Michael Sieburg

I’m on a minor mission to eat at all of the restaurants in the alley near my house. After eating at the same bun bo hue stall a couple of times and trying the glass noodle crab soup across the street, this time I went for a little restaurant that serves delicacies from the rural north, with a special emphasis on “cua dong,” which is a type of crab that lives in the rice paddies. I last tasted this dish when I was an exchange student. One day our group went out to the rice fields to help plant rice. For lunch, we were served a bowl of bun noodles with crab from the paddies I had just been working in ground up on top.

When I walked into the restaurant tonight, I didn’t even know cua dong was its specialty until I noticed everyone else eating it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s too eat what everyone else is eating. Earlier today I went into a restaurant intent on ordering the pungent bun mam but saw that everyone else had rice plates, so I followed suit, figuring they knew something I didn’t. Thus, with everyone else eating the cua dong, I did the same. The “fake dog meat with pork stomach” was enticing but it will have to wait until next time I guess. That dish did have me wondering though why someone wouldn’t eat real dog but would eat pork stomach. My dinner was good, not overly flavorful like a bowl of bun bo hue, but light and interesting. Don’t think of it as big hunks of crab meat floating in a soup. Cua dong are small crabs and to prepare them, the chef just smashes them, shell and all, with a mortar and pestle. The resulting gray mash is then put into soup. And then eaten by farmers during a break or people like me at a restaurant in Saigon. After dinner, I strolled down the alley to a little fruit shake stand and ordered an avocado shake. Watching as the vendor expertly cut open an avocado, I heard the gentle sound of a bell being struck. I looked up and across the street stood a beautiful Buddhist pagoda.

Sinh To Bo, or Avocado Shake: