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Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Traveling on Highway 4

Pork ear cartilage roasted in salt.  Crickets roasted with lemon leaves.  Freshwater snails stewed with tofu and green bananas.  Minced pigeon served with rice crackers.  Sound interesting?

Highway #4 in Vietnam is not just one highway but a series of routes along the Vietnam-Chinese border, linking major urban centers throughout the mountainous regions.  We didn't actually travel on Highway #4, but instead stumbled across a restaurant called Highway 4 which was unlike anything we had ever seen.

Originally we had intended to go to Cowboy Jack's, an American-style restaurant to celebrate the first day of school for the kids.  But when we went to the restaurant near our house, it was closed for renovations for another week.  So we kept walking up the street and discovered this amazing restaurant that celebrated the cuisine of northern Vietnam, including some of the dishes mentioned above.

We didn't get anything that was crazy, but it was fun to try this new cuisine.




These are fries cooked in garlic.  It was our first attempt at eating them with chopsticks:



These catfish springrolls were delicious:


When we ordered chicken wings, we should have known they would be the actual chicken wing:


My dish of catfish and pork, simmered in a pot:


They did take pity on us at the end and gave us a few forks:




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