I met up with a subscriber, her name is Linh. And she's going to introduce me to

Bun Dau Mam Tom and we're gonna go find out what that is. She requested not to be on camera.

So you won't see her face, but you can definitely hear her voice and some explanations by her.

So let's go check it out! We start off at

29 Hang Khay, you go down this alley.

Linh told me that

there's a few restaurants that you come to first and those ones you should walk past because they're a little bit more touristy.

But if you go around the bend to the left, it takes you right to the restaurant that she recommends.

This is it guys, the OG Bun Dau Mam Tom restaurant.

The inside atmosphere was really nice there was people just having a good time eating with family and friends.

There was also a lot of fermented shrimp paste (mam tom).

As you can see on this plate here, we have

Bun here, which is like the rice noodle base of this dish. And along with it, we have the

deep fried Tofu here, really crispy, and

the one of the special things here on this plate

we have the blood sausage.

But it's kind of quite different to, for example, Korean blood sausage. It only has pig's blood and along with some

pork fat and

some herbs in it, and together with all the tofu, blood sausage and rice noodle, we have some cucumber and some herbs to go with it.

-How do you say this in Vietnamese? -Blood-sausage literally translate into "Dồi" (pronounced "Zoy")

Yes, but this is a pan-fried one,

So we call it "Dồi Rán" (Zoy Zan... in north Vietnam, people pronounce Rs like Zs, unlike the south which just say their Rs)

"Rán" (Zan) means pan-fried in Vietnamese.

The shrimp paste by itself it tastes really salty and pungy.

So the the oil with the brown sugar and Calamansi, it helps like balance out the taste of the shrimp paste.

So the goal here, Linh told me, is to stir up the oil with the fermented shrimp paste.

And it's kind of like creating an emulsion.

It's not a perfect emulsion, but you get this like more creamy texture.

I'm going to go ahead and try this out for the first time.

I'm going to get the noodles dip it in the sauce.

Shove it in the mouth.

While that's still in the mouth, get some tofu, dip that in there as well.

And chase it with little green herbs.

Wow!

The salty strong taste of the mam tom, the fermented shrimp, is

amazing with this oil and the Calamansi juice in there.

All the textures are matching very nicely.

In this piece of sausage, you can see we have blood and also with this kind of like light brownish part here.

It's like pieces of pork fat and the kind of like brown-greenish bit here,

it's a kind of like Vietnamese basil.

If you like Korean soon-dae (blood sausage), I highly suggest trying this.

It's just as good. It's his own thing from Vietnam, and it is lovely.

I don't even think I'm eating blood-sausage. I just think of like a normal sausage. It's really good. Look at that, yum yum!

If you guys are afraid of mam tom, just because of the word "fermented"

and you hear all these weird things about like mam tom being salty and like really rank or whatever

Please look past that, and actually try it first before you make a judgement for it.

Really like got some deep flavor in it at the back end of it, like at first, you're like, whoa

What am I eating and then you start to realize like wow,

this like pairs really well with a lot of different things, like with rice noodles, with

vegetables, like dipping stuff like it's just like a really great dipping sauce.

I highly recommend at least trying it once in your life.... mam tom.

It was really great to have a local Hanoian like Linh introduc me to Bun Dau Mam Tom.

There are so many things I would have not known about this dish, about how to eat it, how to prepare the sauce.

All kinds of stuff. So I'm very thankful to sit down and share this really good meal with Linh.

Alright you guys, we are completely stuffed. That was such a great recommendation from a local, she is from Hanoi.

And she's been an actual longtime subscriber of the channel.

So she's been watching a lot of stuff from Korea, from like more than three years ago, right?

Yeah

If you're an adventurous eater, you don't mind trying out like fermented shrimp paste and stuff like that, then Bun Dau Mam Tom

I'll have the

street like information stuff like down below in the description box so that way when you guys come to Hanoi

you can definitely check it out yourself. So that was only

50,000 Vietnamese dong for two of us and so it's essentially like 25,000 per person.

It's like a dollar and change per person, it was very, very affordable, very satisfying and I'm very glad that Linh

had recommended this for me to try for you guys.

-Linh says "Thanks for watching." -Did you hear that?

Okay, thanks for watching guys. See you in the next video. Bye!!!