With all due respect to both living and deceased parties involved, I’m confident the only reason this beast didn’t end up as dinner for the entire village is because it was already dead and rotting.

Thousands Mourn Dead Whale in Vietnam

An enormous whale known as “Your Excellency” received last rites and was buried today at the mouth of the Cai Cung River at southern Bac Lieu province in Vietnam, according to an Associated Press report.

On Sunday, the 15-ton, 52-foot-long whale was observed floating dead 26 miles off the coast. It took several dozen fishermen on 10 boats just to bring the whale ashore.

Thousands of people were expected to attend today’s funeral. Yesterday, 10,000 mourners had already gathered to honor the whale in the southern Vietnamese village. The air was thick with incense burned during such sacred occasions.

Plans are already underway to build a temple at the site of the whale’s burial.

“Whenever whales arrive, dead or alive, local fishermen believe they bring luck and safety,” Do Tien Ha, a coast guard in the area, told AP.

Also, just so we’re clear, “last rites” are the final prayers and ministrations given to Christians by Christian clergy upon death. There’s a remote chance that one or two of this gang may have been Christain, but you can bet none of them was wearing a cassock and speaking Latin. That goes double for the whale.

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.

An interesting pair of news items today from the go-get-’em bulldog reporters over at Thanh Nien News, who never met a soft news story they couldn’t somehow make softer:

CKE Restaurants Inc. said Thursday that it signed an exclusive deal to open 25 of its Carl’s Jr. restaurants in Vietnam. The Vietnam agreement with the Mesa Group will see the first Carl’s Jr. restaurant open in Ho Chi Minh City in April.”

And in a related but equally mortifying development:

Subway, the U.S.-based sandwich-shop chain, plans to open its first store in Vietnam in August and is targeting 25 shops throughout the country by 2015 … The Milford, Connecticut-based company will adapt its standard menu to Vietnamese tastes.

Vietnam, bless its Stone-Age heart, has until now remained almost completely untainted by the culinary disease of Western-style fast food. That’s not to say the food here is disease free; nothing could be further from the truth — even the tap water is potentially deadly — but at least the local cuisine has nearly always been local — at least until the turn of the millennium. In 1999, the Philippines’ biggest hamburger broker, Jollibee, broke into the Vienamese market (signature dish: something called “Chicken Chickenrice,” which must have taken the marketing team a full focus group session and entire minutes of brainstorming to come up with). Around the same time, South Korean beef-’n'-bird joint Lotteria stormed the beaches. A few years later, in 2000, the world’s largest perpetrator of fast-food, U.S.-based Yum! Brands, muscled its fat ass into the room, after which a rash of KFCs and Pizza Huts broke out all over the country. Apart from that grease-spattered mob, however, Vietnam has been otherwise franchise-free. In fact, this may be the only country left in the world without a single Starbucks, which might go a long way toward explaining the mystifying lack of sullen, shaggy-haired, plaid-pants-wearing hipsters among the Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times yesterday, writer David Farley explored the foodie scene in Saigon with Manhattan restaurateur and home boy Michael Huynh for that paper’s Asia-Pacific edition of its weekly Travel section. The money quote:

‘You like congealed pigs’ blood?’ my travel companion asked, pulling me over to a street cart in Ho Chi Minh City. Before I could answer, two bowls of chao, a rice porridge bobbing with slices of pork sausage and cubes of coagulated blood, were plopped in our hands.

In all fairness, the coagulated pig’s blood soup is not half bad.

In tangentially related news, the recently announced Ho Chi Minh City subway (a mythical public transit development not to be confused with the sandwich shop) is proceeding apace, with the first of six lines expected to be completed sometime shortly before all matter and space-time in the universe collapse into a infinitely dense, dimensionless singularity.

Somehow I managed to miss it last weekend in all the hubbub of our 20-person Vespa convoy to Mui Ne, but The New York Times on Sunday ran an article about Vietnam that made no mention at all of 1) the war, 2) communism, 3) rice fields or 4) the galloping local economy. Unusual enough by itself, but the article also made specific reference to lederhosen, dirndls and Bavaria. What could Vietnam possibly have in common with German culture, you ask, other than breathable air comprised of roughly 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 0.93% argon? According to the Times, that would be beer, as fine an answer as any I can think of.

Ho Chi Minh City is home to a handful of European-style microbreweries, most of which are centrally located in District 1 and some of which claim to brew their beer according to the Bavarian purity law known as the Reinheitsgebot. This trend took off in 2001 when the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus, which had previously been importing Pilsner Urquell, built a Euro-style brewery inside the restaurant with the help of experts from the Czech Republic. Other breweries followed, trying to tap into a domestic beer culture that stretches back at least to the 1890s (that’s when the Habeco brewery, now state run, was founded by French colonialists), was revitalized during the Vietnam War** in the 1960s, and currently produces more than 2 billion liters of beer a year.

I’ve been to the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus on Mac Dinh Chi Street, and I’ll admit to being somewhat less impressed than the author, but then maybe that’s because I was distracted from the beer by a plate of bratwursts that had clearly emerged from a tin of Vienna Sausages just moments before. I’ll give it another try and make sure I’ve eaten beforehand. I’ve not been to Nguyen Du Brauhof or the Lion Brewery & Restaurant (home of aforementioned lederhosen – on wall murals, luckily), but they’re now on my Must Visit list. I wonder what variety of beer goes best with grilled goat testicles? (Disclaimer: not a rhetorical question.)

**Whoops. Apparently I was wrong about there being no mention of the war — and me raving about it less than two paragraph ago.

This morning The New York Times slobbers over what it pegs at the hottest new condiment of the moment, at least in remote parts of California. Sriracha Chili Sauce (Tuong Ot Sriracha) is manufactured in the good old US of A, but its roots, if sauce can be said to have roots, are Southeast Asian.

The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal. Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods in Los Angeles, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples.”

Be that as it may, Tuong Ot Sriracha is thoroughly Vietnamese, from its wasabi-green cap to its squeezable bottom. Huy Fong Foods (pronounced hwee fong) is owned and operated by an L.A.-based Vietnamese expat named David Tran. The purée of fresh red jalapeños, garlic powder, sugar, salt and vinegar is a southern Vietnamese staple, the perfect complement for everything from pho to roasted dog. I can say this with confidence not because I have had roasted dog (or not only because of that) but because I have some of this very sauce sitting on a shelf in my kitchen cupboard:

Yes, that’s a bag of grits behind it. Is there a problem with that?

This one’s for the folks back home. The other day, I did a double-take as I was walking down the aisles of a local supermarket. Anyone notice anything familiar about the friendly brand logo on these cans? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Piggly Wiggly has probably not begun producing Vietnamese-style beans ‘n’ franks (suòn hâm dâu) in which the “franks” are gristly chunks of ham and bone. (Of course I tried it.) What we have here is a pirated pig.