Như Lan, the Market, and the Ice Cream

Three places that are not meals, and one fruit I was wrong about twice.

Như Lan, on the afternoon I arrived

14 March 2026, half past three, more or less straight off the plane. NHƯ LAN is a Saigon deli-bakery institution, and I did what I always do in a food shop I do not understand: I photographed the board.

Which turned out to be the right instinct, because it is completely readable four months later:

Bánh giò · Bánh chưng · Bánh bao ngọt · Bánh bao trứng cút · Bánh paté chaud · Bánh croissant · Xôi gà xé · Xôi lá sen (lạp xưởng tôm, nấm đông cô) · Xôi mặn chả lụa · Xôi bắp · Xôi cút · Xôi gấc · Xôi đậu · Nem xiên nướng · Thịt xiên nướng sả · Khoai mì hấp nước dừa · Chuối nếp nướng nước dừa

⭐ Count the xôi. Seven kinds of sticky rice on one board — shredded chicken, lotus leaf with Chinese sausage and shiitake, savoury with pork roll, corn, quail egg, gấc fruit, mung bean. Sticky rice is not a side dish here, it is a category, the way sandwiches are a category to me. That is the sort of thing you only notice by reading a whole board instead of ordering one thing off it.

And bánh paté chaud sitting between the bánh bao and the croissant is the French half of the city in three words on a price list.

⚠ To be clear: this is what the shop sells, not what I ate. I photographed the board and the case. I am not going to write a tasting note on a roast suckling pig I only looked at.

The market, on the 18th

🔴 A correction: they are not prawn crackers, they are dried shrimp

This page used to say that the baskets of orange-brown stuff in the market frames were “still unidentified — prawn cracker, bánh phồng tôm, is the obvious guess and it stays a guess.”

The guess was wrong. There is a closer frame of the same stall that nobody had opened, and at full size it settles it in one look.

They are tôm khô — dried shrimp. Every piece has the comma curl, the ridged segments and the tail fan of a whole small shrimp that has been salted, boiled and sun-dried. A prawn cracker is a puffed starch wafer and looks nothing like it.

⭐ And the giveaway is the merchandising, not the object. There are three baskets, graded by size, with a balance scale beside them, and a fourth tub of a different grade behind. Nobody sorts a snack food into three sizes and weighs it out. That is how you sell an ingredient, and dried shrimp is one of the load-bearing ones in southern Vietnamese cooking — it goes into gỏi, into canh, into bánh, and it is what a stock gets when there are no bones.

This is the third time on this trip a filename or a first-pass note has been corrected by opening the picture properly, and the second time the correction went against the guess I had already published.

The bakery crates

Not a picture of a dish, and I am keeping it anyway, because it is a picture of logistics. Red crates, on trolleys, on the pavement, at the front of the shop rather than out the back — because there is no out the back. In a city where a huge fraction of the eating happens at a folding table on the street, the supply chain runs down the same pavement as the customers.

The durian, and my own two errors

I filed this photograph as “Durian - Actually pretty good.”

When I came back to it I looked at the picture, saw dark spiky shapes with a curved neck, decided they were sesame pastry swans, and wrote down that the file was misnamed and contained no durian at all.

Wrong. They are hand-formed durian, and I ate several of them — which I know because I was there, and which no amount of squinting at a photograph was going to establish. The lesson is not subtle: I talked myself out of the caption written by the only person who had tasted it.

But the first instinct was not useless either, and the page should say both things: this photograph shows a pastry, not the fruit. If you came here looking for what a durian looks like, this is not it — the raw fruit is in the market picture further up, the big spiked green ones.

⭐ And that is a genuinely interesting way to meet durian, because a durian pastry is a managed introduction. The fruit’s reputation is built on the smell, which is volatile and hits you before anything else. Bake it into a pastry and you keep the custardy, oniony-sweet, slightly savoury flavour while losing most of the assault. “Actually pretty good” is exactly the reaction that setup is engineered to produce.

Kem Bạch Đằng

18 March, around half past seven in the evening. Kem Bạch Đằng is an old Saigon ice-cream parlour and one of the few places on this trip I had actually heard of before I got there.

⚠ One caption I have to be careful with. The house signature at Kem Bạch Đằng is kem trái dừa — coconut ice cream served in the coconut — and it is what every article about the place photographs.

That is not what is in these glasses. What I have is tall sundae glasses with wafers. I am not going to caption a sundae as the famous coconut just because I was in the right building, and I could not tell you now which flavours those were.

My filename for the frame taken six minutes earlier says “Amazing Coffee”, so I evidently had a coffee there too, which — in an ice cream parlour whose sign says Tea & Coffee — is at least consistent.

And the one I drank most of

Nước dừa. Not a dish and barely a recipe, but on the evidence of my own camera roll it is the thing I reached for most often, and it belongs on a page about the parts of the trip that were not meals.

⭐ The bit worth noting is what is not there: no ice, no glass, no sugar, no garnish. The container is the fruit, it is cut open in front of you, and it is thrown away afterwards. In March, in that heat, it is also cold without anything having been done to make it cold, which is a trick no drink I can buy in Michigan manages.

---

That is Vietnam. Next in this section: Shenzhen, the first half of the same trip.