Hội An Cooking Class and Basket Boats
By Lauren Gerzina & Justin Hayes
Lanterns, Face Paint, and Mezcal (?)
We started our day cooking traditional Vietnamese food and ended it eating Mexican and drinking mezcal cocktails. Record scratch I bet you’re wondering how we ended up here.
We woke up early and decided to try out a highly rated “western” breakfast place called Thom's Sourdough Bakery & Café. As its name implies, it’s a restaurant/bakery which specializes in sourdough bread and is right in the heart of Old Town. We accidentally came to Hoi An during rainy (and “off”) season, which has actually had numerous benefits — there have been minimal tourists AND the rain cools us off (it is incredibly hot and humid here with most places having no A/C but LOTS of fans). After a five minute scurry over to the restaurant, we ordered an “English” breakfast for Justin and a big ol’ sandwich on sourdough for Lauren plus two iced coffees and a mango/passionfruit smoothie (which tasted like it was literally JUST the two fruits and some ice, no sugar added). We have both noticed that the meals here are very filling, and we haven’t really felt the need to snack in between. The food took a bit longer than usual, so we had to scarf it down quickly and dash back to the Airbnb for our tour pick up at 8:30.
We met our lovely tour guide Nhung and headed to a local market to buy supplies for our cooking class. We realized about five minutes into the drive that we weren’t stopping to pick up any other people — so we got a private tour today (another score for coming during off season). Nhung showed us tons of fruit we had never seen before and had us taste a few. We walked around looking at tons of dead animals (including a shark — which made Lauren pretty sad) to pick out the chicken, pork, and prawns for our recipes.
We got back in the car and headed over to Cam Thanh Coconut vVillage where we hung out in a covered area out front of what seemed Nhung’s travel/souvenir shop (it might have also been a residence, but it was unclear). She was incredibly sweet and told us about her children and her business (Phu Lanh Travel) which is named after her kids, Phu and Lanh. She taught us how to apply silk to a pre-made lantern bamboo base, and we picked out a pretty purple colored silk to signify romance (definitely not because Justin likes the color purple). We get to take this lantern home as a souvenir — and Lauren enjoyed making it so much that she wants to take a class on how to make the ENTIRE lantern . . . more to come in the next few days on this.
Once our lantern was complete and drying, we got into a circular bamboo basket boat with a nice lady who spoke about 10 words of English and the lyrics to “Gangnam Style.” While the exact origin of these boats is unknown according to National Geographic, the story goes that when the French occupied Vietnam, they levied taxes on boats that the poor fisherman could not afford. So they came up with a bamboo basket that could also be used as a boat. The baskets turned out to be very versatile and capable on the water, and many local fishermen used them to go out on their own independent from larger fishing businesses. Now, they are mostly used as a tourist experience.
The boat ride started with a slight drizzle and quickly turned into an outright downpour. The lady gave us some ponchos (which we later discovered bled color onto our arms and neck) and an umbrella to use during the trip. She was so cheerful and fun and, because she knew we spoke English, she started singing and dancing “Gangnam Style” over and over again to engage with us. It was hilarious.
We then came up to a section of the water where there were multiple boats with big speakers on them and people singing Karaoke. It was hard to make out exactly what they were singing because they were non-English songs and there were about three or four karaoke boats singing at once. A few boats in this area were offering tourists a chance to go for a “spin” and Lauren, being a huge fan of teacups in a certain Mouse-related theme park, decided to take it for a spin (for 100,000 dong):
Needless to say, she had a good time.
The rain tapered off as we made our way back to Nhung’s shop. Our boat guide caught a crab using nothing but a stick with a line and bait, but Justin couldn’t get his phone out in time to snap a picture before the crab fell off. We both tried our hands at crab fishing, but couldn’t get any bites (claws?).
When we returned, we cleaned ourselves off and tried to get as much of the poncho paint off as possible, and saw that Nhung and her assistants had prepared all of the meat we had purchased at the market earlier for our cooking class. The vegetable cutting was our job though. She taught us how to “flower” chili peppers and tomatoes — Lauren was better at this task than Justin, perhaps since it involved a more artistic touch. Nhung found our flowering “skills” amusing. We chopped some scallions, onions, carrots, and papaya and used a unique tool to slice up some corn kernels for spring rolls.
