AFTER HONG POURS THE last shot of sinister rice wine, we all hop on a couple of motorbikes and pull into the clusterfuck streets of the Old Quarter. The city has 3.3 million citizens and an estimated two million motorbikes. All the horn honking and jostling and people dodging give me the impression that we're fleeing something. Clinging to Hong's waist, I feel like if I turn around I'll see some great beast swallowing the city in bites.

Our destination is north-central Hanoi. Along the way, Hong points out where then– Navy pilot John McCain was fished from the water after his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down during a bombing mission in 1967. We follow Nghi Tam Street, which runs along an embankment between the Red River and West Lake. Then we come to a line of dozens of thit cho ("dog meat") restaurants on the side of a busy road, each marked by a daredevil valet who jumps in front of motorbikes to promise drivers that his restaurant is the best.

The side of the street is packed with bikes and pedestrians. It's like a carnival. Hong explains that we've come on the second-luckiest night of the year to eat dog. In the days preceding Tet, it seems, the Vietnamese try to amass so much good luck that the momentum of it will carry them through an entire year of happiness and prosperity. One can also clear up past cases of bad luck by eating certain foods before the New Year, most notably dog. Also, Mai explains, dog acts as a sort of prophylactic protecting you against future instances of bad luck that might spring up in the coming year.

If eating dog just before Tet is good luck, then it's probably OK to eat it anytime you want, right? Wrong. With dog, timing is the tricky part. For instance, you never, ever eat dog during the first two weeks of the monthly lunar cycle; that'll only bring bad luck. It is OK to eat dog anytime during the second half of the month, but it becomes better and better to eat dog as the end of the month draws near.

We select a restaurant whose name translates as "Glory Special Meat Dog." It's a spacious palapa with floors covered in woven rugs. We pick a spot near a group of 17 teenagers with gelled hair and hip-hop clothes, all of them giggling over plates of dog. Our waitress lays out a mat of newsprint and pours a round of draft beer, then delivers a collection of standard dog condiments: a plastic basket piled high with fresh green herbs, a chunk of root that tastes like a cross between ginger and horseradish, lime wedges, a small dish of vinegar-soaked red chiles, and a bowl of raw sugar. Finally, she unveils a bowl of mam tom, the shrimp-based, evil-bastard cousin of Vietnamese fish sauce. Made by fermenting the crustaceans for a year or so in a ceramic vat, mam tom is what you'd get if you put together a team of top scientists and asked them to produce the world's most potent odor. Hong points to it: "Very important with meat dog."

I'm juggling mixed feelings—deep respect for any person who can eat mam tom, utter fear that I will have to eat mam tom—when the moment of truth comes. The waitress brings a large tray heaped with a tapas-style medley of dog dishes. Hong and Mai provide descriptions as she lays them out: "Dog spicy ... dog stomach ... dog boiled ... dog sour ... head dog ... feet dog ... crispy dog."

I follow Hong's demonstration and dredge a piece of crispy dog, golden and crusted in sesame seeds, through the fearsome mam tom. I always tell myself: When in doubt, do it really fast. I pop the dog into my mouth. What happens next can be likened to a situation where your scuba gear is scattered all around you at the bottom of the ocean and your friends are trying to assemble and employ the gear while you panic. Mai and Hong grab the herbs and slice the root and dip things into sauces and try to pack it all into my mouth in some kind of precise sequence. I feel some gristle in my mouth, and the taste of fatty meat, like highly amplified pork, but mostly I feel mam tom. I wash it all down with a snort of beer, and then lean back with a fake smile on my face.

"Well ... ?" Peter asks.

"You like?" says Mai.

I try to think of something polite. "Geez ... it was good. Just great. And that sauce is really something, too! Wowzers!"

I would have sampled every dish (minus the mam tom), but something happens. First, I feel a strange heat rising in my chest. It comes on as a subtle warming deep inside, like how a cell phone feels after you've been talking on it for a long time. But after a moment or two I feel as if I've had a tanning bed's heating element stuffed into my shirt pocket. I suspect the condiments, but Hong explains that the heat is from the dog itself—hence the dog's power. It's unnerving, but not as unnerving as what happens next.

Mai dips her chopsticks into the "feet dog," a large bowl filled with broth and several submerged objects that are about as thick as big carrots. She hoists one of the objects and lays it in my bowl. The name "feet dog" is a pretty good description: toenails, skin, pads, the whole damned deal. And then I'm visited by the ghost of Muffin Man, a corgi/terrier mutt that once belonged to a girlfriend of mine. I never thought about eating Muffin Man, because he was old and gaunt and lame in one back leg. Instead I used him to play "doggy rock star." I'd lay him across my lap, use his teeth as frets, and "pick" his rear ham like guitar strings. This tickled him, and his otherwise paralyzed leg would flail out below my hand and I'd grab it to do the whammy-bar effect. Looking at the paw in my bowl, I can't shake the image of Muffin Man's poor little foot. I lift it, take the faintest nibble, then announce that I am finished.