Dìn Ký Seafood Restaurant

I spent a significant portion of Sunday mentally salivating over the New York Times article on Saigon eateries I posted the previous day, and so that evening M. and I decided to hit one of the local spots reporter David Farley waxed enthusiastic over, Cơm Niêu Sài Gòn. The article’s account of flying clay pots and caramelized fish hatchlings sounded like a full-sensory dining experience, and it didn’t hurt that Cơm Niêu had appeared in a No Reservations episode back in 2005. If Anthony Bourdain gives it a thumbs-up, you won’t find me second-guessing the man.

Unfortunately, I forgot that Vietnamese restaurants are more attuned to the dining schedules of locals than Westerners, which means the dinner rush starts around 5pm and lasts until about 7:30pm at the latest. (After all, these people have to be up at 4:30am the day day so they can get in a good two-hour nap at lunchtime.) By the time we finally arrived at 9:30pm, chairs were being placed on their tables and floors were being mopped. A waiter enjoying a cigarette and grooming his mole hair on the street in front of the entrance harrumphed when we strolled up and gave us the shaking-hand-in-the-air sign — the universal Southeast Asian semaphore meaning “no fucking way.”

I despaired, roundly cursing fate, all the food gods and Vietnamese clocks, not having eaten since breakfast and knowing this probably meant I’d have to settle for pub food somewhere unsavory. But M. had a brainstorm: we’d check out an all-night Vietnamese-Chinese joint she knew a few blocks away called Dìn Ký Seafood Restaurant. Turns out Dìn Ký is one of those Vietnamese places with a menu the size of a capital-city phonebook; you know for a fact there’s no way they cook some of these things more often than once a year. But with M.’s guidance and a look around at what other diners were tucking into, we settled on a grab-bag of crumbled fried softshell crab, vegetable springrolls, a salad of crab-claw meat and needle mushrooms, and stuffed grilled cockles with peanuts and cilantro.

The favorite of the lot was the softshell crab: lightly breaded and perhaps a little too vigorously fried, it was served with the ubiquitous saucer of soy and sliced red chilis that accompanies nearly all southern Vietnamese dishes. The vegetable spring rolls were also fried, the diameter of a V-8 cylinder, and delicious. Crab claw meat and needle mushrooms (who knew there was such a thing?) may go together well in a salad, I don’t know; all we tasted was mayonnaise, in a sea of which both ingredients were drowning. Last on the list: a quartet of cockles, drizzled with oil, cilantro and aforementioned chopped peanuts and grilled. The result was a shellfish with the taste and consistency of galvanized rubber. Probably great for weight loss, as you’d lose 100 calories just masticating the thing. All in all, a mixed bag of results for ol’ Dìn Ký.

The best part of the meal, in fact, was in considering a few of the items we didn’t order. (See photo below.) It’s not that I have anything against ox penis or deer veins or chicken testicles or pig’s brain, necessarily. But braised? Come on. Even I’m not such a country philistine as to eat braised ox dick. At least grill that bad boy, then we can talk about dinner. I suspect Anthony Bourdain would agree.