Hải Hà: Bún Bò Nam Bộ in Prague's Sapa
People come to the Hải Hà bistro for the bún chả. It's supposedly the best in Prague and I'm not about to argue - I've written a whole article about it. But order the same thing every time and you'll never find out what else is on the menu.
Bún bò Nam Bộ, a bowl of rice noodles with briefly seared marinated beef, is reason enough to come to Hải Hà in Prague's Sapa market a second time.
What Bún Bò Nam Bộ Is and Where It Came From
It's a dish built in layers. At the bottom of the bowl sits the sweet-and-sour nước chấm sauce, above it a mound of thin bún rice noodles, then salad greens with herbs, bean sprouts and cucumber, and right on top slices of beef marinated in garlic, lemongrass and fish sauce and seared briefly over a high flame. Roasted peanuts and pickled carrots go on top; in Hanoi locals routinely order fried spring rolls on the side. It arrives arranged like a still life - and your first job at the table is to wreck it. Only once it's mixed from the bottom up, so the sauce reaches every noodle, is bún bò Nam Bộ complete. If you're expecting soup, you've got the wrong dish - the only hot thing in the bowl is the meat.
The name, though, points somewhere completely different from where the dish was actually born. Nam Bộ is the Vietnamese word for the south of the country, so the obvious translation is "southern-style beef with noodles" - and that's exactly what the Vietnamese press has been pushing back against for years. The best-documented account points to Hanoi around 1980: a woman named Can sold bún chả on the sidewalk, started throwing seared beef in with the noodles at her customers' request, and the new dish was called bún bò trộn, mixed noodles with beef; it only got today's name from phố Nam Bộ, the street where her stall stood. The street has since been renamed Lê Duẩn, so the dish carries an address in its name that you won't find on any map. The argument between the northern and the southern version is still unsettled - even the Vietnamese press admits as much. One thing is certain: a dish that sounds southern most likely started life as a second order at a northern bún chả stall.
A Bistro Named Sea and River
Hải Hà means sea and river, yet it stands in the middle of concrete - among the halls of the Sapa market in Prague's Libuš. Bún chả made the place famous; the menu, though, runs longer than its reputation lets on. Sapa runs by its own rules: first and foremost it's a wholesale market, but anyone who drives out here for Asian groceries and leaves without lunch is making a mistake. There's a whole row of bistros and restaurants here and Hải Hà is among the best known of them. Both of the dishes it's known for point in the same direction: bún chả is a Hanoi classic, and bún bò Nam Bộ, by all accounts, was born in Hanoi too. So at least the river in the bistro's name fits - Hanoi sits on one.
Why I Order the Beef at Hải Hà
I paid 170 CZK (6.80 EUR) for a bowl of bún bò Nam Bộ at Hải Hà, and it was one of those dishes that make you want to peek into the kitchen to see how they do it. The beef is a flawless piece of quick cooking: meat so tender that you forget you're eating strips cut from the round and start suspecting the cook sliced up tenderloin by mistake. The rest of the bowl keeps up - once mixed, the sauce pulls the noodles and the vegetables into one, the peanuts and pickled carrot crunch, and the herbs cool things down where the meat is still warm. Let bún chả keep carrying the bistro's reputation. At Mrs. Can's stall in Hanoi everything started with bún chả too - and that second order is a dish with a name of its own today.
Hải Hà Restaurant
