Postcard from Tom: Three ways to eat in Vietnam

Spelunking gives everyone an appetite. No sooner do we return to Cong Nghia than lunch is served on the window-wrapped main deck in a wide booth, the table draped in a blue cover that almost disappears amid the flurry of dishes. First, a little dip of black pepper, red chilis, salt and kumquat juice appears. Next, some ocean crab, which a cook cracks at the table, and a plate of shrimp, which she deftly peels for us as well. Marvelous on its own, the sweet seafood, culled from the water we’re gliding on, becomes electric after a dunk in the citrusy hot sauce: big flavors from a wisp of a galley.

Vietnamese cooking emphasizes the balance of flavors and textures as well as the principles of yin and yang, or the heating and cooling characteristics of ingredients. The perfume of fresh ginger (considered hot) announces a big bowl of steamed elephant trunk clams (cool), so named for the long white meat inside the shells. Tender squid with crisp bok choy, and finely shredded cabbage glistening with oil and biting with black pepper, keep our chopsticks moving, too. A plate of carved, sliced cucumbers refreshes the palate between bites of the seafood and (there’s more?) herb-scattered butterfish.

Only three hours have passed, but between boarding and disembarking, I feel as if I’ve been to the dawn of time and back, a journey punctuated by the most memorable meal of a year that has been packed with them.

A three-to-four-hour tour of Ha Long Bay on Cong Nghia costs $120 for up to 48 passengers; lunch is an additional $20 per person. To make reservations, e-mail quynh@vietnamnowtravel.com.

Dateline: Hanoi

If you have time for only one meal in Hanoi, make it at Quan An Ngon. There are finer restaurants, and less crowded ones, but none that match the sheer number of dishes (200) or variety found in this aromatic and animated collection of 20 food stalls.

Quan An Ngon pays homage to rural food peddlers whose stands play the role that restaurants fill in the city. Although the dining destination, modeled after the shacks found in the Red River delta, offers seating inside a two-story building, the fun takes place outdoors, where booths staffed by dozens of cooks ring an open-air courtyard packed with row upon row of dark wooden tables. (Grab one; they go fast.)

You get a menu, but better to have your guide, in my case the Mighty Quynh again, show you around the perimeter and point out the selections. Each stall posts a woven bamboo sign announcing its specialty in Vietnamese. But you probably don’t require a translator to tell you that the tiny grilled birds at one stop are sparrows and that the fleshy steamed attraction at another stall is pig’s ear, wrapped in rice paper with lettuce, mint, scallions and noodles.

Talk about one-stop shopping! All of Vietnam — north, south, central — appears to be represented at Quan An Ngon. I’ve slurped better beef noodle soup, or pho, at Eden Center in suburban Virginia. But smoky grilled pork on a bed of vermicelli noodles with a tuft of fresh herbs makes me sad to be saying goodbye to Vietnam, as do steamed snails enlivened with garlic, fish sauce and lemon leaves. As we put a small dent in the menu, giant fans suspended from the trees help us keep our cool and steer fragrant cooking aromas our way. Before heading to the airport and home, I manage to squeeze in some boozy fermented black rice and yogurt and make a friend of it.

Quan An Ngon, 18 Phan Boi Chau St., Hoan Kiem str, Hanoi. 011-84-4-39428162138.

Tour operator Nguyen Xuan Quynh of Vietnam Now Travel can be reached at quynh@vietnamnowtravel.com.