“SO YOU’RE GOING TO HANOI to learn to cook Vietnamese food from a Frenchman? That seems a little silly, doesn’t it? Why don’t you just go down to Chinatown to Nha Trang?” my mother asked when I told her and my father about my plans. Nha Trang was our go-to spot for Vietnamese food, and although I loved it, I knew it wouldn’t be the same as actually being in Vietnam.
“Mom, I want to learn from the best. Everyone I’ve asked who knows anything about Vietnamese food has told me to work for Didier Corlou. He is French, but he supposedly has an amazing understanding of the country’s flavors and recipes. More than any Vietnamese chef I could find. And it’s not like I can speak Vietnamese,” I said.
“Ironic, isn’t it? I spent my youth trying desperately to avoid going to Vietnam, and now all you want is to go there,” my father said.
“Times change. I bet the country bears no resemblance to Vietnam back then,” I said.
“You’re probably right,” he conceded.
“I just don’t want you on the other side of the world cooking in some ramshackle hut on the side of some godforsaken road,” said my mom in her best mother hen voice, as though she’d forgotten that I had basically been living on my own since college.
“La Verticale is a nice place, Mom, one of the best in Hanoi. I mean, if I could have gone and cooked pho in a hut, I would have. But it’s not like I have a way to contact those types of places. I did the best research I could using guidebooks and the Internet, but the corner pho joint obviously doesn’t have a website address. Besides, I still have some savings, and the cost of living is going to be much cheaper there than in New York. So it’s almost like I’ll actually be saving money,” I said enthusiastically.
“Almost,” said my mother, while my father raised an eyebrow.
“It’s what I need right now.”
“We aren’t going to stop you. Just be careful over there.”
And that’s how I found myself in the thick of a sweltering Hanoi summer, with two boxes of latex gloves, my knives, a Vietnamese dictionary, and lots of mosquito repellent in tow.
“YOU NEED TO CALL A TAXI to get downtown to the restaurant. If you hail one off the street, you’ll probably get scammed. I’ll give you the number for the company I use,” said Belinda, the bubbly Australian handbag designer who was my new housemate.
Before leaving New York, I had placed an ad on an expat website for a furnished room for rent. Belinda’s friendly response offered me not only a large air-conditioned (“the most essential necessity in Hanoi, from April to September,” she wrote) bedroom with an en suite bathroom in a three-story villa, but also an invitation to show me around Hanoi, to meet her social circle, and to navigate the eccentricities of expat life. Having moved to Hanoi six months before, she had settled in Tay Ho, an expat enclave just north of the city center whose quiet, tree-lined streets of gated villas surrounded the city’s largest lake. Given its Western-style minimarts offering these temporary foreign visitors a taste of home wrapped in cellophane, I was at first skeptical of the location, but Belinda had explained that downtown Hanoi was noisy and hectic, and Tay Ho offered a welcome respite from all that.
I popped into the taxi, which soon sped past brightly lit storefronts filled with a dizzying array of wares for sale in the Old Quarter. Trees swayed over tangles of phone and electricity lines, shading the motorbike drivers who perched languidly across their bikes, which were parked willy-nilly in the middle of the sidewalk. “Moto! Motorbike!” they shouted to any foreigner passing by. When we reached the center of town, I saw more and more signage written in English for tours and day trips to Ha Long Bay and Sapa, along with the tanned and beer-fueled backpackers who purchased them. Incessant honking from the thousands of whizzing motorbikes drowned out the humming of the taxi’s air conditioner. But after sitting in traffic for five minutes in the heart of the Old Quarter, we soon drove by stately, colonial-era villas and several tranquil lakes, glistening a magical silver blue under the intense rays of the sun, while old men played badminton or read newspapers along the banks.
Just south of Hoan Kiem Lake in the city center, Didier’s restaurant, La Verticale, is housed in a lemon yellow villa on Ngo Van So Street in a quiet neighborhood resplendent with embassies and a few modern office buildings. Upon entering, I recognized Didier from the picture on his website and introduced myself. Sweat beads formed a crown around his shiny forehead, but he appeared affable and much younger than his fifty-something years.
“Ah, Lauren. Our stagiaire. Just starting out your career. An exciting time in one’s life. So tell me, what would you like to learn here at La Verticale?” he said to me in French as we sat at a table on the terrace.
“Um, I was working at a restaurant in New York that did a sort of experimental cuisine,” I said. Although I knew he had seen my résumé, I doubted he had scanned it for more than a few seconds.
“You mean molecular gastronomy? I don’t like that type of cuisine. Food should be able to nourish you. With all those powders, I don’t know…,” he said, slightly dismayed.
“Yes, it was a great learning experience, but I decided it wasn’t the type of food I wanted to specialize in,” I said.
“So why Hanoi? Do you have a connection to the place, or any family history here?”
“No, I just wanted to learn to cook in a place that was completely different from New York, and live somewhere I had never been before,” I said.
I also wanted to go to a country that hadn’t yet been completely tainted by globalization and commercialization. Somewhere that was exotic and a little rough around the edges, where everyday necessities weren’t readily available. Perhaps this wanderlust came from my childhood years in Budapest. My parents and I had moved there in the winter of 1993, when Hungary was slowly shaking off its outdated, drab Communist facade. My father’s law firm had sent him over to help the Hungarian government privatize its banks and public infrastructure to get the country up to speed with the rest of world that hadn’t been locked behind the iron curtain. He had spent the previous year alone there, and when he realized that the project would require another two, my mother and I packed up our New York life and went along for the ride.
While today’s Budapest rivals any other European capital, back then, and especially during the interminable winters, a somber grayness blanketed the city. Even grocery shopping proved a daily challenge. On our first full day on our own, Mom and I trudged through the knee-deep snow to the local supermarket at Batthyány tér. When we approached the meat counter, we asked for a “csirka” after consulting our Hungarian dictionary for the translation of chicken and were met by the butcher’s pasty-faced, blank stare. Undaunted and desperate to provide me with a semblance of an American-style dinner, my mother tucked her hands under her armpits and imitated a chicken’s clucking sounds. Finally the butcher grasped what we wanted. He disappeared into a back room, returning with a shorn chicken whose gnarled yellow feet were still attached. He placed it on a sheet of newspaper, wrapped it halfheartedly so that the legs dangled out of the paper, and handed it to her with a grunt. Our search for salad ingredients proved even more elusive, as lettuce wasn’t available. We might now embrace the locavore ideals of eating seasonally and locally, but let me tell you, eating Hungary’s cabbage—bland, greenish gray, and limp—for nine months out of the year got old really quickly.
