The Rice Lady

Võ Văn Tần street in HCMC is the place to go to buy a safe. Although the old quarter of Ha Noi is most famous in Vietnam for retaining the custom of designating certain streets for the sale of certain goods, this also still happens sometimes in Saigon. There are a number of shoe streets, and there’s a furniture street round the corner from us. If you want hardware, or electronics or a gold fish, there’s 3 different, well-stocked streets you can go to make your purchases.

However when I set out for Võ Văn Tần this morning, securing my valuables was not my purpose. I had a picture of this fabulous woman presiding over her impressive selection of dishes in my mind from a previous visit. So I was very happy with this photo because it captured exactly what I remembered of this restaurant. Although this place is definitely a cut above in terms of quality and the number of dishes available, it is a typical ‘Cơm’, meaning rice, a restaurant serving every day dishes, always with rice. Sometimes these places are called ‘Cơm bình dân’, meaning rice for the common people. You will find a restaurant like this on almost every town or city street in Vietnam. The food is always displayed at the front so you can pick whatever looks good and then they’ll dish it up for you. Though the food is not usually displayed so attractively, or by a woman with such presence.

Today I went for an old favourite, deep fried tofu stuffed with pork (apologies to Vegetarians) and a very tasty salad of bean shoots, carrot and pickled cabbage. As you can see, my meal also came with an overflowing bowl of greens and herbs, and a mug of ice tea. At many places like this, your meal will be served with a light soup and a banana, just to round it off as an honest square meal. Most of the dishes you can see are fish or pork based. Notice the slabs of deep fried pork in the back left corner. A little unhealthy but balanced out if you eat them the way you should, with Nước chấm, sweet and sour dipping sauce, and the aforementioned greens and herbs. Next to that is a kind of steamed egg cake, that usually has vermicelli rice noodles and minced pork, very tasty. I had a very good look at the bowl half cut off at the front right, because it was a combo I’d never seen before, stir fried bean shoots with slivers of liver. Intriguing, but I probably won’t be trying it. Even though I’ve been living in Vietnam for a while, I’m still an offal squeamish westerner.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of customers. Good places like this can sell out everything they’ve made in a couple of hours or less. I strategically got there at 11, before the onslaught, to capture this rice lady in all her glory.