This only place to eat it
Food: Cao lau
plate up
You may think it is difficult to find special ingredients to cook authentic Vietnamese food at home. Unless you live near a good Vietnamese grocery store, you’ll probably have a hard time finding sawtooth coriander or banh xeo flour. Wait until you try making cao lau, a noodle dish native to Hoi An in central Vietnam.
To make proper cao lau noodles, you’ll need to mix rice flour with water drawn from the Ba Le well, a spring in Hoi An famous for its calcium-rich purity. If you use any other water, you won’t make cao lau. Hmm. Difficult.
So the only thing left to do is to travel to Hoi An and taste this truly excellent dish, which has a heroic ingredient of thick rice noodles made chewy by the addition of an alkaline solution (supposedly using wood ash from the nearby Cham Islands). These noodles are tossed with pork char sui and cracklings, along with bean sprouts and various herbs. With a small amount of broth to bring the dish together, you have a unique, delicious Hoi An icon.
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first serve
Hoi An is a historic river port with a long history of influence from China and Japan, among others, which likely contributed to the creation of cao lau. Some suggest that the noodles were introduced by Chinese traders in the 17th century, while others argue that the Japanese were responsible about 100 years later, whose udon and soba noodles bear similarities to those used in cao lau. The finished dish resembles neither of these nations and was therefore probably developed organically during the same period.
Order there
You’ll only find this dish in Hoi An, and one of the best is served at Cao Lau Thanh (no website, 26 Thai Phien, Hoi An).
Order here
Unfortunately you can’t order cao lau in Australia. But you can enjoy excellent Vietnamese cuisine at An Restaurant in Bankstown (anrestaurant.com.au) and Pho Chu The in Footscray (uncles.com).
One more thing
The name Cao lau means “high ground” and is assumed to be a reference to the elevated platforms on which Hoi An shopkeepers traditionally eat lunch.
Ben Groundwater is a Sydney-based travel writer, columnist, broadcaster, author and occasional tour guide with over 25 years of experience in media and world travel. He specializes in food and wine—writing about it and consuming it—and at any given moment Ben is probably thinking of either ramen in Tokyo, pintxos in San Sebastian, or carbonara in Rome. Follow him on Instagram @bengroundwaterConnect via email.
