How one chef in Vietnam uses fish sauce as the foundation for flavor

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — The taste of banh te — a steamed rice cake with an enticing filling of mushrooms and minced pork — captures the quintessence of northern Vietnamese cuisine: Humble ingredients, prepared perfectly and often enjoyed with a funky fish sauce dip.

This balance of flavors is what Quang Dung, the chef and owner of Chapter Dining in Hanoi, sought in his modern take on the dish. His version of banh te is unapologetically fancy. The steamed rice cake is enriched with pork stock and served with a raw scallop and pickled daikon shavings. Freshness comes from coriander used several ways, sweetness from fried shallot oil, and a delicate floral essence extracted from a giant water bug used in northern Vietnamese cooking.

And then, a splash of fish sauce — or nuoc mam — brings it all together in a savory broth that suffuses the dish.

“Fish sauce is one of the foundations for flavor,” he said.

It's also the basis for Vietnam’s diverse and vibrant cuisine. Just a drop of the amber liquid can transform a dish by boosting umami and savory notes. Made by fermenting fish — often anchovies that are getting harder to catch because of climate change — in salt for many months, the taste of each bottle varies depending on factors like the ratio of salt to fish or the length of fermentation.

Fish sauce is a staple across Vietnam, used in a variety of dishes. As a dipping sauce for spring rolls or savory crepes called banh xeo. In marinades for grilled meat dishes like Hanoi's pork and noodle classic called bun cha. In salad dressings and in braised meat dishes like the southern classic where pork is cooked in bittersweet caramel and fish sauce. Much of Vietnam’s cuisine is shaped by the decades of hardship during and after the Vietnam War, but today its economy and its cities are booming. And fish sauce is finding its way into unusual applications.

In Hanoi, fish sauce is used in some cocktails to add umami, and Dung has used it to add a Vietnamese twist to French hollandaise sauce and even flavor ice cream.

“It is very versatile," he said. "A lot of fun to use and to explore.”

Dung’s culinary explorations began early. His mother taught him to cook at 10 so he could feed himself while his banker parents worked long hours. He learned how to make rice, fry eggs, and boil vegetables. Soon after, he was braising pork and making spicy fried rice. Growing up, he assumed everyone could cook — after all, his friends in Hanoi could. But it wasn’t until he moved to the United Kingdom as a teenager to finish high school that he realized this wasn’t the case.

He eventually studied finance in coastal Devon, but while working part-time in restaurants, he fell in love with all things food: learning from his peers, consuming cookbooks by top chefs, and spending all his savings to eat out at restaurants. “When you’re 18, you’re a sponge. You absorb everything,” he said.

He came back to Vietnam in 2013 and got a job working in a bank. But every evening, he worked a second job — as a junior chef for a five-star hotel in Hanoi at night. He eventually quit both jobs in 2015 and started a gastropub in Hanoi. That didn’t go according to plan as he “managed to do everything wrong.” More failures followed — he calls them “lessons in my dictionary” — but in 2021 he opened Chapter Dining, a fine dining restaurant in the heart of Hanoi’s Old Quarter that celebrates local, seasonal produce and the cooking traditions of Vietnam’s mountainous north.

The restaurant, with its facade of steel slats, leads to an open kitchen where Dung and his team regularly create a 14-course tasting menu that won it a spot in the coveted Michelin Guide Hanoi in 2023 and 2024.

“I can finally call it ... my restaurant, my food, my philosophy,” he said.

Central to that philosophy is sustainability. Each menu is seasonal — warm, comforting dishes for the cold months and fresh, lighter dishes in the summer — and the ingredients are locally sourced. Given the erratic weather in the climate-vulnerable country, this means that he can't always be sure of what produce will be available. So the menu adapts, letting nature decide, and the bottle of fish sauce is never too far away.

“Fish sauce isn’t just about saltiness. It is as much about umaminess. It is magic,” he said, adding that he hoped more people would cook with fish sauce.

A good starting point, he suggested, is to use it to add a bit of that magic to the humble omelet. Three eggs, two teaspoons of fish sauce, a heap of finely diced spring onions all beaten together. Add pork fat to a hot pan and roll the eggs around.

“And then you’ve got a very nice fish sauce omelet. That goes down really well with rice,” he said.

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