Cha Ca La Vong (Cha Ca Ca Cvong), Hanoi, Vietnam (Alissa and Don Eat Asia Day 24, Part 1)

You know what's a real dick move? To open a restaurant on the same street as a 100 year old restaurant that invented a famous dish, make the exact same dish, call your restaurant the same name and then put up gigantic signs so as to make it appear as if you're the famous restaurant, all the while actively call people to you as if you're helping them out. Sound unbelievable? Well, this actually has happened in Hanoi.

Cha Ca La Vong is immensely famous, being a 'must eat' in many a guidebook, on the list of 1001 Foods You Must Eat Before You Die and even the subject of an article in the New York Times. Its a seemingly simple dish of grilled fish that is then pan fried in a with some dill, then added to a small bowl of noodles, chilli, peanuts, onion, other herbs and a sauce. The result is a dish that is so delicious that its inspired chefs in the US to either directly reproduce it wholesale or adapt the dish's flavours into new creations.

Here's the tricky part - the restaurant and the dish are both called Cha Ca La Vong, and its located on a street called Cha Ca. And on that street are two shops with exactly the same name located almost opposite each other. Even someone like myself who mapped out all the streets in the Old Quarter and knew roughly where to look for Cha Ca La Vong was very confused. In the end we chose the one of the east side of the road given the much more welcoming staff and signage.

Little did we know that we actually had gone to the slightly more expensive 'imposter' store (the original is already considered expensive by Hanoi standards). They claim in their menu that they are the famous Cha Ca La Vong 'mentioned in many guidebooks', but had I had Google Maps or a Lonely Planet handy it would have told me to go to the dingy, unwelcoming place across the road. Had we read the sign a bit better we might have noticed it actually read 'Cha Ca Ca Cvong' but it was really only when I was writing this blog post that I even noticed this little detail!

So given that they were not the correct store, how did the food hold up? Pretty well actually. Based on other blog posts I've read the food here is said to be on par with the original and definitely did not disappoint.

First the herbs, onion, sauce, peanuts, chilli and noodles are placed on the table.

Then a pan sitting on a hotpad is warmed with the dill added in to be fried up.

The waitstaff prepared the first bowl for us to show us how to eat the dish.

And when the dill is sufficiently cooked the grilled fish is added.

The end result is a dish that is very utterly Vietnamese but very unique due to the dominance of the dill. I always think of dill as a good friend of salmon, and it again proves here that dill and seafood are wonderful together. Mixed together with the noodles, nuts, herbs, onion and chilli and the sauce, this was a flavour explosion - I can see why this dish is so highly praised and copied in the US. If you like seafood, you'll probably like this more than an average bowl of pho, but for our palate was probably behind bun cha in our esteem.

The Verdict: Very Good (Provisionally)
I've said some very nice things about the food at this imposter store and it was well earned - the food was delicious and lived up to its high expectations. But what is not earned is its name, and I really don't like the deception involved. While the food is said to be as good at the original store, the experience of how the dish is presented at the true Cha Ca La Vong looks to be much better and more exciting (based on blog posts I've seen) so for these imposters to charge more its totally unacceptable. No matter how good they were, I really recommend not giving them the business as this kind of dishonesty should not be rewarded. 

Introduction & Dome, Perth Airport, Western Australia (Alissa and Don Eat Asia Day 1, Part 1)

As with all travelling stories in the de Souza family, it all starts with a coffee at Dome. Whenever any member of my family travels overseas we always make sure we’re at the airport with sufficient time for one last cup of coffee together, and in the ensuing years it’s become something of a family tradition. Not that the coffee at Dome is particularly special or there aren't any other options (albeit from Perth Airport’s very meager food and drink selection), but so entrenched is this familiar ritual that it just would not feel right to start a journey without it.

For most of these cups of coffee Dome was as far as I was going. This was my parents’ travelling story, and my role in the adventure ended with goodbyes at the departure gate. Sometimes I went with them too - in 2009 and 2011 I joined my parents on their then-biennial voyages to India. But this trip is different. For the first time it is my parents staying behind in Perth. For the first time this travelling story belongs to me – and my favourite dining partner.

Friday 25^th October, 2011 was the last time I went through those departure gates, travelling with my parents for a food odyssey to Hong Kong, Mumbai, Udaipur, Munnar and Singapore. This was an exciting trip that I’d been looking forward to for months; however a part of me didn’t want to go. See, just 5 days before departure I’d met a girl. Or rather, it wasn’t that I met her (we’d been friends of friends), but that we’d started seeing each other. And I liked her, and felt immediately that I’d found someone truly special. With the bad timing of my departure we chatted online just about every night I was away, and though we’d only been on two dates beforehand I felt even then that I wished she had been there with me for all of it.

6 months later we were engaged, with November 23^rd, 2013 being our wedding day. And now exactly 2 years after I left for my last overseas holiday, I’m correcting the wrong of that last trip by taking Alissa to all the cities I told her about every night I was overseas. With meals booked at 5 of San Pellegrino’s Top 50 Restaurants in Asia - 2 of which also boast 3 Michelin Stars – and 5 weeks of amazing meals planned it seems only fitting to open the Ministry of Gluttony with our first travelling story – Alissa and Don Eat Asia.

Alissa and I have talked about ratings for food. With food varying from 3 Star Michelin to a simple temple meal, how does one rate a meal on its own merits? Additionally, as people who enjoy eating we probably find most food is at least passable, therefore its probably more important to distinguish between varying levels of good. Rather than allocating a star rating of giving a score, we've come up with a rating system for our blog that we feel better reflects our experiences in a straightforward manner:

Poor - Food that is of an unacceptably low quality. Best avoided
Okay - Passable food of acceptable taste and quality. Not bad but not exactly 'good' food.

Good - Worth a try; a satisfying meal if not exactly mindblowing.

Very Good - Recommended food to eat if you are in the area; a satisfying meal +

Fxcellent - A very satisfying meal; food that you should eat if you are visiting this place.

Exceptional - The very best food of its class. Food and/or a food experience so good that you should make travel plans to eat here!

So with this in mind... back to Dome. Alissa and I ordered long macchiattos (a strong or double shot latte in correct terms) with Alissa eating a chicken wrap and a ham and cheese croissant for myself.

The coffee was okay. Not a bad or a particularly excellent coffee. It served its purpose of waking us up after getting out of bed for 3:15am. What wasn't so good though was the paper cup - I'm fairly certain that in the past we've been given proper cups at Dome, so someone made the unenvironmentally friendly decision to switch to disposable since our last trip. 

My croissant was not very good. The pastry had obviously been given the microwave reheat treatment and was lacking the crisp flakiness I associate with a good croissant. The filling was very poorly spaced out - so much so I basically ate half of my croissant before I even got to the ham and cheese, and then it felt as if they'd put way too much in this half as it seemed overly generous. I would have preferred a more evenly spread out filling, and I finished my meal wishing I had ordered something else, like Alissa's chicken wrap.

Alissa's order looked a lot more appetizing, and had clearly been seared in a sandwich toaster, making me wish mine had had a similar treatment. I had a bite and appreciated the well-seasoned chicken. Thankfully I hadn't taken a large enough bite to have noticed something Alissa later pointed out as a fault - as the wrap had been microwaved to reheat, the thickly sliced cucumber had become warm and semi-cooked with a weird texture. As someone who doesn't like thickly sliced cucumber, perhaps the ham and cheese croissant was not such a bad choice after all.

The Verdict: Okay
Its a family tradition, so we'll keep coming back. However, as the food is only of a passable standard I cannot exactly recommend it as a place of interest.