Hang Bong’s blameless Chinese barbecue – Food – Travel

Hang Bong’s blameless Chinese barbecue – Food – Travel

Hanoi Times – Right along Hanoi’s fashionable

Hang Bong Street

, Jacob O Gold indulges the primal urge to eat meat skewered and cooked over an open flame.

The impulse to put meat o­n a stick, cook it over a fire, and eat it is both primal and universal. While the practice of cooking meat must have evolved in part as a means of sanitizing and preserving meat, what is more remarkable about this innovation – which predates the human species itself – is that it may mark the world’s first deliberately aesthetic act.

The application of fire to meat created something new, whose interaction with the human senses played with inborn animal feelings of pleasure, if not beauty. For further consideration of what all that means, you can pick up a copy of Claude Levi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked. To experience the magic of meat for yourself, right here in Hanoi, you really should head over to Do Nuong Trung Hoa at 66 Hang Bong.

Do Nuong Trung Hoa, which basically translates as “Chinese grill,” is o­ne of those street-corner operations that straddles the line between restaurant and incident. Announced by a big red banner printed in bold yellow Chinese and Vietnamese scripts which hangs above the scene, Do Nuong Trung Hoa consists of: a busy, attentive, expert staff, a table heaped with raw skewered delights of various sorts, a huge gas grill, a refrigerator for bottled drinks and iced tea, and low plastic tables and stools that radiate from a little alcove in the building, sprawling in either direction from the corner with the ebb of the crowd.

As its name suggests, Do Nuong Trung Hoa’s meat, seafood, and vegetables o­n sticks derive from the so-called “street meat” popular throughout China, which arrived in the Middle Kingdom by way of the empire’s interactions with the Islamic peoples who lived at its borders and traded in its cities. While the prevalence of lamb in the Chinese variant recalls these origins, our region – o­nce more removed and unencumbered by dietary restriction – relishes the full variety of creatures and their parts available for human consumption.

Lest you moderns forgot that fire is from the gods, Do Nuong Trung Hoa is there to provide a near-religious eating experience. Helped along by a few simple spices, the grill masters trust in the power of flame. There is not a thing that I tried at Do Nuong Trung Hoa that was not groan-worthy: beef, lamb, pork, chicken wings and chicken entrails, sweet potatoes and sweet maige, curry fish and whole sardines and squids. o­ne of the fastest items to go are the meats wrapped in bacon. There are big black mushrooms and little straw mushrooms wrapped in chicken skin. There is a spicy sausage that looks pretty plain but comes out fantastic. It goes o­n and o­n. The table laden with uncooked possibilities looks like a still life painted when o­ne of the Old Masters came down with a serious case of the munchies.

Off-the-skewer accompaniments include a kind of seafood maige-meal fritter and stuffed soft-shell crab. Everything can be dipped in a tasty chili sauce that comes with your meal in a little dish. To cool down your palate, you can also order a plate of cu dau- that kind of sweet water-potato.

The place is blameless. And the basic human appeal of the food lends a warm conviviality to the atmosphere. The night I came to Do Nuong Trung Hoa, it was happily feeding people from around the world, faces flushed red from the beer that goes so well with the meat. There were sets of Vietnamese youths but also families, a crowd of heavy-set Koreans, lone older gentlemen of Germanic appearance, bald and ruddy with a thick white Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, an Irishman and his comely Dutch-Indonesian friend. Everyone was in a good mood.

Like just-ripened fruit or freshly-baked bread, a skewer of grilled meat still hot from the fire is o­ne of those basic joys of eating that is good with a capital G. And at Do Nuong Trung Hoa, it is cheap and easy to run your carnivorous cup over and over and over with this timeless blessing.

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