My aim is not to gross people out. My aim is simply to state the facts as plainly as possible and let others judge them. I hope you will see that I am not a monster. I hope you will agree that I am just an ordinary man caught up in the sweep of events.
Dog is eaten throughout Vietnam, but Hanoi is the capital of dog cuisine. The epicenter is a one-kilometer stretch of road lined with about 60 dog restaurants.
I know of no reason that dog restaurants should look as uninviting as they do. They could look like normal upscale Vietnamese restaurants, with table cloths, plastic chairs, bowls of condiments, and maybe some fake flowers.
Instead they are two-story structures. The bottom story is an open concrete cellar, where the dogs are caged, and where the killing and cooking takes place. The cellar is suitably grim.
Upstairs is the dining area. The dining area is open to the outside, and fenced in on all sides by vertical bamboo bars. It looks like a makeshift prison.
We were a group of five. We had just returned that evening from our kayaking trip on the Ha Long Bay. One of us, a woman from London, had lobbied for a celebratory meal of dog, and she had found a receptive, if not enthusiastic, audience.
The restaurant we selected was half-full with groups of mostly men sitting on the floor, eating dog and drinking rice wine. We took a place on the floor and ordered beers.
I very soon realized that nervous timidity was not going to see us through this meal. We needed to eat dog the way the Vietnamese did: drunkenly and with gusto. I ordered two bottles of rice wine — vile homemade stuff with a slush of sugar at the bottom — and insisted that we continue pouring shots for one another until the bottles were empty.
Four dishes arrived. One was slices of roast meat that looked and tasted somewhat like pork. Another was tough fried cubes of meat. A third was narrow links of dog sausage. A fourth consisted of chunks of meat in a heavily spiced black sauce, about which the less said the better.
Reactions to the food varied. I was the oddball, I think. I couldn’t handle the roast meat, which everyone else found innocuous, precisely because it was the most readily identifiable as meat.
Brian feared the sausage because he didn’t know what was in it. I pointed out that whatever was in it was unlikely to be more objectionable than dog. Perhaps they had tainted the sausages with beef.
No one liked the fried meat or the meat in the black sauce. Nevertheless, these are the dishes I stuck to, simply by process of elimination.
I confess, the meal was horrible but the evening was fun. We were drunk and we were eating transgressive food. Everyone was giddy and grossed-out, and we behaved like happy and brazen tourists, snapping pictures throughout.
The Vietnamese were fascinated by us. Several asked to pose with us for photos, particularly with the women. Then they posed for photos of themselves kissing the women: kisses with greasy, dog-smeared lips.
After dinner, I went downstairs to look at the cages where the dogs are kept. The cages are in a dank, dimly lit concrete cellar, and they have gratuitously thick steel bars. Four dogs crouched miserably in one of the cells. I don’t know whether these conditions are appreciably worse than for most farm animals, but I will never eat dog again. There is no reason to. I’ve done it, and it didn’t taste good.
If you are ever in a position to eat dog, this is my advice:
- Go in as large a group as possible. Mobs are preferable. You get more of what psychologists refer to as “diffusion of responsibility” this way.
- Drink as much alcohol as possible. Indicate to the waitress as soon as you sit down that you are the type of person who becomes extremely angry if your beer glass runs empty. Buy several bottles of the hideously sugary moonshine and then play a game in which you pour a shot for your neighbor and pass it around.
- If possible, bring an Irish farmer along with you. He will make you feel ridiculously sentimental for even hesitating to hungrily devour dog. “It’s an animal,” he’ll insist, entrails dangling from his blood-flecked lips as you nervously back away.
- Someone is going to make a joke about taking home a doggie bag. It may as well be you. Write it on your hand before going out so you don’t forget.
- Some people fear that eating dog will irreparably harm their relationship with their own pets, that Rex or Fido will somehow know that their masters have betrayed dogkind. This is nonsense. In addition to being blindly loyal, dogs are extremely dumb.
- To work off the karmic imbalance created by eating something as trusting and lovable as a dog, consider donating half of your salary to the ASPCA for the rest of your life, you monster.
Coming soon: weasel coffee and cobra blood vodka.