As a ten-year-old, I quickly resented Budapest and nagged my mother about what I missed from home: my friends, cable television, stores that were open on the weekends, potato chips that weren’t exclusively paprika flavored. Nostalgia, of course, alters our memory, and over time, it’s easy to forget the daily aggravations and hardships. I now relish my two years in Hungary as a period that helped shape me, and I see the beauty of living in a country at a crossroads. In many ways, I found parallels between Budapest of the early 1990s and the Vietnam of 2009. Vietnam remains a staunchly Communist country, at least politically, but it has embraced economic market reforms accompanied by a powerful private sector. Daily life in Hanoi, I soon learned, was still slow and fraught with bureaucratic and infrastructural annoyances, but foreign capital was pouring into the country. It was an ephemeral moment in time for a country, and I wanted to be there to see it.
This explanation seemed too complex for me to tell Didier, though, especially in French, so I said, “I was attracted by the fresh flavors of Vietnamese cuisine, and intrigued to see if there were any lasting vestiges of France’s culinary legacy. I’ve read a lot about your influence on Hanoi’s food scene and how you helped bring upscale Vietnamese cuisine to new audiences.”
Didier nodded approvingly and then led me on a tour of the restaurant. I had read about La Verticale in my trusty Vietnam guidebook, and its description rang true to form: The restaurant occupied a refurbished colonial four-story structure, with dining rooms on two floors and a rooftop bar on top that overlooked the city. As we climbed the staircase that spiraled up the stories, Didier pointed at the framed photographs on the walls and said, “These are all the generations of my family. France and Vietnam, together here. You know, family is very important to me. My wife, Mai, even tastes all my recipes before I put them on the menu.”
We wended our way to the second-floor dining room, and he pointed out the orange hanging light fixtures, the white walls, the golden yellow abstract sculptures against the wall, and the black-and-white-tiled floor. “This room is decorated in five colors to represent the five seasons,” said Didier.
“There are five seasons?” I replied.
“Oui, bien sûr. In the Vietnamese culture, there’s also a fifth season, which is known as the transition season. You see, you must have the spirit of the place, of the country, even in the little details like the decor,” he said.
“How many days a week do you want me to work?” I asked after Didier showed me the other dining room on the third floor and then the open-air rooftop bar on the fourth floor, whose comfy brown leather chairs and views of the city’s rooftops channeled the stately charm of colonial Hanoi.
“This is your stage. Make of it what you want,” he said, shrugging.
“Okay, maybe lunch and dinner, Monday through Friday?” I said.
“No problem. Do just mornings this week, though. Come tomorrow at ten and we’ll see how next week is,” replied Didier. It sounded good to me: After the intensity of wd~50, I was ready for something a bit more low-key.
AS I APPROACHED the restaurant the following morning, I saw that it was dark, as were all the shops along the street. “The electricity is out,” Didier said after I greeted him. “I think they’re working on the street or something, but it’s annoying. Have a glass of ice water. You look very hot.”
“It’s not too bad,” I demurred, although I was already dripping in sweat from this furnacelike heat, more powerful than a New York City subway platform in the dog days of August.
“I guess you can stay. You can get dressed in the locker room in the back,” he said, leading me into the kitchen, where it couldn’t have been any cooler than a hundred degrees, even at ten in the morning. He introduced me to the kitchen staff before leaving to deal with the electricity. Thanh, one of the head cooks, was wide-eyed and welcoming as he shook my hand. He spoke very broken English but smiled as he handed me a daikon radish to peel. Unlike the Swiss peeler I was used to, the Vietnamese peeler was a single blade affixed to the end of a wooden handle and required a peeling motion away from the body. I began peeling the daikon the wrong way, stubbing the white flesh with the blade. Yen, a wisp of a girl who came to my eye level, shook her head at me gently and demonstrated the right way. I thanked her in English, but my face flushed with embarrassment.
Next, two large bowls of shallots and garlic cloves awaited my cleaning, trimming, and mincing. The shallots were the tiniest I’d ever seen, no larger than the size of my pinky nail. The cooks wielded cleavers, but I stuck to my Western-style knives.
At eleven o’clock, Son, one of the cooks whose intense, brooding expression belied his warmth, took off his white apron and announced, “Okay, now we go to lunch.” Didier had explained that the staff ate at a canteen around the corner because the restaurant lacked space for a family meal. So the restaurant staff, about fifteen of us, trooped to a dusty storefront that probably dated back to the days before Ho Chi Minh. Didier, though, I would soon learn, ate a light dish from the menu by either Chien or Thanh after the lunch service ended. The staircase leading to the canteen’s second floor creaked as we walked, but once we reached the top, a huge buffet of home-style Vietnamese food confronted us. An elderly female server whose face had the texture of a sun-dried tomato and whose smile was punctuated with gummy gaps ladled out rice from a gargantuan pot while clouds of steam rose to the ceiling’s wooden beams. I followed Thanh’s lead and approached her before hitting the buffet tables. She grinned enthusiastically as she reached in for another scoop, but I shook my head no. One mountain of rice on the plate was all I could handle. I skipped over a tray containing a heap of small, pearly white ridged creatures that I was certain were fried maggots and spooned up boiled daikon, banana leaf salad, tofu with tomato sauce, and three balls of ground pork wrapped in betel leaves.
“Nem, nem,” said another server, accosting me before I could sit down. She resembled the older woman, and I figured this was probably a family-run restaurant with all the generations pitching in. She placed two fried spring rolls on my plate.
“So, Lauren, tell us about you,” said Son in clear English as I joined him and Thanh at a small table. Luckily, the electricity worked at this eatery, and a lazy fan stirred the stagnant air, sweeping the pungent aromas of chile-flecked fish sauce under our noses.
I told them the basics: growing up in New York, going to school in Chicago, and my experience working at wd~50. Then I quickly shifted the conversation back to them. “Are you from Hanoi?” I asked. I was curious about their lives, how they had ended up as cooks, and whether culinary career trajectories differed significantly here from back in New York.
“No, from the country,” said Son.
“How long have you worked at La Verticale?”
