Sitting on sand so smooth, fine, and white that the locals call this Ice Cream Beach, I watch as first one and then a whole stream of ten-year-old Vietnamese boys galumph noisily through the water and surround my friends Rick and Susan. Laughing and splashing, the children cavort as if they have just discovered a pair of giant, bizarre sea creatures that are not only harmless but actually friendly. A few minutes later, one of the seemingly sullen teenagers hanging out under the palm trees at the edge of the beach comes quietly forward, lays a branch of small, round, green fruits down in front of me, smiles shyly, and backs away.
It is late afternoon on a day during which we have realized nearly every fantasy of travelers to a tropical island. We have sailed in a gaudy, dilapidated wooden boat to an archipelago of tiny islands, where we snorkeled through the magnificent underwater canyons of a coral reef. We have picnicked in solitary splendor on a palm-fringed arc of sand a quarter mile long. We have swum in aquamarine water as clear as a mountain stream and as warm as spring rain. But this giddy outpouring of spontaneous friendship is the pinnacle. When we leave the beach an hour later, our van surrounded by a crowd of children laughing and chanting our names, I am sated with equatorial pleasures, ready at last to embark on the mission that has actually brought me to Phu Quoc.
Thirty miles off the coast of southwest Vietnam, tear-shaped Phu Quoc, known as Emerald Island, is the country’s largest island. Blessed with every physical attribute that tourists crave, it nevertheless remains unspoiled by tourism, although the Vietnamese government recently announced plans to develop the requisite infrastructure, and word among devotees of sand, sun, and surf is that it may soon become a hot destination.
Like most other languidly gorgeous tropical destinations, though, Phu Quoc has another, more prosaic face, a daily life unrelated to the presence or absence of visitors in search of paradise. And much of that life centers around a particular product: Throughout Southeast Asia—from the remote mountains on the Vietnam-China border to the farthest islands in the vast archipelago of Indonesia—the name Phu Quoc is synonymous with fish sauce.
This thin, light-brown liquid, though indispensable to the cuisines of the region, is unfamiliar to many Westerners. The sauce is made by taking small fish (usually some variety of anchovy), drying them in the sun just until they start to ferment, then layering them with salt and leaving them in wooden vats for three to four months. The salt draws the liquid out slowly, drip by drip; it is then poured back over the fish to drain out once again over the course of another several months. Finally, it is aged in new vats for a month or so to further ferment and deepen the flavor.
I admit that initially this did not sound all that attractive to me. I knew that the ancient Greeks and Romans were big fans of a very similar concoction, called garum. I knew that modern tomato ketchup evolved from a sauce much like this. I was not interested; to me, it sounded like so much rotten fish juice.
But then I took a trip through Southeast Asia, from Singapore up through Malaysia, Thailand, and back down to Vietnam. About midway through that journey, I began to understand why aficionados say that fish sauce is to the cooking of Southeast Asia what soy sauce is to the cuisines of China. I also understood that the analogy is imperfect. I would say that fish sauce is to Southeast Asian cooking what salt is to French food; when properly used you notice not so much its presence as its absence. Added to a dish, it makes all the other flavors broader, fuller, and more intense; without it, that same dish seems somehow pallid.
Unlike many other versions (to which caramel sauce, hydrolyzed wheat protein, or fructose may be added), Phu Quoc sauce contains nothing but fish and salt. And not just any fish, either. The quality of the Phu Quoc brand derives from a particular type of fish, called ca com, or long-jawed anchovy, which swarm the waters of the Gulf of Thailand and are now also raised in farms around the island. Because of their especially high protein content, they yield what the experts say is the absolute best fish sauce in the world. I was determined to find the source.
Because cars are few and roads poor, the only practical way to get around Phu Quoc is on motor scooters. The young guys who rent them tend to hand you the keys and let you drive off, but they will chauffeur you if asked. My Vietnamese vocabulary comprises only a dozen words, but fortunately these include nuoc mam (fish sauce). As soon as the words came out of my mouth, one of the kids perched on scooters outside the hotel motioned me on board. We wheeled around, spun out of the driveway, and took off down the road. Ten minutes later we were careening along a little dirt lane, past tin-roofed, wood-sided houses where women sat shredding green papayas in mud-floored courtyards. We finally pulled up at a wooden dock jutting into a river. I knew that we were not yet near the factory because there was no noticeable smell of fish, so I figured we would be hopping onto the creaky boat that was tied up at the dock. Then my chauffeur pulled my arm and pointed to the sign over the stucco building we stood in front of: “Thanh Ha Fish Sauce.”
Since no one was around, we simply walked into the relatively cool, dim interior. There, stretching from one side of the room to the other, were row upon row of giant wooden casks about 12 feet high. The air was filled with the complex, slightly spicy aroma of fermentation, reminding me not of spoiled fish, or even fish at all, but of the inside of a winery. The sound was like the splashing of scores of miniature fountains.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed the plastic tubing that emerged from near the bottom of the closest vat; a caramel-colored liquid trickled steadily through it into another, smaller wooden vat. Laughing, my guide gestured for me to take a taste. I gingerly dipped my finger under the stream, brought it to my mouth—and tasted the haunting, unmistakable flavor of Vietnam. It was the best fish sauce I had ever tasted, at once lighter, fresher, and richer than any other.
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.