Tich Cho

A topic that I've avoiding writing about has been the food here in Vietnam, as there were some gastronomic oddities that I was alerted. However, as of last weekend I have finally eaten tich cho and am willing to talk about what food here looks like. In Vietnamese, tich means meat and cho means dog. Dog meat. It was quite an experience as it is one of only three foods here in Vietnam that has superstition around it. Vietnam uses the standard Gregorian calendar in the office, but at home there is a strict adherence to the lunar calendar. In my host-family there is a calendar in the kitchen that has the Gregorian in big font and the lunar in slightly smaller font. This all relate to tich cho in that you can only eat tich cho in the last half of the lunar month, from the 16th to the 30th. To eat it any other time is bad luck. This also applies to duck and calamari. In order to eat dog we had to go to a restaurant that serves it. The way the smaller restaurants are here is that they serve one kind of food, like phu, cho, bun or banh my. We ended up eating boiled dog, fried dog, dog sausage, and my personal favourite, dog stewed in dog blood. Sounds gross, but it was actually not bad. After eating it, I came to the conclusion that dog tastes like deer.

However, not all food in Vietnam is as strange as that. The two most important things to Vietnamese cuisine is rice and fish sauce. Everything else is secondary to that. A typical meal in a household consists of rice, a couple types of meat, a vegetable (sliced cucumber is popular), and a soup. You dish out rice into a little bowl and then just grab whatever you want from the dishes in the centre of the table. Its pretty chaotic, but fun. Most things are dipped in fish sauce before being eaten, especially things like nem (spring rolls).

The breakfast that I usually eat is called phu bo. Essentially it is eating soup for breakfast. Phu are long, flat noodles and bo is beef, and it is served in a big bowl of beef broth. It's quite the meal first thing in the morning, but nowadays it feels quite cool at that time of day. Soup really warms you up.

Other foods that are common on the street are bun cha, which is rounder noodle in soup served with little grilled pieces of meat and banh cuan, which is a rice pancake and pork. 

Lastly, I ate KFC here recently and I have to say that in comparison to most Vietnamese foods, its not very salty.