“Almost two years, since it opened.”
“Do you eat lunch here every day?”
“Yes, and dinner, too. But dinner, it is not as good as lunch because this restaurant is for businessmen and at night they go home,” he explained.
“Is it easy to buy a gun in a store in America?” Thanh asked out of the blue.
“I don’t know. I think so, especially in rural areas. But I don’t know anyone who owns a gun.”
“America, lots of gangs, very dangerous,” he said.
“Well, sometimes,” I said. The news is censored in Vietnam, and its citizens are treated to highlights about the benevolence of the reigning Communist Party along with occasional diatribes about Western immorality. My new co-workers asked me if I had been in New York on September 11 and why I wanted to learn how to cook Vietnamese food in Hanoi. They peppered me with questions about the weather and the difference between a state and a city.
“What are your hobbies?” asked Son.
“I play squash, and I like to cook, and I like to go to the movies,” I said.
“Movies? I like romantic comedies. And action films. And learning English is my hobby,” Son said proudly, without any tinge of irony. I had already sensed that these were good, genuine people, not as hardened and stressed as wd~50’s cooks, and I hoped we would become fast friends.
Before I knew it, the half hour had passed, and we headed back to La Verticale to set up for the lunch service. Didier’s lunch menu featured a set three courses for $13, which included an appetizer, entrée, dessert, and glass of wine, although it was possible to order just an entrée plus appetizer or dessert for $11 or simply an entrée for $8. Like most upscale restaurants in Hanoi, La Verticale quoted its prices in U.S. dollars, clearly catering to the town’s expats and tourists. The contemporary Vietnamese (with some French accents) menu changed weekly and included dishes like fish salad with coconut milk, chef’s pâté with three peppers, or a spicy seafood soup flecked with local mushrooms and seaweed as appetizers; entrées might be veal three ways with lime or Hanoi’s famous bun cha pork dish, served “Verticale style.” Didier offered an à la carte menu at lunch and dinner, but since it was more expensive, people rarely ordered from it at lunch, although it featured what I’d gathered were Didier’s specialties: wild prawn spring rolls, Da Lat artichokes with clams, ocean escabeche, and beef yin-yang. During the first day’s service, I mostly observed to understand the working rhythm, reading the handwritten tickets that came in (which, like the menu, were written in English) and watching as the female cooks warmed the bread in the oven before preparing the appetizers and sending them out, at which point the male cooks started the hot entrées. After Didier’s okay and final garnishes, they were good to go, and then the girls would take over once again and assemble everything needed for the desserts. When at the end of service I asked Didier about the gender divide, he shrugged and said, “Oh, you know, the girls don’t like to get too hot making the entrées, and they are also not as good with the wok.”
“Oh, okay. So should I come at the same time tomorrow morning? Are you sure you don’t want me to work the afternoon shift, then?” I asked Didier while the staff began piling all the dirty dishes in the kitchen’s two small sinks.
“No, no. You should ease into the stage. See what’s going on, observe. Vietnam is not just about La Verticale; it’s about the streets, the people… La Verticale is important, of course, but you should explore and visit the markets or see how herbs and spices are used at the local hospital that specializes in Eastern medicine, go eat lots of street food. That’s where you’ll find the true Vietnam.”
Over the next several days I submerged myself in kitchen life, this one worlds away from wd~50. I missed dishwashers, large cutting boards, higher countertops (even for someone as short as me), air-conditioning, and the ease of asking a question and having it understood and answered on the first go-round (since only three of the eight cooks spoke any English beyond what was written on the menu tickets). However, I was relieved to be away from Tom’s critical eye and the precision required at wd~50. No one at La Verticale cared about proper attire; the chefs wore jeans and chef jackets and slip-on sandals with socks, which gave me visions of cleavers decapitating toes. Here, knife skills weren’t important. The cooks wielded cleavers, both big and small, and they wouldn’t have known a brunoise from a jardinière shape. Assigned shallot chopping, I began crosshatching them until Son instructed me to throw a bunch of them together and hack away until they formed small pieces. Take that, Wylie! I attempted to work with the cleavers during my first two days but couldn’t master the proper way to hold them, so I continued to use my own chef’s knife. One of the waiters took it and waved it in the air, pretending to be a samurai warrior, and we all laughed—no translation needed.
“Lauren, come see. Do you know how to make fried rice?” asked Son.
“Sort of, but not really. I know that you need to use old rice because if you use just cooked rice, it’ll stick to the pan, right? Basically you fry it in a very hot wok in a bit of oil, right?”
“Yes, yes. How do you make it in American restaurants?”
“Usually it’s made with pork,” I said.
“Little cut-up pieces?”
“Yes, and eggs, and scallion, and peas. And sometimes mushrooms. Are those lotus seeds?” I asked as he added small ivory-colored balls to the wok.
“Yes, lotus seeds,” he said, stirring them into the rice, which was already studded with chopped shiitake mushrooms. He added fish sauce and minced scallions to finish it off before noting, “See, very easy. I think Vietnamese version is the best.”
“Yes, very easy. Even I can make it!”
“Yes, yes. You can make back home,” he said. Then, abruptly, “Do you have a boyfriend there?”
“No,” I said. Chase was out of the picture, although he still e-mailed me, even saying he was thinking of coming for a visit. Yeah, right. I was enjoying being in this new place so much that the opposite sex wasn’t foremost in my mind, which felt liberating. I was much more excited about the prospect of finding the tastiest pho and bun cha restaurants than about finding a man.
“Oh, are you married?”
“No. Not yet,” I said. Even after only a short time in Vietnam, I was used to this question. If you are a female between twenty and fifty, everyone will immediately ask you this upon your arrival in Vietnam. If you’re thirty or older and the answer is no, you will receive a pitying look. I was still in the safe zone. Never before had my love life, or lack thereof, been such an important topic in daily discussions, but never before had I been so relaxed about it.
“You should marry a Vietnamese man,” said Son, giggling.
I smiled. “Maybe. We’ll see how things go.”
“Vietnamese men, they’re not tall, but kindhearted. You can make them fried rice.”
“THERE’S A WINE TASTING and then a pool party at the Hilton this weekend. You can come with me,” said Belinda.
“Great,” I replied. Belinda was upholding the reputation of the friendly Australian.
