It was almost lunch time when we finished touring the Tomb of Khai Dinh. We quickly made our way back to Huế where we are to have our lunch before we head off to Danang City and beyond. One of the places that was recommended by the guide books was Hang Me.
The name is pronounced as “hang meh” nor “hang mee”. It was more like a small roadside stall, but it actually has room for customers to sit inside. Again, they are probably aware of their fame, since they already have English menus ready for foreigners like us. However, we don’t really know what to order here so we asked out guides for some recommendations.
Apparently, the place is popular for their rice cakes, so we decided to order that. Our guides also ordered some other stuff for us to try. Hopefully, it won’t be too expensive. Considering it is lunchtime, there weren’t really too many people eating at this time. Maybe the Vietnamese do not eat this for lunch. Hang Me specializes in Hue specialty food, particularly rice cakes, and Huế rice cakes are know all over Vietnam.
Anyway, our food came out and, lo and behold, it came out in one huge woven platter, commonly used for cleaning rice. The dish is called bánh bèo. The rice cake itself was distributed into smaller plastic platters commonly used for soy sauce. Each rice cake came with its own cracker and what I thought were shrimp shavings. When dipped in the fish sauce and chili, it turned out to be quite tasty. Of course one tiny platter of rice cake will never satisfy me, so I proceeded to devour my share of the rice cakes.
Our guides other orders also came in but they were more of less the same thing, only varying in the proportion of ingredients each dish uses. So effectively, it uses rice cake or some form of rice, shrimp and the orange stuff they keep using, i think it is crab roe.
Some of the dishes will come wrapped in rice paper. Others will come wrapped in banana leaves. But they more of less taste similar to each other. Honestly, I’m not really a big fan of these kinds of food, whether or not they come from Vietnam, however, it does not taste bad either. If I do not like it, I would just drown it in fish sauce and swallow. Regardless, this is an interesting introduction to the less known food of Vietnam. It is definitely worth a try.
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