76 MAY 2019
in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and I’m at my dream
restaurant, Oc Oanh. Under a broad awning that
stretches across the sidewalk, my friends and I sit on
blue plastic chairs at a low metal table, sipping mugs of Saigon beer on ice while around us
swirls a carefully choreographed chaos. A grill sends fragrant smoke into the air. Customers
loudly toast one another: mot, hai, ba, vo! (one, two, three, cheers!) Waiters clear tables by
dumping meal remnants on the floor to be swept up later. Mopeds and SUVs honk in the
warm drizzle beyond the awning. It’s a glorious mess, made all the more glorious by the
food: grilled octopus with creamy green chile sauce, clams steamed in spicy lemongrass
broth, scallops grilled in their shells with scallions and peanuts, and—most important of
all—snails. Sea snails and freshwater snails, tiny snails and big snails and hulking conch,
fried with garlic, or butter, or coconut milk, or chiles and salt. Snails, snails, snails!
And Oc Oanh is just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of quan oc—snail restaurants—
across Vietnam. The concept is simple: a casual place you go with friends to chat, drink,
and eat not just snails (oc) but every other kind of mollusk and crustacean found along
this nation’s 2,000-plus miles of coastline. You pick your seafood, pick your cooking style
(grilled, steamed, raw, stir-fried), then order more. After visiting Vietnam for more than
20 years, I’ve grown obsessed with snail restaurants—with the
complex flavors and easy socializing, sure, but also with the
transformation of shellfish into a rough-and-ready snack food.
It’s only on a recent, snail-focused visit, however, that I began
asking local friends how quan oc arose.
“Let’s not make this complicated,” explains Peter Cuong
Franklin, chef at Anan Saigon, which serves quirky, ambitious
dishes like a $100 banh mi (truffle mayo, sous vide pork chop,
and foie gras). “They have a lot of seafood. They like to nhau.”
Nhau is a major part of Vietnamese culture. Basically, it means
“drinking while eating”—like post-work wings and beer, but
more intense. Snails are an ideal food for nhau, Franklin says,
because prying them from their shells—with a small fork or
toothpick—takes time and effort, meaning you hang out longer,
drink more, talk more, have more fun. It’s practically algebraic.
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At Anan (which means “eat eat”) and its upstairs pho bar,
NhauNhau, Franklin gets into the oc racket a few ways, like sim-
mering mussels with artichokes in lemongrass broth, or using
them to top a rice-paper pizza along with mozzarella, scamorza,
and rau ram, a peppery herb also known as Vietnamese cori-
ander. It’s Napa Valley meets the Mekong Delta.
Snail restaurants are popular everywhere here, but when I
think about seafood, I think about, well, the sea. That’s why
I head 600 miles north to Da Nang, which some describe as
“the Miami of Vietnam.” It’s one of the country’s largest cities
(population 1 million), and it does resemble Miami geographi-
cally, with a long north-south beach-and-resort area separated
from the urban center by a multi-bridged body of water. Even
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