“My friend Lucy is going to come along, too, and I invited that American girl, Suchi, whom I met in the supermarket earlier this week,” said Belinda, as though it were completely normal to make new friends at the supermarket. In all my years of supermarket shopping in New York, I had never once spoken to anyone except to ask a store clerk what aisle held the paper towels, and I loved the ease of making social connections here.
So on Saturday, Belinda, Suchi, Lucy, and I found our way to the wine tasting in the basement of an upscale Vietnamese restaurant. Suchi was Indian but had been educated in America and was in Hanoi conducting research. She was twenty-eight and beautiful, with strong, angular cheekbones, wide-set eyes, and a tiny, elegant, birdlike frame. Lucy, meanwhile, was tall, blond, and very British, enthusiastic about everything. “Lovely” and “brilliant” were her two favorite words. She was a nonpracticing lawyer, and now, forty-three and single, she was living in Vietnam in order to adopt a baby here. I liked them both instantly, although I liked the wine, a cheap Italian import, a lot less, and after an hour we left for the Hilton hotel, located next to the opera.
At first, I had scoffed at the idea of a hotel pool party, but Belinda explained that many of Hanoi’s social events, especially for expats, were held at hotels. The night air was saunalike, and the damp heat clung to our skin like leeches. We sipped our vodka-spiked frozen lemonade and perched on padded lounge chairs, trying to avoid the shiny brown cockroaches that scurried along the pool’s edge. Belinda knew everyone and introduced me to all her friends. But in contrast with a typical New York party, here we didn’t talk about job promotions or new apartments or recent status symbol purchases. We talked about food and restaurants and how expat life could be both thrilling and aggravating.
“I’m going to go for a swim,” Lucy said. Fueled by several glasses of white wine, she promptly took off her dress and dove into the warm turquoise water.
“Is she really in her underwear?” asked Belinda, mouth agape.
“It looks like it,” I said.
“She must be drunk!” said Belinda.
“It’s lovely in here,” Lucy called as she backstroked across the pool.
A swaggering young Brazilian man in a white linen shirt inched his way into our group and began flirting with Suchi.
“Fabio, she’s married,” said Belinda.
“Oh, are you?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. He immediately sat next to me, then suddenly grabbed my back and scooped his arm below my knees, picking me up like a baby.
“No!” I shrieked. And with a ceremonial splash, he threw me in, shoes and all, as Belinda and Suchi gasped.
“Don’t worry, at least it’s cool in here,” I said, teeth gritted into a half smile. Fabio reached down to lend me a hand.
“Pull him in!” cried Belinda.
I tried, but I wasn’t strong enough, so I climbed up the railing, my diaphanous blue dress clinging to my body as water dripped down my legs. I grabbed my floating shoes.
“So sexy,” said Fabio. Belinda retrieved a towel, which Fabio grabbed and used to dry me off, caressing my legs with it.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
I found a bathroom, where I dried off my dress under the hand dryer. When I returned, Fabio had disappeared and the girls fluttered around me, complimenting me on my grin-and-bear-it attitude. Lucy and Suchi decided to call it a night, but Belinda and I went to Face Bar afterward. After all, a little wet dress wasn’t going to rain on my Vietnamese parade.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING when I got to work, Son was already preparing a massive hunk of pork belly, rubbing it all over with a marinade of garlic, soy sauce, and fish sauce. As I peered over his shoulder, he turned, tapping his bare arm, and asked, “What is this?”
“And this?” He pointed to his leg hair.
“Leg hair.”
“And this, pig hair?” asked Son, chuckling, poking the few coarse black hairs sticking out of the marinating pork belly.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
Unlike Wylie, Didier rarely worked in the kitchen, and at first I worried about communicating with the other cooks. But Son had a good command of English, and Thanh and Chien scraped by. While I rarely spoke to the female chefs (except for Luyen, who occasionally spoke to me in French), the male chefs and I started a language exchange. I mastered counting to ten and basic phrases for greeting people in Vietnamese, while Son and Thanh scribbled English kitchen terms in their pocket-sized notebooks.
“Lauren, what is this?” asked Thanh.
“Ladle. L-a-d-l-e,” I said.
“And this?”
“Whisk.”
“And this?”
“Strainer.”
“And this?”
“Flattop.”
“What?”
“Flattop.”
“No, no. Come—” He led me into the office and pointed to the computer. “This, flattop?”
“Ah, no, that is a laptop. This is a flattop,” I explained as Thanh burst into a fit of laughter.
“I think you say this is laptop!” he said, smacking his palm against his head. “And what is sheril?”
“I don’t think sheril is a word. Can you write it down?”
Thanh got out his notebook and wrote out “c-h-e-r-v-i-l.”
“Oh, chervil. It’s an herb. You say it like sure-vil,” I enunciated.
“Same as parsley?”
“No, it’s not the same. It’s milder and has smaller leaves.”
“Yes, I think it is the same,” he said, drawing the leaves on his notebook.
“Okay, it’s same-same, but different.”
At this, we both erupted in laughter, because “same-same, but different” was one of the unofficial slogans of Vietnam. It was particularly useful in explaining the nuances of the English language, as when Son asked me the difference between the words tired and fatigued. I simply explained that they were “same-same, but different.” Why you needed the second “same,” I didn’t know, but you did. Outside of our vocabulary lessons, though, the slogan was often used for scamming tourists. You might book a hotel room at one place, but when you got there, it would be full to capacity; however, they would offer you a “same-same” room at their “sister” hotel down the road. Of course, that room would not be same-same. It would be worse.
Although I bonded with the men, most of the female cooks unfortunately gave me the cold shoulder. So much for sisterly solidarity in the kitchen. Maybe they saw me as a threat, or perhaps they didn’t want another girl to hog the spotlight. Or maybe they were intimidated by me. But one day while changing into my uniform, Yen, the spritely female cook who was the resident expert at making the prawn summer roll appetizers, said in broken English, “I’m happy you are at La Verticale, and I want to be your friend.”
“I want to be your friend, too,” I said, and she gave me a big hug.
Son and Yen then began chatting in Vietnamese. Son told me, “She wants to know what makeup you use to have your skin stay so white. She wishes her skin was as white as you.”
“I don’t use anything. But you’re so beautiful!” I said to Yen, who shook her head.
“Not like you,” she said, stroking my face.
Son diplomatically changed the subject. “So, Lauren, do you take taxi home tonight?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Taxis are very expensive,” he replied. “How much do you pay for taxi?”
