More on Hanoi soon but firstly let's get down to what makes its food scene truly unique - it gets weird, real weird.
Dog meat is a special occasion dish, cat is the healthy option, semi developed duck foetuses are a breakfast item and pigeon,
frog
and eel soup are comparatively quite normal.
Snail soup is a much loved breakfast choice.
And snails fished out of their shells, using a pointy little metal implement, get dunked in a fish sauce, kumquat, chilli, ginger and kaffir lime concoction for a tasty pre-dinner snack.
Even drinks get a bit weird. Take a raw egg, whip it and pour it over the top of your coffee for a ca phe trung - a speciality of Hanoi.
But that's not the half of it. Over a thousand years ago a man rescued the king's daughter from a king cobra and rejected the king's offer of half of his land instead requesting that his village be recognised as the snake village of Vietnam, given snakes were the village's bread and butter. To this day snakes are still the village's bread and butter with 80% of it still involved in the farming, capturing and serving of the reptilian delicacy.
After reading too many articles and watching episode upon episode about the experience that awaits you in Le Mat village it was the one key goal of our time in Hanoi. We arrived at The Hung Snake Restaurant for lunch and what ensued was one hell of a strange affair.
Thuy met us out the front of the restaurant and immediately pointed out the finger his dad had lost to a cobra bite. His dad then promptly fished out a cobra from one of their little hidey holes whilst Nicola did the calculations as to whether a dash up the stairs or just streaking down the road was her best method of escape.
Thuy then took us upstairs to watch our selected cobra meet it's fate. First the still beating heart was cut out, its blood poured into a cup and off came the head (still snapping and writhing around in the bucket). Then the stomach was expertly extracted and the bile drained into a bottle of rice wine. What was left of our little pal was then taken out into the kitchen.
WARNING: the video is a wee bit graphic (but that's why you should want to watch it)
It was then time for a couple of pre-lunch aperitifs. As the man, the still quivering heart was all mine. Make me strong.
Then it was a shot each of the blood mixed with rice wine and then about four shots of the bile with rice wine. Better than they sound but really that's not hard is it.
Then came course after course of snake-centric dishes.
In no particular order or preference was egg and snake soup, snake congee, boiled snake, grilled snake, sauteed snake, crushed snake bones with rice crackers, snake spring rolls, snake bits wrapped in la-lot leaves, snake offal with pineapple and sticky rice infused with snake fat. The bones and offal were the picks of the bunch.
Shots of rice wine aged with an entire king cobra (venom and all) and some sort of root kept the weirdness going.
After lunch we went down into the kitchen to play with a bamboo snake and marvel at how normal fishing a snake out of a bag of thirty was to Thuy.
It was an experience for the ages and one the grand kids will be sure to hear about. Hopefully we'll be back for a king cobra one day. Until then we'll feast on some pretty bizarre, sort of twisted memories.
At least we didn't have dog meat hey mums...
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