The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Page A

eel.
    This, I knew, was what I couldn’t get back at Chez Trinh, the only Vietnamese restaurant in Williamsburg. This was why I’d picked up stakes and moved to Vietnam—for the food. The eel, in fact, was so great that I wanted to tell strangers about it, to turn to my neighbors and tell them—in English if they were tourists, in pidgin Vietnamese if not—that it justified everything.
    But I had no neighbors. I was alone in this restaurant—alone and confused. After all, this seemed to be a quality spot; the eel wasproof of that. So where was everyone? Or, really, what was I doing wrong?
    It was a question I asked myself often in those first months in Vietnam. I’d told everyone I’d moved there for its cuisine—the grilled meats, the startling herbs and crunchy vegetables, and, of course, ph , the aromatic beef noodle soup that is the national dish. And it was true I liked Vietnamese food. But liking a cuisine is not the same thing as understanding how to eat it—how to order it, and where, and when, and why. And I understood none of it. I’d eat ph for lunch, for example, usually going to the famous (and overrated and overpriced) Pho Hoa Pasteur for a bowl and a few small, sweet bananas as dessert. But when I’d tell the students in my English classes about my lunches, they’d look at me quizzically. To them, ph was breakfast, not a major midday meal.
    I’d protest, noting that plenty of Vietnamese people were at Pho Hoa Pasteur. And then my students would backtrack. Oh, sure, they’d say, you can eat any Vietnamese food anytime you want. Không sao —no problem.
    But it was a problem, clearly. And I knew the roots of it. At a Vietnamese restaurant in America, like Chez Trinh, all kinds of foods would be served together—noodles, soups, stir-fry, spring rolls. But in Vietnam, restaurants would often be devoted to a single dish or set of dishes. Pho Hoa Pasteur sold ph , and no other noodle soups—no h ti u mi , no bún riêu , no bánh canh . If I wanted g i cu n —known in English as summer rolls, they’re rice-paper packets stuffed with thin rice noodles, veggies, herbs, and pork or shrimp—I could get them, and other combinations of rice noodles, veggies, herbs, and pork or shrimp, at a hole-in-the-wall behind the grandiose Ben Thanh Market.
    Adapting to this was harder than I’d expected. Knowing only a small subset of Vietnamese dishes, and speaking only a few words of Vietnamese, I didn’t even know what to commit myself to at oneof these single-specialty restaurants. And though I knew I should just blindly walk in, point to whatever I saw on other tables, and enjoy the result, fear and shyness kept me at bay. Is there anything more alienating than not knowing how to eat?
    And “knowing how to eat” was a big deal. That was actually how the question was phrased in Vietnamese: Anh bi t ăn cá không? meant “Can you eat fish?” but translated as “Do you know [how] to eat fish?” It was hard for me to escape the implication: Maybe I don’t know how to eat fish, or anything else, for that matter.
    Which is not to say I wasn’t eating, or eating well. One night, I found my way to a restaurant that served nothing but cua , or crab: ch giò cua (fried crab spring rolls), mi n cua (glass noodles stir-fried with crab), and cua lt chiên (deep-fried soft-shell crab, served with lettuce and herbs), a revelation to this young man who’d grown up not far from Virginia’s crab lands. And even the second-rate ph at Pho Hoa Pasteur was light-years better than what I’d had in America.
    Still, however, I felt flummoxed at mealtimes, and too often wound up eating at the foreign restaurants in the backpacker and tourist districts. They were all surprisingly good: fresh tomatoes and basil made for excellent Italian, a devoted expatriate clientele demanded serious Japanese, and a