Money was a hot topic with the Vietnamese. Everyone at La Verticale watched me take a taxi home every night as they chugged off on their motorbikes. Having grown up in New York City, I didn’t learn how to ride a bicycle until I was sixteen years old (at which point my parents, never athletic types, hired someone to teach me in Central Park), so riding a motorbike in Hanoi was basically an instant death wish. By the end of my first week, the staff had peppered me about the cost of my airplane ticket, my rent in Hanoi, my salary in New York, and how much I paid for everything else in Vietnam (to which they always responded, “Lauren, too much!”). By Vietnamese standards, I was wealthy, and I began to tell white lies because I wanted my fellow cooks to see me as a compatriot and not as a rich dilettante.
“Forty thousand dong,” I said, although the real price was 65,000 dong, or almost $3.
“Yes, very expensive. And you take in morning?”
I also took a taxi to work every morning. I reasoned that taking taxis weren’t much more expensive than commuting via the New York City subway, and I didn’t really have many expenses in Vietnam, since my meals were either free or next to nothing and my rent was 400 percent cheaper than in New York City (for a space that was probably 400 percent larger). A xe om, or motorbike taxi, was about 15,000 dong, but I didn’t want to endure a hot and sweaty ride at morning rush hour, during which I’d be inhaling pollution for twenty minutes straight, even if I wore the ubiquitous cotton face mask. So I took taxis, but I couldn’t shake my sense of guilt, and I made the taxi driver drop me off two blocks away from the restaurant so no one would see me.
“No, I take the bus,” I lied.
“You should get motorbike, like Valentin,” said Son, referring to the twenty-three-year-old French manager who had started working at La Verticale a few months before I did. Because Valentin was the manager and always busy with front-of-house responsibilities, he and I didn’t become close the way I thought we would as two Westerners in Hanoi; instead we maintained a professional relationship.
“I don’t think that will happen. I am not a good bicycle rider. I think I would die on a motorbike,” I said, mimicking the twisting and turning motion of imaginary handlebars.
“Oh, oh,” said Son, chuckling. “Then tonight I take you home?”
“You want to drive me home tonight? But I live very far away.” I doubted Son lived in Tay Ho.
“No problem,” he said.
And after work, we flew through Hanoi on the back of his motorbike, the lights of storefronts blurring into one electric rainbow and the wind pushing our hair back behind our ears and flapping it up against our plastic helmets.
“Okay. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye,” he said when we got to my front gate.
Son, Yen, and Thanh continued to drive me home occasionally, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Because we were now more than co-workers; we were friends.
DURING THE FIRST FEW WEEKS of service, I was responsible for warming the bread in the oven and for preparing the rice and potato sides that accompanied the fish and meat dishes. The fried rice was pretty traditional, flavored with fresh lotus seeds and shiitake mushrooms, but the potatoes were one of Didier’s more fusion dishes. With a nod to France, thinly sliced potatoes were boiled in a mixture of water and chicken stock and topped with bread crumbs before being placed under a salamander for a quick broiling—a sort of lighter potato gratin. But Didier added turmeric, star anise, and large strips of cinnamon to the chicken stock, which colored the potatoes a bright, school bus yellow and subtly flavored them with the sweetness of Vietnam.
I quickly learned that everyone had an assigned role: The girls (Luyen, Nu, and Yen) prepared the appetizers and desserts, Con was responsible for the prep work for the entrées, Son cooked the entrées, Thanh plated them, and Chien, the sous-chef, alternated between cooking and plating the entrées. No one ever strayed from an assigned job. Didier primarily supervised and added sprinklings of salt or spices at the last minute to the entrées that the other chefs cooked. He also spent a lot of time when he was in the kitchen discussing cooking and his culinary philosophy with me. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to imbue me with his personal philosophy and steer me away from my molecular gastronomy origins, or if he was just so excited about Vietnamese ingredients and flavors that he couldn’t help sharing.
“See this? Simple, good flavors. That’s all you need. I’m so against molecular gastronomy. You destroy the food’s integrity and you just play around with it,” he reiterated yet again, pointing to the warm chocolate cake nesting in a black bowl, still hot from the oven. We made a large quantity of batter but kept it in the refrigerator, filling small ring molds and baking them only as needed, so that each diner could enjoy an individual-sized cake. The cinnamon-spiked aroma swirled into the damp, humid breeze drifting in from the open door leading to the porch.
I nodded as he looked in my direction, as though to ascertain that I understood that this was the real way to cook. And here in the La Verticale kitchen, I was becoming more convinced by his philosophy; although his cuisine might have lacked Wylie’s intellectual elements at wd~50, I was learning the importance of using local ingredients at their freshest, how to make a few simple ingredients pop with flavor by adding a single freshly picked herb or a pinch of exotic spice—and, most important, that cooking isn’t a precise science. You don’t need to follow a recipe to a tee; it’s more important to trust your taste buds and other senses, because foods aren’t static products but change from day to day.
“And the visual is important,” he added, cutting a stalk of lemongrass and adding it to a glass filled with orange-flavored gelatin. “But taste, that’s what matters. I believe in the five flavors. Sweet, salty, sour, bitter… Do you know what the fifth one is?”
“Spicy?” I ventured.
“Fade,” he said, referring to the French word for blandness. “The Japanese, though, they think differently.”
“Right, umami,” I said, referencing the flavor profile that’s best described as savory or meaty and is found in foods like soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, and anchovies.
“But it’s all about balancing flavor. Here’s a question for you: What is the profile of vanilla?”
“Sweet,” I said.
“Yes. And chocolate?”
“A little sweet and a little bitter?”
Pleased he had stumped me, he shook his head. “No, it’s not sweet, just bitter. We add sugar to it. But some things, like tomatoes, are both sweet and sour. You know, I spend one to two hours a day learning about new ways to use flavor, and then I experiment in the kitchen. As a chef, you always have to be evolving, and there’s always more to learn.”
Didier’s passion for flavors was obvious in the moment you set foot in La Verticale, since the entrance to the restaurant opened into a spice shop that spanned the front of the ground floor. Large glass apothecary jars lined the walls, filled with star anise, curled cinnamon sticks, and bright red chile powder, while Didier’s own salt and spice blends were displayed in neat rows along the counter. He also stocked rare Vietnamese spices, including exotic ones that I’d never before encountered, like musky-scented talaluma, floral-noted ambrette, and minorities’ spice, which came from the northern highlands of Vietnam, near the Chinese border, where many ethnic minorities lived (and presumably cultivated these spices). And although you can’t walk into a restaurant in Hanoi without encountering nuoc mam, or fish sauce—the lifeblood of Vietnamese cuisine—Didier sold a special version that had been aged for fifteen years. Didier might not have been Vietnamese by birth, but he was Vietnamese by choice, and that was evident in his culinary knowledge, a fact that further reassured me that I had made the right decision to learn about Vietnamese food from a non-Vietnamese.
“On Friday, you should come to my house. First, you can help prepare for the buffet that we are catering, and then you can sit in on the cooking class that I’m giving,” said Didier. He wore many culinary hats: In addition to the restaurant, he ran a catering business, preparing food for private parties and takeaway, and also taught cooking classes for tourists.
So that Friday morning I took a taxi to Long Bien, a suburb of Hanoi located across the Red River. Lush, flowering potted plants surrounded a small swimming pool, and a caged bird chirped from the veranda. Didier’s wife, Mai, petite and slender like almost all the Vietnamese women I’d met, greeted me and led me down a winding path to the back of the house. Didier’s home featured an industrial kitchen in addition to his personal one, and it was huge, with a walk-in refrigerator, bread ovens used for La Verticale’s triangular-shaped rolls, and tons of counter space.
Three members of the kitchen staff were already busy chopping mushrooms and skewering meat. They murmured hello, and the sounds of cleavers tapping against the cutting boards echoed across the room.
Mai handed me a bag of wriggling shrimp. “You must get them alive,” she said in heavily accented French. She grabbed one from the bag, beheaded it deftly, and peeled off its shell.
“Place the shells here. For stock,” she said, spreading out an empty plastic bag. “Pinch the shrimp just below the head to stun it, then twist off the head in one motion, and peel off the remaining shell.”
I had never worked with live shrimp before, and while I felt bad about inflicting these crustaceans with a beheading crueler than Marie Antoinette’s, I appreciated how truly fresh they were. When you buy shrimp at the grocery store, you really have no idea how fresh they are. Surely it’s more aesthetically pleasing and desensitizing to buy a bag of shelled, cleaned, and cooked shrimp, but working with fresh, live products was giving me a greater understanding of the source of our food.
After I peeled all the shrimp, I wedged a bamboo skewer through each one so that when boiled, they would remain elongated, making them easy to wrap inside a summer roll. The technique works for any foods that curl up when cooked, like squid or lobster tails; simply boil or steam or grill until done, then slide off the skewer.
When my task was completed, Mai beckoned me over. “La sauce satay,” she said. “Do you know how to make it?”
“I’ve had it, but I don’t know how to make it,” I said.
“Easy. Shallots, peanuts, peanut oil, turmeric juice, coconut milk, lemongrass, chiles, galangal. You know galangal?” she asked, holding up a pink, knobby rhizome that looked almost identical to ginger. I nodded and watched as she placed all the ingredients into a blender. The peanuts, shallots, and coconut milk formed the base of the sauce in relatively equal portions, about a cup each, and she added the other ingredients by taste, not measuring, though each was about a few tablespoons’ worth except for the chiles, which was just a pinch.
After smearing the sauce on skewered pork, we began to prepare steamed fish in lotus leaves. Mai made a marinade of fish sauce, pepper, and turmeric juice, and we dipped the fish in the sauce before placing them in cut pieces of leaf along with dill sprigs, thinly sliced carrot and scallion, and several lotus seeds. “You can also do this with banana leaves,” she said. Everything was uncomplicated, seasoned by intuition and with discriminating taste.
I began mincing onion, mushroom, carrot, and sweet radish for the fried spring roll filling, and each chopping motion transported me back to wd~50 and once again rekindled my love of my home kitchen’s mini–food processor. When finished, we spooned the vegetables into a bowl and added pork, wood ear mushrooms, and bean thread noodles.
“Mix with hands,” said Mai, working the mixture into a cohesive stuffing. She showed me how to place a large spoonful in the middle of a dampened sheet of rice paper and to roll it up, folding the ends toward the center and then rolling again, forming a tight, sealed parcel.
We broke for a lunch of rice, preserved mustard greens, roast pork knuckle, crunchy Thai eggplants in fish sauce, and a clear soup of greens and itsy-bitsy clams, which had been prepared by Mai and an assistant earlier in the morning. After I finished my rice, Mai immediately offered me more, saying, “You don’t eat anything. I’ve already had three bowls of rice.”
“I’m fine,” I said. The Vietnamese appetite for rice never ceased to amaze me. No meal in Vietnam was complete without rice. Lots and lots of fluffy, steaming rice.
We returned to work, and then at two o’clock, Mai told me to get changed so that we could drive to meet Didier at the restaurant for the cooking lesson. While swerving through the Hanoi traffic, she asked me, “So, you want to be a chef?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said.
“It’s a hard life, especially for a woman. I couldn’t do it,” she said.
“Yes, I know.” I thought of her and her children. Even though Didier wasn’t working the line at the restaurant, he was there every morning and evening except Sundays and probably returned home after his two sons’ bedtime. Maybe he saw them in the morning before school, but when you’re growing up, that’s not always enough.
Mai and I made small talk until we reached the restaurant, where Didier was conversing with a woman in her mid-fifties whose coiffed hair and fashionable scarf screamed French haute bourgeoisie.
“Lauren, this is Chantelle,” said Didier. “Her husband is working in Hanoi for a few months and she will be taking the cooking class today. Chantelle, this is Lauren. She is in Hanoi for two months to do a stage with me and learn more about Vietnamese cuisine, so I invited her to come along for the lesson.”
Chantelle smiled, and we chatted in French while Didier made final preparations for our market visit. A German film crew in town to shoot Didier for a television program followed us with their cameras. Even in Berlin, it seemed, Didier had culinary clout.
With a midafternoon drizzle under way, we hopped into Didier’s van and headed to the Hom market. Once there, we saw prepared goods lining the walkway to the central part of the bustling market: everything from basins filled with swimming carp to designer knockoff shoes. Pointing to the rows of wrapped sausages, plump like thighs in a Rubens painting, Didier exclaimed, “And here we have Vietnamese mortadella and pâtés. You can see the French influence in foods like these…”
As we wended our way into the heart of the market, Didier paused occasionally to highlight his favorite ingredients. “Dried shrimp, young rice… Ah, do you know what this is? Buddha’s hand. You use the rind. It is so fragrant.” He held up a gnarled green fruit as we inhaled the grassy citrus notes.
