The Goriest Meal

Jenny and Monika are vegetarians, though you would never know this if you were their travel buddy. One day in Hanoi, the girls meet me in the room and pull a pink plastic bag out of the fridge saying they have brought me a present: dog meat. Since they are vegetarians and they ate dog, I should do it too. Well, I couldn't do it and I never heard the end of that. Look, I'm all about experimentation, but eating Lassie is taking it a bit far for me.


Being born in Louisiana, eating strange reptiles is pretty normal. I've grown up eating crawfish, alligator, turtle soup and frog legs, so when the girls heard about a snake village outside Hanoi, I was game. The snake village has these specialty, family-run restaurants that serve cobra feasts featuring the raw heart of the snake and snake blood wine. We selected our restaurant and withing minutes, the server's father and brother brought out a writhing cobra to the corner of the restaurant, stepped on its head and stretched out its body, slit its throat and drained the blood into a goblet. Our server then ushered us back to our table and mixed the blood with rice wine. As we toasted, she brought out another goblet containing a greenish liquid, which turned out to be snake bile, and 3 cobra hearts in 3 glasses for us. We were told that the cobra is supposed to give you long life and fertility, which is why Vietnamese have these restaurants. After having our "wine" and some beer to wash it all down, our server started bringing out the rest of the food.

The menu was so extensive, we couldn't eat everything she brought. Imagine iron chef where the secret ingredient is cobra. Among the twelve dishes we were served, we had snake gruel, snake with ginger, sauteed snake with garlic, snake steamed with Chinese medicinal herbs and fried snake with dipping sauce. I wouldn't have been surprised if she had served us cobra ice cream at the end of the meal.

My vegetarians made me proud that night. The slaughter didn't phase them one bit. When our glasses were drained and our bellies full, we caught our taxi back to town, a little grossed out that we were stuffed with snakes.