062293077
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	303,586
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Graham Holliday grew up in Rugby, England, and moved to Iksan, South Korea, in 1996 to teach English. He is the author of Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table and the blog noodlepie about street food in Sài Gòn. He has written for the Guardian (UK), the New York Times Magazine, the South China Morning Post, Time, BBC, CNN, and many other media outlets.

Table of Contents

Foreword Anthony Bourdain ix

1 Hà Noi 1

2 Bún Chi 17

3 In Search of a Monster 27

4 Beyond Tràng Tien Street 41

5 Food Safari 57

6 Vina-land 63

7 Moving Out 77

8 Tet 87

9 Taking the Vina-pulse 101

10 Nothing Worked 117

11 Poisoned 131

12 Never Mind the Bollocks 141

13 The Ten Commandments of Street Food 153

14 I Never Remember You 163

15 It's Shit in the South 169

16 Hoa Hung Street, District 10, Sài Gòn 175

17 Paperback Writer 183

18 Sài Gòn 187

19 Enter Hém Hoà Hung Market 195

20 Noodlepie 205

21 The Tape 217

22 "Vietnamese Food Is Nothing Without Herbs" 227

23 No Magic Ingredients 239

24 Bánh Mì 249

25 It's the Chinese 267

26 What a Very Civil Civil War 273

27 All Vietnamese Love Bánh Cuon 289

28 Bà Sáu Bún Måm 295

29 A Northern Soup in a Southern City 311

30 My Shift Is Up 319

31 Apocalypse Now 323

Liner Notes 329

Editorial Reviews

In his rough-and-tumble, lip-smacking memoir…Holliday writes with exhilaration…[His] loving, laddish descriptions will make gonzo gourmands salivate…

The New York Times Book Review - Liesl Schillinger

★ 02/09/2015
In this wry, entertaining food and travel memoir, journalist and “Noodlepie” blogger Holliday escapes a future career as an office drone by expatriating to Vietnam, where he makes his living as an English teacher. His true passion, however, is the quest for the best and most interesting street food in Ha Noi. At first, locals only point him to “big, fancy-schmancy” hotels “serving western, ‘Asian’—whatever that is.” But upon further digging, Holliday unearths the pleasures of street-stall bit tet—“A thin slice of beef comes with three (count them) potato fries, a token sprinkling of green onions, a fried egg, and a ball of peppery coagulated cow blood”—pho, and, of course, bahn mi, the Vietnamese baguette sandwich, which merits its own chapter. Holliday’s lively chronicle of the beginnings of his blog, Noodlepie, at the dawn of the blogosphere, sets the stage for his successful transition from English teacher to freelance writer. Writing in an inviting style with ample humor, and using his intricate knowledge of street food and life in Vietnam, Holliday keeps the pages turning with stories of food that is delicious—the search for the perfect bun cha, “the astounding lunchtime BBQ pork and noodles”—and more questionable: “As the pig’s uterus landed on the blue plastic table in front of me, I knew I’d made a mistake.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Holliday writes with exhiliration…[his] loving, laddish descriptions will make gonzo gourmands salivate.” — The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Holliday writes with exhiliration…[his] loving, laddish descriptions will make gonzo gourmands salivate.

The New York Times Book Review

★ 02/15/2015
Anthony Bourdain regularly proclaims his love for Vietnam, so it's no surprise that one of the books for his Ecco imprint should chronicle the foods of this country. When Holliday moved from England to Hanoi to teach English, another expat advised him to find a hobby, and the author realized his passion was discovering great food. But Holliday wasn't interested in eating at the restaurants Westerners frequented. His fascination was in the street fare that the Vietnamese ate. Holliday takes readers on a gastronomical tour of the many provisions on offer, from the relatively tame—pho and banh mi—to the more bizarre, such as cobra and pig's uterus, and advises readers on what to look for when choosing local food. VERDICT With a personal, often humorous tone, Holliday does an exceptional job of bringing the heat, noise, and plethora of scents and flavors of Vietnam to life, and this book will definitely spark the curiosity and appetite of all readers.—Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL

Library Journal

2014-12-22
A celebration of Vietnamese street food, with some offerings that will make readers squirm as much as the author initially did.This is the adventure-travel version of a food memoir, one that puts Vietnamese food in fresh perspective yet ultimately proves more repetitive than exotic. What began as a blog while Holliday was teaching English in Southeast Asia—living in Korea as well as Hanoi and Saigon—still retains some elements of that form, with a penchant for lists and a tendency to revisit the same themes and make the same points. Small restaurants and food stalls that serve only one dish tend to prepare it very well, and there's often an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of the preparation and the quality of the food. Ask a native Vietnamese for a recommendation, and he'll often tell you where tourists like to go, or what places are really popular, rather than divulging where he thinks the food is best. Eat and run is the expectation for uncomfortable street diners, since lingering hurts profits. Yet most of the cooks and proprietors, operating at the margins of legality, proved cooperative and helpful to Holliday, though almost uniformly, they had little idea how many bowls of pho they serve in a day. They know that they've made money when they've sold out and generally lost money when they have food left over. Though he initially shocks the reader with "boiled uterus" and " pig's intestine," he quickly explains this as "the unlikely beginning of a long-running affair with Viet Nam and Vietnamese food. It was just unfortunate that I'd gotten started at both the wrong end of the menu and the animal." Ultimately, he writes, "[s]treet food is a bit like smoking. It can seem somewhat disgusting at first, it takes a little time to get into it, but before too long, you're addicted." Readers are likely to run out of patience before the author has run out of pages.

Kirkus Reviews