“Why are they green? Aren’t they ripe yet?” I asked.
“No, not yet, but when they are, you can use the rind to make marmalades. It’s much more fragrant than lemons or the citrus fruits you can find back home,” he said. We walked through the market, passing a few kiosks selling kitchenwares, including cleavers fit for giants and, of course, the frustrating, difficult-to-use Vietnamese vegetable peelers.
Passing stool-lined counters serving noodles and papaya salad, we snaked our way to the back of the market. Coal black eels squirmed in galvanized tubs, while gray shrimp fluttered in circles, performing a synchronized death swim as their antennae intertwined. We saw stands selling every conceivable cow part carved into shiny slices alongside glistening white brains and maroon livers. I cringed at the cage filled with live frogs ribbiting loudly and clamoring for space as they sat one on top of the other. Sticky, primordial smells of fresh blood and guts filled the air, masked only slightly by the mild aroma of steamed glutinous rice being sold by a crouching woman wearing a non la, the traditional Vietnamese conical hat.
Didier stopped and picked up a large striped orange crab, its claws tied underneath its body. “This is how you tell the difference between male and female crabs. If it forms a point, then it is a male, and if it is curved, it is female,” he said, noting the design of the white underside.
“And the females are better, right?” I asked.
“Yes, they are a little bit sweeter, so when you go to your fish markets back home, you should look for that. Oh, look at this. I will make a tempura with a bit of orange juice for an amuse before the meal,” he said, now reaching into a large bucket crowded with white baby squid.
“Now this is Vietnamese cooking,” he continued as we reached a small stall dedicated to herbs.
Large bamboo baskets displayed multitudes of herbs packaged in small parcels tied with wooden string, like an artist’s palette in shades of green. Didier reached down and snapped off a feathery leaf tinged with purple. Holding it, he said, “Perilla. And that is cilantro. And dill. Ngo herb. Lemon balm. Do you know what this is? This is rau ram, or Vietnamese mint.” He encouraged us to inhale the grassy scents of each leaf before we tasted them as the video camera zoomed in.
Once the market tour concluded, we returned to Didier’s house along with the cameramen. When we arrived, cups of hot, fragrant tea greeted us.
“Your house is beautiful,” said Chantelle to Mai, admiring the black-and-white family photos on the wall and the Asian antique furniture that stood beside modern Western accent pieces, much like the East-West blend of Didier’s cuisine. “Where else in the world has Didier worked?”
“Malaysia, Tunisia, Thailand, Bora Bora…,” said Mai with a trace of wonder, as though Didier had lived a whole life before her.
“Are you going to move anywhere else?” Chantelle asked.
“No, Didier has his roots here now. I’d like to, maybe, but he’s done.”
We ambled to the kitchen, where the film crew was adjusting the lighting and setting up microphones. From our seats at the central island, I spied four generous bottles filled with homemade rice wine and fruit-infused liqueurs and brandies, and in front of us was a tray filled with standard Vietnamese ingredients and spices. “Action,” said one of the cameramen, and Didier commanded center stage like the maestro at the Metropolitan Opera.
“Herbs, herbs, herbs. They are the king of Vietnamese cooking. And nuoc mam, the famous fish sauce made from anchovies, it is the connecting force between northern, central, and southern Vietnamese cooking, which are all very different, you know. The food in the North is simpler, more refined and unadulterated, while in central Vietnam the food is spicier, and in the South it’s much sweeter and ornate. Northern pho is pure, just broth and noodles with maybe a touch of green onion, but in the South it’s like salad with all the herbs and sauces they shower into it,” he said.
“Which version is better?” I asked.
“Why, northern, of course. Any Hanoian will look down on southern pho. But in the South, they think our pho is bland and that theirs is far better.”
Didier handed Chantelle and me a folder containing his classic Hanoian recipes. Pho didn’t make the cut, but he had included recipes for other local favorites, including banana flower salad, bun cha barbecued pork, grilled chicken skewers with lemon leaves, sautéed pumpkin branches, and fried spring rolls. Mai, a seasoned home cook, joined Didier as he began to prep ingredients. “We’ll start with the marinades for the meat. Raw meat must be marinated, to give it extra flavor and to make it more tender, but don’t let it marinate for too long. Just an hour or two is good,” Didier said, adding the fish sauce, turmeric juice, minced shallots, thinly sliced lemon leaves, oil, salt, and pepper that had already been prepped. He placed them in a bowl with the chicken.
Chantelle and I observed his technique, scribbling notes onto our recipes.
“And for the pork bun cha, we have fish sauce, chopped shallots—and they must be chopped with a knife to keep their juice—chives, sugar, pepper, caramel. You make the caramel by cooking water and sugar together until very dark, and then you immediately add cold water so that you have liquid caramel. But don’t add salt, because you have the nuoc mam. And you must have small morsels of meat, because, of course, you eat with chopsticks in Vietnam,” he said while Mai sliced pork shoulder into bite-sized pieces.
As the meats marinated, Mai and Didier began preparing nuoc cham, the fish sauce–based dressing to accompany the bun cha and nems.
“You add salt and sugar and a little lime juice to help soften the vegetables and draw out the water,” Didier explained as Mai cut green papaya and carrot into delicate slivers and plopped them into the bowl of sauce.
He continued, “Green papaya, it is excellent. You can boil it and make a puree, or you can have it fresh in a spring roll with herbs. With this spring roll, you can do anything. You can make it with seafood, but then make sure you add fewer vegetables and a bit of ginger. But you have not been to Hanoi until you have had nem.”
Once he rolled the nems into tidy parcels, we tackled the banana flower salad, ubiquitous in Vietnam. “This is the flower from the banana tree, but you can make this recipe with cabbage, or whatever you have, since the banana flower has no flavor,” he said. “You want to have the spirit of the salad. But Vietnamese salad, it has no salt, no vinaigrette, no oil, and it is perfect.” After Didier had demonstrated all the dishes and left for the restaurant’s dinner shift along with the camera crew, Chantelle and I were presented with the afternoon’s bounty. We sat like empresses at the long dining room table, where we were served the dishes in succession. We relished the salad’s cool crunch, the pork’s sweetness, and the crispness of the fried spring rolls, the herbal intensity of the lemon leaves, and the freshness of the sautéed pumpkin branches. Everything was filled with flavor and passion: This was the food of Vietnam. This was why I had come.
