Bún Cá Hải Phòng: Carp Soup in Prague's Sapa
Prague's Sapa market packs in some fifteen hundred shops and eateries. Even so, my visits there often end in the same place - over the same bowl of soup.
The Bún Cá Hải Phòng bistro cooks bún cá, the Vietnamese fish noodle soup with fried carp, and to my mind it does it better than anywhere else in the market. The soup is right there on the shop sign: the place is named after its signature dish and after the city the recipe comes from.
What Bún Cá Is and What Makes the Hải Phòng Version Different
The basics are simple: round rice noodles called bún, fish broth and fried fish. Everything else is down to the region - the whole of Vietnam cooks bún cá and every part of the country does it its own way, sour with tomatoes in Hanoi, with snakehead down in the Mekong Delta. The version from the port city of Hải Phòng gets the tag cay, meaning spicy: the broth gets its kick from chili and its sourness from tamarind, and alongside the fried fish the bowl also holds fish cakes. Which fish belongs in it is something not even Vietnamese sources agree on - descriptions of the Hải Phòng classic, though, mostly talk about carp and mackerel cakes. So the carp in the Prague bowl is probably closer to the original than I realized.
The Prague version leans less on heat than on dill and lemon: slices of carp fried until crisp and a broth built on dill and lemon juice. The fish goes into the bowl at the last moment so it keeps its crisp coating. For dipping into the broth they also serve bánh quẩy, fried sticks of light dough - a side that turns up with soups all over Vietnam. There, bún cá is a classic breakfast from street bistros; in Sapa it has turned into lunch. Rice noodles turn up in other bowls around the market too: with grilled meat in bún chả, with crab in bún riêu cua. And if you'd rather have beef broth than fish, Sapa has phở as well, of course.
A Name from the Port, a Market from the Mountains
The second half of the name is geography: Hải Phòng isn't the owner's surname but a port city in northern Vietnam, where the spicy bún cá comes from and where it stands as a symbol of the local cooking - people born there call it the taste of their childhood. The market around it went for a more romantic name: it's called Sa Pa, a misty mountain resort in the north of Vietnam, even though it stands in perfectly flat Libuš on the southern edge of Prague. Finding one particular bistro in the sprawling complex takes a while - you'll spot this one by the blue-and-yellow sign above the door, and I'm adding a map at the end of the article just in case. The bistro is also in my rundown of the best restaurants in Sapa.
The One Stop I Never Skip in Sapa
Bún cá is a fixture of every trip I make to Sapa: whatever I've come to the market for, I almost always end up over a bowl of this soup. At lunchtime every table in the bistro is taken, but people come and go quickly, so you don't wait long for a seat. A brimming bowl, with a side dish of fresh cabbage and herb salad, came to 160 CZK (6.40 EUR). The broth smelled of dill and lemon, the fried carp stayed crisp for a while even under the surface, and the noodles held the whole thing together - a combination I find impossible to turn down. By the time I got up and reached the door, someone else was already in my chair.
Bún Cá Hải Phòng
