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Cocktail Culture

Posted on August 17, 2007

Vietnam is blessed with such amazing fresh ingredients, as is evidenced in the delicious food everywhere. But it hasn’t rubbed off on their cocktails. You only have to look at a fruit-shake stand menu to see what amazing things they could cook up with the addition of a little rum (there are even dirt-cheap local spirits that approximate rum, vodka and whisky.) But every place we go seems to have the same cocktail list, copied from a hard rock cafe, circa 1991.

If you have a taste for a Sex on Beech, Harvey Wallbagger, Blow Gob, Tequila Sunrise or just a plain old Scroodriver you’ll have no trouble finding an over-sweetened version made with canned juice from concentrate. The most common drinks are those made just by mixing different kinds of booze in a glass, and bizarrely the drink that tops many menus in Northern Vietnam is the B52. Presumably the connection with the aircraft that destroyed half the country is not apparent to the locals, or maybe they are having a bit of fun, like the Irish with their carbomb.

As a San Franciscan I’ve been spoiled for choice with regards to great cocktail bars, and I know from bitter experience that even in a city as cosmopolitan as London it’s hard to find anything approximating a decent cocktail, or even a good mixed drink. Good luck in Elgin!

So I wonder if it’s just a matter of time, or if there’s something fundamentally different about Southeast Asian culture that means my longed for fusion between their amazing fresh ingredients and hard liquor will never materialize.

The limes here come in many varieties and sizes, with different levels of sweetness and bitterness, and all are juicier than any I’ve ever had in the US or UK. You could make an entire line of different margaritas just using the different limes. There are also dozens of strongly flavored herbs that you could substitute for mint in mojito style drinks. Then there are the unique SE Asian fruits - dragonfruit, with it’s white flesh and tiny black edible seeds, sweet longons and prickly rambutans.

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