These recipes, which typify some of the classic dishes you’ll find in Vietnam, have been adapted from Didier Corlou’s cooking class to make them fairly easy to replicate at home. You should be able to find most ingredients at Asian grocery stores.
You cannot talk about Vietnamese food without mentioning spring rolls, which are called nems in Hanoi and cha gio in the South. Although they are served primarily with bun cha (see here), I ate fried spring rolls all the time, particularly as part of my lunch meal at the commissary. As Son said, “All foreigners like nems.” It’s true. For this dipping sauce (as well as subsequent dipping sauces), I like to use a Microplane grater for the garlic, which results in a fine paste that dissolves easily into the liquid.
SERVES 4 AS AN APPETIZER
½ ounce dried wood ear mushrooms
½ ounce dried shiitake mushrooms
2½ ounces cellophane or rice noodles
2½ ounces bean sprouts (about 1 cup)
2½ ounces onion (about 1 small)
6 ounces ground pork
1 egg
Large pinch of freshly ground black pepper
16 rice paper sheets
Vegetable oil for frying, about 2 to 4 cups depending on the size of your pot
½ cup water
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon rice vinegar
½ teaspoon minced or grated garlic
¼ teaspoon finely minced Thai chile
1 head of lettuce, or about 16 lettuce leaves, for serving (large, flat leaves like green leaf or Bibb work best)
Herbs for serving, including mint and cilantro (optional)
Soak both mushrooms in hot water until soft, then rinse off any grit or dirt. Discard the shiitake stems, and mince the mushrooms. Meanwhile, soak the noodles in hot water until soft, about 10 minutes, then drain. Return the noodles to the bowl and, using a pair of scissors, cut into small pieces, about ¼ to ½ inch. Mince the bean sprouts and onion, and combine in a large mixing bowl along with the mushrooms, noodles, pork, egg, and pepper. Mix until fully combined.
Moisten a piece of rice paper with a little water, rubbing the water all over both sides. Place about 2 tablespoons’ worth of filling at the base of a piece of rice paper, and form into a log shape, leaving about an inch of space from the sides of the rice paper. Begin rolling the rice paper over the filling until you’ve used up about half the sheet. Fold in the sides over the center and roll all the way up so that your enclosed parcel measures about 4 inches by 1 inch. Repeat with the remaining rice paper rolls and filling.
Pour enough oil into a heavy-bottomed pot or wok so that you’ve got at least 2 inches’ worth of oil. When the oil is shimmering, add a few of the spring rolls. (You can test to see if the oil is hot enough by dropping a small piece of moistened rice paper into the oil; if it floats and bubbles, you’re ready to fry the rolls.) Fry until browned, about 3 minutes. Let dry on paper towels to absorb the oil, and continue frying in batches.
Meanwhile, combine all ingredients for the sauce in a small bowl, and mix well.
To serve, wrap a lettuce leaf around the hot spring roll and a few sprigs of fresh herbs, and serve with the sauce for dipping.
After pho, bun cha is one of Hanoi’s most famous dishes and is a delicious summertime lunch or light dinner. In Hanoi, you’ll know you’re at a bun cha stand by the smoke wafting from the charcoal grills. Living in New York City, I don’t have the luxury of cooking pork on a charcoal grill, but my stove’s broiler works just fine. For some reason, my local bun cha joint in Hanoi served foreigners pork patties while the locals got pork patties and grilled pork belly—but on my last day in Hanoi, when I went for a farewell lunch, I was served both. Coincidence? Maybe, but I like to think that by then I was considered a local. This version uses only pork patties, but feel free to add sliced pork belly to the marinade and grill both.
2 tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons water
1 pound ground pork
1 large shallot, minced as small as possible
3 tablespoons fish sauce
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1½ cups water
½ teaspoon minced or grated garlic
1 red Thai chile, minced
2 tablespoons green papaya, cut into small, thin slices, about ¼ inch (optional)
1 pound thin rice noodles
Selection of Asian herbs, including any of the following: cilantro, perilla, mint, sawtooth coriander, ngo herb (for a total of about 2 loosely packed cups)
½ head red leaf lettuce, torn into small pieces
In a small saucepan, combine the sugar with 3 tablespoons water and cook over high heat until a dark brown caramel forms, about 8 minutes. Remove from the heat and add 2 tablespoons cold water, swirling the pot.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the pork, shallot, fish sauce, caramel sauce, and pepper, and marinate in the refrigerator for 1½ hours.
Meanwhile, combine all ingredients for the sauce in a large mixing bowl.
When the pork is through marinating, remove from the refrigerator and shape into small patties, about 15 to 20 in all.
Heat a charcoal grill or a broiler to high. Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook the noodles according to the directions on their package. Drain, then rinse under cold water to halt the cooking process.
Meanwhile, grill or broil the pork patties until fully cooked and slightly charred, about 4 minutes per side.
Spoon the sauce into four bowls, then place the pork patties over the sauce. Place the herbs and lettuce in one large communal bowl and the noodles into another large communal bowl.
To eat, dip some of the noodles into the sauce and eat with the patties and herbs.
We made this dish with pumpkin shoots, which are easily found in Hanoi but less so in America. Instead, you can use Chinese broccoli, bok choy, watercress, spinach, or any other variety of Asian greens. You will need to blanch a larger green with thick stems like Chinese broccoli or bok choy, but if you’re using a leafy green like spinach, there’s no need.
SERVES 4 AS A SIDE DISH
1 pound Chinese broccoli or other Asian greens
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons fish sauce
Pinch of freshly ground black pepper
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the Chinese broccoli. Blanch for 1 minute, then drain.
Meanwhile, heat a wok over high heat and add the oil. When it starts to shimmer, add the garlic and sauté until softened but not browned, about 30 seconds. Add the greens and sauté until tender, about 2 minutes. Add the fish sauce and pepper, and stir until coated, about 30 more seconds. Remove the greens to a serving platter, leaving any liquid that remains in the wok. Serve hot, as an accompaniment to any entrée.