Cantonese-Vietnamese Food and Cookbooks

I often talk about the Chinese influences on Vietnamese cooking, but what about the other way around? Joel, who lives in Hong Kong, made me think about that. 

When I lived in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, Vietnamese cooking was virtually non-existent, save the poor refugees living in the camps at the time. An international port city and hub for business and trade, Hong Kong has always been open to new ideas. From the tiniest joint to the oldest dim sum house to Pizza Hut and high tea, Hong Kong offers tons to eat. In the past 15 years, Vietnamese has been added to the menu.

Vietnamese Cookbooks in Chinese

Joel gave the following low-down on a few Vietnamese cookbooks written by Chinese authors:

The first book is Enjoy Vietnamese Cooking by Wilson Kwok ( ISBN 962-14-2580-8 ) published by Wan Li Publishings in October 2003.  My impression is that it is much better than the HK cookbooks published in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Kwok did studies on cookery in the West in the 1980s and 90s and returned to Hong Kong to start the Entrecote French steakhouse.  His interests on Vietnamese cooking stemmed from his contact with Vietnamese immigrants when living in the West, and he cooked part time in some Vietnamese restaurants.  For a time he also ran the Paris 13th Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong.  The book's primary language in the anecdotes, cultural backgrounds, and history sections is Chinese but the recipes are also available in English.  In addition, all recipes all contain Vietnamese names as well as names in English and Chinese.

The recipes listed are a summary of Vietnamese restaurants available in Hong Kong, documenting the early-days 1970s Vietnamese Chinese restaurant dishes, 1980s Cantonese-ized Vietnamese dishes, and 1990s French-style nouvelle Vietnamese cooking.  The favourites which you listed like pho bo, banh cuon, cha gio are there.  The red beancurd fried chicken is rendered in Vietnamese as ga quay simply, and it is listed as steaming the marinaded chicken for 15 minutes, add honey, dark soy sauce, and vinegar mix to the skin, hang for 4+ hours until dry, and then fry using the method I mentioned.  They also have recipes like ca hap (steamed fish), thit de chien (fried goat), bo xao hat tieu den (beef with black peppercorns), tom xa (jumbo prawns with lemongrass), ga xe phay (chicken salad) yen nuoc dua (dried bird's nest in coconut milk) which are all popular dishes in HK's Vietnamese restaurants.

The second book is  Street Food in Vietnam by Michelle Lo ( ISBN 962-14-3325-1 ) published by Wan Li Publishings in January 2007.  Lo is Vietnamese Chinese who immigrated to Hong Kong at the late 1960s, and then to France.  She returned to Hong Kong in 1996 and is now a teacher at the Towngas Cooking Center in Hong Kong.  The whole book is bilingual and contains streetfood of Vietnam divided to Hanoi (North), Hue (Central), and Saigon (South) with almost every common Vietnamese street food you can think of is in the book (pho bo, banh mi ra-ku-bo, even the less commonly publicized recipes like banh beo, bun-bo-lao and banh-gio) alongside some actual photos of Vietnam's street food scene and intetesting notes of cooking in the three main regions. 

[Update on 11/1/07: You can find Chinese-Vietnamese cookbooks at a well stocked Chinese bookstore. I just returned from New York, where I picked up Michelle Lo's book on street food (pictured here).]

There are many connections between Chinese and Vietnamese cooking, which is why if you're in a Chinese market, you can get most of the ingredients for preparing Vietnamese food. Of course, the same goes for being in Viet market. They're often run by business-minded Chinese-Vietnamese!

My friend Terrence Khuu, a professional Vietnamese-American chef,  says that Viet Huong/Three Crab fish sauce is processed in Hong Kong. Lee Kum Kee and Koon Chun, both leading manufacturers of Asian condiments, turns out tons of hoisin and shrimp sauce for Vietnamese cooking. So we're buying lots of Chinese-made ingredients for Vietnamese fare. But the opposite is happening too!

Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong

• Geoexpat.com reviews of 6 restaurants
• Eat Drink Hong Kong listing

Comments

[Robyn]

Andrea - when we lived in Hong Kong '94-96 we used to eat at a teeny-tiny Viet place tucked under a freeway overpass in Causeway Bay/Happy Valley. Don't remember the name (do you know the place?). They only served pho. It seemed delicious at the time but then again I had no reference point.

The first time I ever had Vietnamese-style coffee was in China, at the southern tip of Hainan island, in the mid-80s. I never found coffee like that elsewhere in China so I always wondered if it somehow made its way to Hainan from Vietnam (that part of the S China Sea is, or was, contested, I think).

[Andrea Nguyen]

Robyn -- I bet Joel would know about that restaurant. Joel??? I was in Hong Kong from 91-92.

Oh yeah, Vietnamese coffee on Hainan Island is indicative of the Chinese-Viet connection. That's interesting because in HK, coffee is with simple syrup and evaporated milk, which I always found to be an awful combination. Hainan was and kind still remains contested territory. There's oil on the island.

[Joel]

Hi Andrea and Robyn,

Thanks for publishing my reviews here! To be honest I have not been to the restaurant Robyn mentioned as we sticked to Chinese food when we ate out at Causeway Bay. There are two Vietnamese restaurants in the district recorded in Kwok's book: one is on Percival Street, and the other on Cannon Street. Both streets are a little far from the viaduct on Gloucester Road according to my trusty Hong Kong Directory 2007 edition, so they may not be the one you are looking for.

Having said that, you may well be referring to a more low key place that Kwok did not list. (I think he only listed 5% of all Vietnamese eateries in HK in his book) Vietnamese cooking was very popular in the 1980s but it was eclipsed in the 1990s by Thai cooking. But now it is enjoying somewhat of a revival so new restaurants spring up all the time.

With regards to Vietnamese impact on Cantonese cooking, I have read a cookbook by a famed Cantonese chef who worked his trades in Haipong between 1938 and 1958 (it is very likely to have passed away by now - he was 76 in 1985 when he wrote that book) and he included mien ga in the work. And I have also seen chao tom served as a first course in Cantonese banquets. Cantonese cuisine is quite famous in adding whatever foreign dishes that are popular among diners at the time into the menu - we used to say that "there is no such as as authentic food in Cantonese cooking - it is constantly evolving" so it is not that unusual to add Vietnamese dishes.

Another impact is the use of young coconut as a cooking and serving utensil. From the 1980s onwards there are dishes like baked seafood rice in curry sauce that are baked in a young coconut, or dishes like pigeon soup stewed in a whole young coconut. I think it is courtesy of Vietnamese restaurants in HK that popularized young coconuts.

I also noticed that cua hap bia (crab in beer broth) has made it onto some Cantonese dishes. This dish is a must on HK's Vietnamese restaurant menus so it is also not surprising that it also ends up on Cantonese menus.

Hopefully this very sketchy and incomplete description will help shed some lights on the scene of Vietnamese food in Hong Kong. I think that is probably the main thrust, but I definitely with Andrea that Vietnamese cooking has made its mark onto Cantonese cuisine in Hong Kong.

[Steamy Kitchen]

Great list of books! I'm glad they are bilingual since I can't read Chinese...THOUGH...after 2 weeks in China I told my Mom that I would re-learn to read Chinese just to be able to read the cookbooks! Such motivation!

[Andrea Nguyen]

The bilingual books are really great. Wei-Chuan publishes a decent series. Reading Viet cookbooks is one the ways I polish my Vietnamese.

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I often talk about the Chinese influences on Vietnamese cooking.