Saigon: A Dog’s Tale
By Nichola Ryan


The distinctive cuisine of Vietnam includes some novel ingredients and cooking methods that can be more than a little hard to swallow: the practice of curing coffee beans by feeding them to weasels and collecting the beans from the droppings, is an example, and the one where you insert a straw into a small bird’s egg and suck out the partially formed embryo.

Dog meat is another culinary delight that westerners find difficult to digest. Not for the faint of heart, a tour of the back-street Saigon dog restaurants is a great insight into an age-old part of Vietnamese cuisine and culture.

The first thing that will hit you is the smell. Cooking dog is extremely pungent and sharp and travels a long way – first whiff had my Vietnamese motorbike driver retreating in disgust to wait for me at the end of the street while I went off to take snaps. Even the pre-boiled dogs can pack a terrible stench, and I can’t think of a single thing it can be compared to – except that it’s terribly terribly fleshy with a powerful overwhack of sweat, muscle and smoking fat.

There are several types of dog stalls, all al fresco and a little on the grimy side. The first generally go through a small dog a day. The glazed pooch is hung, much like a crisp roasted duck, and slices are carved off throughout the day and served in soup or wrapped in lettuce leaves. Another kind of stall serves dog tail and paw soup – the paws are small and numerous. You pick them out of the soup with chopsticks and gnaw on them like a pig knuckle or a piece of crab. One restaurant served sausage made from dog intestines – and this was a seriously smelly eatery, as the sausage is made on-site. A sticky mouse mat with ten or so dying, desperate mice stuck to it just a stone’s throw away and a bowl of small, waggly tails on the bench next to me was incentive to move on. In the afternoon I went to district five, where afternoon stalls and cozy bars serve beer snacks, which include dogs’ legs with ginger and a kind of sour curried dog with noodles.

Despite the number and variety of restaurants, eating dog is a practice that provokes mixed reactions in Saigon – it is much more commonplace in Hanoi. Many southerners consider it a barbaric practice while for others, outdoor Sunday brunch or dinner of dog delicacies is an outdoor institution. It seems to be mostly groups of men and sometimes boys who indulge – with the usual beliefs of enhanced sexual performance and general manliness, and maybe as a kind of male bonding activity; but mostly it is eaten simply because Vietnamese, like nearby China and Korea, have become accustomed to it over the centuries.

So where do the dogs come from? There are stories of them being stolen off the streets or from well-to-do homes. (I did once see what looked suspiciously like a honey-glazed corgi, legs stretched in full flight like a giant bat about to crash through a restaurant window.)
But they are also raised on farms in the countryside for the Saigon market. The only person I could find who had actually had a dog stolen from his home got it back again after a clandestine 10 pm meeting in the park. The ransom? Twenty US dollars.

Tourist beware: Vietnamese people are aware of westerners’ general reaction to dog meat and not all of them appreciate cameras. After a day of pushing my nosy zoom lens into other people’s culinary affairs I will say that the dog soup and curry sellers are very friendly and accommodating. The wholesalers are another story. These women generally have two or three pre-cooked animals piled up in large wheelbarrows on the street to sell to the restaurants. Their fierce belligerence may be due to the illegal nature of their wares. Don’t try to take a photo, or you may be chased a long way by a very angry woman wielding a whole skinned and boiled dog (take it straight from the horse’s mouth.)