On the noodle trail

Vietnam’s Da Nang offers fine food and local charm to visitors, writes Mike Ives

LE Ha Uyen never tires of searching her hometown’s shady alleys and side streets in search of the perfect bowl of noodles.

‘’It takes time to explore,’’ said Uyen, a 24-year-old foreign affairs officer who blogs about Da Nang and its vast food culture. ‘’We have a very diverse cuisine, and different shops have different types of cooking.’’

Travellers arriving in Da Nang typically travel by road 29km south to the former trading port of Hoi An, which Unesco has designated a cultural heritage landmark. Others drive north to the former royal capital of Hue, another designated heritage site, where a preserved citadel offers glimpses into a former feudal empire.

But some residents and expatriates say Da Nang, a coastal city that was host to a U.S. air base during the Vietnam War, is emerging as an appealing destination in its own right. The city’s charms include a riverfront promenade where locals sip iced coffee, and a museum displaying artefacts from the Champa kingdom, which ruled for centuries along Vietnam’s central and southern coasts.

And the central region’s best-known foods, like the noodle dish mi quang and the chicken-and-rice medley com ga, easily rival salty specialities from Hanoi and sweet ones from Ho Chi Minh City. It is easy to spend less than 200,000 Vietnamese dong, or about $9.60, on a day of eating in Da Nang, and hard to resist sampling the noodles, snacks and desserts that confront you at every street corner.

Uyen, who lived in Japan and Australia before coming home in 2011, says dishes from Da Nang and Vietnam’s central coast are underrepresented outside the country, especially when compared with the interest in foods from the north or south. ‘’They deserve to be more popular,’’ she said.

Da Nang, Vietnam’s fourth-most populous city, also has a crescent-shaped beach that lies largely vacant by day except for some expatriate surfers. Vietnamese revellers arrive just before dusk, tossing volleyballs or strolling in the surf as vendors sell juice and quail eggs from foam coolers.

Farther up the beach, fishermen prepare the thatched, circular boats that they row most evenings into the South China Sea, catching squid and prawns as their grandparents did before Vietnam won its independence from France in 1954.

‘’I catch anything in the sea,’’ Huynh Ba Son, 41, said recently on the beach before beginning his nightly fishing shift. ‘’Anything that swims into my net.’’

The boats leave shore at sunset, passing a hilltop pagoda complex where a 67-metre female Buddha gazes back at the twinkling green lights of Da Nang’s modest skyline of low-rise concrete houses and occasional office towers. According to local legend, she has kept away typhoons that typically ravage this coastline during the winter rainy season. The city may not stay lucky forever: Like some of Da Nang’s shinier buildings, the statue is a mere three years old. The ghosts of a conflict that killed an estimated 58,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese have not entirely vanished: Museums in Da Nang display leftover bombs and tanks, and some residents suffer from leukaemia and other illnesses that the Vietnamese Communist Party says are linked to dioxin from Agent Orange.

But the city, which has a population of more than 700,000, is looking to the future. Three bridges are under construction, and the newly refurbished airport, which has the country’s first Burger King, offers flights to major destinations in the region like Singapore and, at the end of the month, Hong Kong.

The city authorities are trying to bolster Da Nang’s international image by promoting luxury resort development and staging sports competitions, including an inaugural marathon scheduled for Sept. 1. They also have constructed a few unconventional attractions, including the giant Buddha statue and a 50-metre glass elevator that for 30,000 Vietnamese dong will lift a tourist to a hilltop pagoda overlooking coastline that US troops once called China Beach.

IHT-NYT News Syndicate

Developers say Vietnam’s central coast has the makings of Asia’s next beachfront resort destination, and some international hotel chains, including Hyatt and InterContinental, recently opened resorts along a stretch of prime coastline. But change comes more slowly in central Da Nang, where streets are still flanked by faded yellow homes from the French colonial era, and motorbike traffic is not nearly as frenetic as it is in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.

Thanh Huong, who serves noodles in a small shop near the riverfront promenade, said she had not seen too many changes lately in her neighbourhood, aside from some upscale restaurants that opened across the street.

As for her business, she said on a recent weekday afternoon, ‘’People like the way I cook, not too salty, not too plain.’’

Huong said she and her husband, a soldier who fought with the Americans, moved to Da Nang from Hue in 1968. For the last 20 years she has been perfecting her recipe for banh canh: rice or tapioca noodles in a mild broth made from crab, shrimp and beef stocks.

Unlike other vendors, Huong said, she makes her noodles from scratch, no matter that a bustling food market is only a few streets away. Her regular customers include Uyen, the blogger, who says the shop is among her favourites.

Da Nang’s airport offers several flights each day to and from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and several other Vietnamese cities. There also are direct flights to Singapore, Seoul and Kuala Lumpur, and on March 28, Dragonair is scheduled to begin flying three times a week between Da Nang and Hong Kong.

On the noodle trail