Nhau: beer cocktails, fusion kitchen & Qi harmony

Shell fish in lemongrass garlic sauce, perilla leaves with deep fried tofu and fermented shrimp paste sauce (the grey dipping sauce)

Whenever there is something to celebrate, Vietnamese people often go nhau. According to the local friends, it stands for beer drinking, while eating "weird" food. Finally I experienced a culture shock... or kind of.

So, my first time nhau. We arrived at an outdoor beer restaurant that looked like a walled parking place with the typical kids-sized plastic furniture. As this means that your knees are closer to your face than your food is, these places may not be the most comfortable establishments to eat. Still, do expect amazing meals as the rule in Asia is often: the less effort put in facilities & decor, the more is spent on your plate.

Our first nhau experience was here

After we got seated, a case of beer (bia) cans was ordered. These were served with a small bucket of ice cubes, as the beer was stored at room temperature. Oddly, the bucket of ice was not meant to cool the beer cans in, but the ice cube were intended for your plastic drinking cup. However, the ice cubes were so big that one already fills half the cup. This did cool down the beer in no-time, but it also diluted it into yellow water with hints of bitterness. That's when we learned to "boost" the flavour with some pepsi and ta-da: we had made a beer-cocktail! Culture shock #1, as where I'm from, mixing beer with anything is regarded as a sacrilege.

beer-cocktail: a chunk of ice, some beer & a dash of pepsi

This cocktail was like many ordinary cocktails; too much ice, too little alcohol. Still, it wasn't all bad, as the food served at nhau is often spicy and that heat requires quenching. Doing that with a cold semi-sweet watery beer cocktail is more effective than with a lukewarm beer. And what is drinking without toasting? We yelled along with the Vietnamese, faster and faster: "mot hai ba yo!" ("one two tree yeah") and felt truly culturally integrated.

Concerning the "weird" food: many beer restaurants offer frogs, eels, snakes and squid, but also chicken wings, fried tofu, shell fish etc. So it wasn't shockingly weird. Many of the dishes were stir fried with different sauces like lemongrass, fish sauce, garlic, onion, some sugar and chili's. All very fragrant with a good punch of heat to keep you drinking more "beer".

The food was served on big platters to be shared. Chopsticks and bowls were present and I felt like having a Cantonese dinner at home. With one major exception; baguettes instead of rice. This French twist, a trace of its colonial past, turned out to be an improving feature. It allowed you to mop up the sauce with the bread and enjoy the great taste one more time while leaving your bowl almost as if you licked it clean (while keeping your dignity intact).

Frog legs in sweet & sour sauce, stir fried eel in spicy lemon grass sauce, chicken wings and same sauce.

And when you are feeling 'fancy', you can go to a fancy indoor beer garden / restaurant and have fancy food like seafood hotpot (lẫu hải sản) or beef in chili hotpot (bò nhúng ớt) and table BBQ (thịt nướng, post coming soon). Our seafood hotpot was definitely an eye catcher, great choice for impressing your guests. Fresh shrimps, clams, fish balls and squid were placed on the side of the seafood hotpot. In the middle, underneath the lid was the soup pot with hot broth. This whole unit was placed on a heating element and the raw ingredients were shoved into the boiling broth to cook. All this while you even get to sit on fancy wooden chairs (although still uncomfortably kids-sized)!

Fancy seafood hotpot lẫu hải sản, with Asiatic hard clams (nghêu bến tre) shrimps, squid, fish balls, tofu, decorative carrot & scallions.

Underneath the lid was the soup-pot, where all the raw ingredients were shoved into the broth and boiled.  

After a few minutes of boiling, the seafood was cooked, ready to be scooped into our small bowls along with some of the soup. Fresh bún (rice vermicelli, already cooked and drained served dry on a plate) was added in the bowl and it was like a mini seafood noodle soup! Leafy greens were blanched in the hotpot for some veggie-addition to the meal.

Freshly scooped to be devoured

Vietnamese style table BBQ (thịt nướng)

The chili hotpot was truly spicy, so make sure you can at least stand the heat of medium spicy curry before you dive into this. The thin slices of beef were dipped in the hot soup to cook them. Depending on your preference, you give it a brief plunge for medium rare, a long soak for greyish well done.

bò nhúng ớt - beef dip in chili hotpot

Self service. On the plate on the right you can still see some remaining beef, rau dắng (bitter herb) and slices of bitter gourd. 

The raw beef displayed on a bed of rau dắng, a very bitter herb/grass/weed, and slices of bitter gourd adorned the plate. These vegetables were also dunked into the hotpot before consumption. Many of my local friends barely touched it, but I actually liked the contrasting bitterness against the heat of the soup. It even felt healthy eating these vegetables, but that's probably because of my Chinese upbringing.

Whenever I had a pimple outbreak, mouth ulcer or a sore throat, my mother would blame it on my snacking-too-much-fried-stuff habit. According to her (and the Chinese food philosophy), fried food, fast food and spicy food have "warming" abilities (熱氣). Eating too much of it will get you "overheated", resulting in over-heating symptoms like the before-mentioned things, but also sore eyes and even nose bleeding. To cure you from these symptoms, you need to restore your balance (your Qi, energy flow) by eating "cooling" (涼) food like watermelon, cucumber, pear, barley etc. Some of the cooling food/drinks, like herbal soup/tea and bitter gourd, tasted very bitter and I was taught that more bitterness meant better cooling ability, thus more healthy. Hence my appreciation towards the bitter vegetables with the spicy soup, as their balance would bring perfect harmony to my Qi.

The whole balancing-your-Qi-with-food-thing may sound like a controlling mechanism for Chinese parents to keep their kids from eating junk food. However, I recently found out from my most reliable source (my mom told me) that beer is sometimes referred as "western herbal tea" by the Chinese, meaning it has great "cooling" ability. No wonder that beer goes so well with spicy, fried & fast food! So controlling mechanism or not: a good reason to believe in Qi.

Details & how to order

Sorry, no addresses this time, but beer gardens are scattered all over Da Nang, so just enter one that looks busy. As for the dishes you can order:

gà chiên mắm - chicken wing fried with fish sauce
Mực trứng chiên nước mắm - Squid in fish sauce
hến xào - stir-fried mussels
cá đuối nướng - grilled stingray

bò nhúng ớt - beef dip in chilly hotpot (non bbq, but available in bbq places)

lẫu hải sản - Seafood hotpot

Concerning the prices, I only remembered that the non-fancy nhau usually costed about 90.000 - 125.000 VND per person for a full tummy and a few beers each. Fancy nhau was about 130.000 VND per person; we were with 10 and devoured a BBQ with vegetables and meat, the sea food hot pot, chilly beef hot pot, noodles and soda & beer.