Vietnam Ben Thanh Night Market

Here’s another guest blog entry. This time it’s from my boss at Level Up, our Marketing Director, Jake San Diego. He recently went on a trip to Vietnam with his lovely wife, Tey, for some much needed RNR and he agreed to take a few pictures for me, hahaha! Enjoy the post guys!

Here we are food tripping at Ben Thanh night market in Vietnam. This is actually on a street beside the market. It’s a regular, busy Vietnam street during day time. But at 5pm, you will see accordion tents magically appearing from everywhere. Parang yung mga tents sa Harry Potter when they watched the Quidditich Cup. ^^

Wauks: Find out more about they ate (including a flaming Shrimp dish) after the jump! Lotsa’ pics too.

This is my most favorite dish in Vietnam. Like most of what I ate there, I don’t know what its called. But it’s like a crispy omelette filled with bean sprouts (toge), shrimps and coriander–they put coriander in almost eveything there– and other seasonings. You get some of this omelette and wrap it in fresh lettuce, like lumpia, then you dip it in fish sauce. Their fish sauce is not like our patis. It’s a lot watered down, doesn’t smell like rotten fish and it’s sweet like the water in atchara. The ritual reminds me of how you eat “buro” of the Kapampangans.

It’s customary for Vietnamese to serve a fresh plate of vegetables for every dish. But this one comes with rice noodles and rice paper. Like the omelette, you wrap some fish meat together with the noodles and vegetables using the rice paper. Then you dip it in the same sweet fish sauce, or the spicy salt with lemon concotion which is a staple when eating Vietnamese seafood.

I don’t eat rice as much as the regular Filipino because it makes me feel stuffed. That’s why I love this combination. Though it has rice (in paper and noodle form), you can eat a lot without suffering that impacho feeling.

Eka gets face-to-tail with the Elephant Fish. When we saw this before it was cooked, I wondered how they are going to fit it on a plate. The answer came together with the fish, it has wooden stands. It’s like tilapia, but it’s meat is more tasty.

This is just a photo of the dish served next to our table. It’s shrimps stuck into a flaming dish. Actually, at another table, they also had a shabu-shabu type mini stove where you cook live baby octopus.

Yes, each oriental meal is an adventure.^_^

Wauks: Thanks again Jake and Tey for this post. Guest bloggers make life easier for me because other than saving me time for writing, it also helps out with the load of actually paying for food to review here. Maintaining a food blog costs a lot of dough, hahaha. Cheers everyone! Next post will be on Friday. I’ll be reviewing a Spanish Restaurant that specializes in Paella.