Using the corn, scallion greens and rice paper, we folded up some corn spring rolls. We then put all of the seasonings like garlic, shallots, curry powder, and oils on the meat. Justin started cooking the pork while Lauren began making the Vietnamese pancakes with pork fat, prawns, rice water and egg. Lauren, being an omelette aficionado, was quite good at flipping the pancakes using just the pan.
We cooked about four pancakes, the pork, and some chicken, and then we fried up the corn spring rolls. Then it was time for plating. We added the pork to a local noodle dish called Cao Lau, put the chicken in with the sliced papaya and carrots and herbs to make Papaya salad, placed the pancakes on a bamboo dish with some lettuce and cucumbers, and arranged the spring rolls around the flowered tomato.
The food was all delicious, especially the Cao Lau — we will be getting more of this in town — and the papaya salad. And the corn spring rolls were way better than we thought they were going to be.
After the meal, we parted ways with Nhung and promised we would write her some fantastic reviews on Trip Advisor. We rode back to the Airbnb and decided to take showers to try to remove the remaining poncho color and relax a bit in the A/C. We spent some time figuring out what else we wanted to do in town and where to try to get some fancy cocktails (Justin’s favorite). We found out that there is exactly ONE Mexican restaurant in town (with a Mezcal speakeasy upstairs) and decided to give it a try for dinner.
Honestly, we had very low expectations for the Mexican food — we just wanted a bit of flavor from home. But WOW, it was actually really good. Corn tortillas, tacos al pastor, delicious guacamole — it all really hit the spot. The restaurant was also celebrating Dia de los Muertos (since it is celebrated in Mexico this week), and the restaurant offered faced painting to all of the customers ho came in — so naturally Lauren HAD to do it. When in Hoi An, right? The owner came over to speak to us and thank us for celebrating with them (and to take pics of Lauren’s face). She is an American who had lived in Mexico for 5 years and missed Mexican food since moving to Vietnam, so naturally she and her husband HAD to open a restaurant/bar. It was so fun chatting with her and the face painter (another ex-pat from the UK). It seems they have a wonderful ex-pat community here. Afterwards, we wandered up to the cocktail bar.
For as great as the restaurant was, the bar was even COOLER. The decor was stunning. It had such beautiful attention to detail, but we were so excited to try the drinks, we completely forgot to get pics of the place. Have no fear, reader, we will DEFINITELY be back as they are doing a swanky Dia de los Muertos party on Saturday night with more face painting where we will be sure to get tons of pictures for you to see!
The Mezcal and Tequila menu was expansive — pages and pages of delicious crafted cocktails and varieties of Mezcals to try. Both of us wanted to try almost the entire menu, especially after we tried our first drinks and were blown away. For those of you that know Lauren well, she puts these drinks at the same level (if not even higher in some cases) as the Cava de Tequila at Epcot. That’s about the highest praise you could expect from her, especially for her beloved tequila drinks.
Lauren ordered two different cocktails: a hibiscus margarita and a matcha vanilla mezcal drink (the names are way cooler that that, we just cant remember them). Justin ordered an Añejo-based cocktail called Señor Marcos, a mezcal-based cocktail with Aperol and green chartreuse, and a white Oaxaca Old Fashioned that was out of this world! We also chatted with a lovely woman behind the bar who just got back from studying in Indiana and was readjusting to life in Vietnam. She told us about a gin bar owned by the same owner as this bar and a speakeasy in Hanoi for us to try. We will definitely be checking out both of these recommendations.
Around 7:30pm, we got a text from our tailor saying that we could come in to do our first fittings for our custom clothes. Lauren was so excited that we agreed to run over there straight from the bar. However, she forgot that her face may or may not have a thick layer of paint on it. We ran downstairs and asked the face painter for some baby wipes so she could actually try on clothes and got it, mostly, off her face. After a 12 minute walk over to the tailor, we got to try on all of our new clothes! We were SO happy with how everything turned out. They have a few more adjustments to make them absolutely perfect, but we were SO impressed with the approximately 30-hour turn around time for so much custom clothing. And now, we both want more. :)
So ladies and gentlemen, thats how we went from cooking Vietnamese food to consuming Mexican food/drinks in Hoi An, Vietnam. One of the best days of our trip so far.
