Just then a man appeared from the office at the other end of the building. After a few words with my young driver, he went off and returned with a rickety bamboo ladder. I leaned it against the side of the vat, climbed up, and peered in. Thousands of little fish, interspersed with salt. Nothing else. A technology that hasn’t changed for millennia, yielding a product as sophisticated and nuanced as the finest Scotch whisky.
But fish sauce, no matter how delicate, was never meant to be taken straight. That night, we followed the advice of a United Nations official staying at our hotel and headed to a restaurant known to him only as Mrs. Hieu’s. Now, over the years I’ve followed hundreds of tips from fellow travelers about that little, informal restaurant on the beach where the fish is just-caught fresh, the beers cold, and the cook a budding genius. Usually the only thing that proves true is that the restaurant is on the beach. So when our scooter drivers turned off the road onto a path through the woods and approached a standard concrete-block, neon-lit, tropical joint with no customers, I was disappointed but not shocked. A few yards later, however, they made another turn, looped through a stand of palm trees down to the beach, and slid to a stop in the sand beside a wooden-slat house. Under a large open-air roof stood half a dozen plastic tables covered with bright cloths. Mrs. Hieu, a smiling middle-aged woman with a round face and a bun of gray hair, nodded from her post at the stove as her husband came forward and ushered us to a table.
Twenty minutes later, I knew this was one time the rumor was real. A half dozen sweet, ultrafresh shrimp arrived in an amber sauce in which the defining elements of Vietnamese curry—the funky edge of coriander, the bite of ginger, the aromatic waft of lemongrass, the full richness of coconut milk—were beautifully balanced. In Mrs. Hieu’s version of the homey classic clay pot pork, the caramelized sugar was ideally poised between sweet and bitter, the taste of the dish as a whole more complex than I remembered. Grilled squid, caught the previous night directly offshore and now nestled in a sauce whose heat came from fresh local green peppercorns, was tender as pudding inside, grilled to a crisp crunchiness outside. And beneath the flavors in each dish, reminding me exactly where I was, thrummed the deep, full muskiness, paradoxically at once lingering and vanishing, of Phu Quoc’s matchless fish sauce. My journey was complete.
Island Stopping
It is possible to take a ferry to Phu Quoc Island, but the best bet is Vietnam Airlines, which has two flights a day from Ho Chi Minh City. As befits its relatively undeveloped status, Phu Quoc is somewhat short of good hotels. The usual choice is Saigon Phu Quoc Resort, a government-owned beachfront hotel with a large pool and air-conditioned rooms (011-84-77-846-999; www.sgphuquocresort.com.vn; $45–$130). More stylish, if somewhat less modern, is Mai House, a cluster of villas over-looking the ocean, owned by a charming French-Vietnamese couple (011-84-77-847-003;$30–$50). Without question, the best restaurant on the island is Hieu Family Restaurant (also known as Mrs. Hieu’s), on the beach in front of Mai House.
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