For the food

"It was a very odd sight, especially in a country as tightly controlled as Vietnam, and I wanted to ask someone - anyone - about it. Was the man a gangster? A cop? This was a mystery that needed solving.

"Then my food arrived. I hadn't known quite what to order, but something on the menu caught my attention: lu'o'n nu'o'ng mia. A variation on chao tom nu'o'ng, the popular dish of shrimp paste wrapped around sugarcane and grilled over charcoal, this was made instead with freshwater eel - held in place with a chive tied into a bow - and as I bit in, I fell in love.

"The eel was rich and oily, caramelized from the charcoal heat, infused with garlic, fish sauce, and the raw sweetness of the cane. And the cane itself, when I gnawed it, released a burst of sugary juice tinged with the meaty slick of the eel.

"This, I knew, was what I couldn't get back at Chez Trinh, the only Vietnamese restaurant in Williamsburg. This was why I'd picked up stakes and moved to Vietnam - for the food. The eel, in fact, was so great that I wanted to tell strangers about it, to turn to my neighbors and tell them - in English if they were tourists, in pidgin Vietnamese if not - that it justified everything."

Matt Gross in "The Turk Who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World"