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Outside Traveler Winter 2005

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Vietnam: Nha Trang
Asian Fusion
Welcome to Nha Trang, where Vietnam's sophisticated new era and ageless culture meet on a gorgeous beach

By Amy Goldwasser


	Age-old tradition meets new-age style: Ana Mandara Resort's "Hideaway" (courtesy of Ana Mandara)

UNTIL TODAY, I had never been headed anywhere—happily—before 5 a.m. It's an hour and a half before sunrise when chef James Patrick Tawa's cyclo, a bicycle-powered rickshaw, pulls up next to mine on Tran Phu Boulevard. "Yeah, see? The Vietnamese coffee helps," he says, catching me smiling at the hundreds of men and women (mostly women) who are well into their tai chi practice along the shore of the South China Sea, between us and the eastern horizon. "Everyone's up at about four and in bed by ten," explains the ever-jolly New Zealander. Jim is the executive chef for the Ana Mandara Resort, the first luxury beach property to open in Nha Trang, the capital of Khanh Hoa, a south-central coastal province of Vietnam. We're on our way to the markets. I'm already sweaty, and all I'm doing is reclining in the canvas backseat of the country's environmentally kind mode of passenger transport.

On my right, there are amazingly beautiful

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women in communal motion. Many are at least in their eighties, their gray hair wrapped in tight buns, and they wear bright-orange, green, and turquoise silks. On my left is some of the typical main-beach-drag tourist commerce—postcards, towels, bathing suits, knockoff Nikes, dive gear. We cross a lovely arc of a bridge, with traditional wooden fishing boats on both sides, and make some sharp lefts inland to more congested streets. Jim has to yell over the noise and bustle that usually signify rush hour. My cyclo driver's white polo shirt stays impressively dry, and when we stop at a corner that smells like warm fruit and sea salt, I figure we're nearing the market.

I ask Jim what brought him to Vietnam. "It's a chef's paradise," he says, showing me a mint stalk destined to be a part of cooking class back at the resort this afternoon. Pointing to the source of the slight durian stink, he says, "All the ingredients are local and organic, and the flavors are real." (Indeed, one afternoon at Ana Mandara's poolside restaurant, I heard an American woman so blown away by the greens she was wrapping around her banh xeo—the street-food staple of crispy rice-flour pancakes with seafood and pork—that she stopped the chef to ask what they were. "Lettuce," Jim replied.)

We pass attractive piles of baguettes, mangosteens, and mangoes. "It's the only place I've seen where they care about produce and display it like this," Jim says. The market aisles are narrow, and the Vietnamese too polite to ask you to move, so he warns me not to block anyone's passage. He says he made that mistake early on and discovered that he had single-handedly redirected the flow of traffic to the circumference of the market. By about 6 a.m., we're eating steaming bowls of pho, the Vietnamese national dish of noodles, pork broth, and strips of meat, along with coffee and tea from a market stand run by three sisters—one handles the pho, one the tofu, and one the sweets. The pho sister's formula is perfect; I can taste the lemongrass and mint over quite a lot of chile in the hot broth, on a hot day. Our meal comes to less than a dollar, and I'm extremely happy to be in one of the few markets in the world where I can feel like a novelty—a Westerner slurping the local specialty. "And besides all the chef business," says Jim, "there's a thrill to getting in first. Vietnam is a hot destination."

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