The last word: Fido for supper

My new friend Hong, a husky-voiced Vietnamese woman, is pouring me another shot of rice wine from a bottle that contains the pickled remains of a lizard, a cobra, a scorpion, and two seahorses. It’s Feb. 15, and we’re sitting in a living room in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, two nights before the official start of Tet, the weeklong celebration marking the Lunar New Year. Hong is pouring the shots in the spirit of holiday cheer, but I’m throwing them back to get liquored up. I need all the bravery I can muster because I’m in town to do a daring deed.

Hong is a family friend of Peter Kastan, a 56-year-old American with a shaved head who lives in Hanoi with his Vietnamese wife, Mai. I first located Peter through a blog that he keeps about his life in the Vietnamese capital, and he agreed to assist me on my mission. Now, a month later, we’re ready to go for it. But first Peter and Hong issue a pair of warnings.

“It’s good—if you can bear it,” says Hong.

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“The heat hits you in your chest,” explains Peter. “They say it’s very powerful. That’s why it can be lucky. Or unlucky.”

I look over at Hong, confused. She demonstrates the heat for me with fluttering hand gestures directed toward her chest, as if she’s putting out a deep, fearful flame. It’s a gesture I will see often during my stay in Vietnam.

I’m here, after all, to eat Canis lupus familiaris.

I remember the first time it occurred to me that dogs were edible. It was during one of those long, boredom-filled years between learning how to ride a bike and hitting puberty. My dad, figuring that I was ready for a life lesson, settled that day on gutting deer. He snapped his fingers to summon our beagle, Bo-Bo II. Then he rolled the dog over. “You get the deer on its back,” he said, “all four legs up in the air.” Using a drink stirrer, he traced out the proper incision line up Bo-Bo’s underside. The dog lolled his head back and forth in the ecstasy of human attention while my dad mimicked the act of cleaning out its entrails.

My family all loved dogs, but I never could shake the implication of my dad’s lesson: Underneath all that playful fluffiness, dogs are made out of meat. From then on, I often wondered about the line separating the things that I was allowed to eat (cows, deer, chickens) from those that were taboo (dogs, cats, cockatiels). Who drew that line, anyway?

I’ve since eaten just about everything that you can legally hunt or purchase in a supermarket—from maggots to a crown roast of kangaroo. Even so, I approached dog-eating with trepidation. In much of the world, I knew, eating dog was commonplace. What I hadn’t heard, until I started scouring the Web for more information, was the claim that the residents of Hanoi consume tens of thousands of dogs around the Tet holiday. I promptly bought a ticket to find out for myself.

The last shot of rice wine is history when we all hop on a couple of motorbikes and pull out into the frenetic streets of the Old Quarter. Our destination is a line of thit cho (“dog meat”) restaurants on a busy road in north-central Hanoi.

Outside the restaurants, the roadside is like a carnival, packed with bikes and pedestrians. Hong explains that we’ve come on the second-luckiest night of the year to eat dog. In the days preceding Tet, it seems, the Vietnamese try to amass so much good luck that the momentum of it will carry them through an entire year.

If eating dog just before Tet is good luck, then it’s probably okay to eat it anytime you want, right? Wrong. With dog, timing is the tricky part. For instance, you never, ever eat dog during the first two weeks of the monthly lunar cycle; that’ll only bring bad luck. It is okay to eat dog anytime during the second half of the month, but it becomes better and better to eat dog as the end of the month draws near.

We select a restaurant—“Glory Special Meat Dog”—and pick a spot inside near a group of 17 teenagers with gelled hair and hip-hop clothes, all of them giggling over plates of dog. Our waitress lays out a mat of newsprint and pours a round of draft beer, then delivers a collection of standard dog condiments: a plastic basket piled high with green herbs, a chunk of root that tastes like a cross between ginger and horseradish, lime wedges, a small dish of vinegar-soaked red chilies, and a bowl of raw sugar. Finally, she unveils a bowl of mam tom, the shrimp-based, evil-bastard cousin of Vietnamese fish sauce. Made by fermenting the crustaceans for a year or so in a ceramic vat, mam tom is what you’d get if you put together a team of top scientists and asked them to produce the world’s most potent odor. Hong points to it: “Very important with meat dog.” I’m juggling mixed feelings—deep respect for any person who can eat mam tom, utter fear that I will have to eat mam tom—when the moment of truth comes. The waitress brings a large tray heaped with a tapas-style medley of dog dishes. Hong and Mai provide descriptions as she lays them out: “Dog spicy ... dog stomach ... dog boiled ... dog sour ... head dog ... feet dog ... crispy dog.”

I follow Hong’s demonstration and dredge a piece of crispy dog, golden and crusted in sesame seeds, through the fearsome mam tom. I always tell myself: When in doubt, do it really fast. I pop the dog into my mouth. What happens next can be likened to a situation in which your scuba gear is scattered all around you at the bottom of the ocean and your friends are trying to assemble and employ the gear while you panic. Mai and Hong grab the herbs and slice the root and dip things into sauces and try to pack it all into my mouth in some kind of precise sequence. I feel some gristle in my mouth, and the taste of fatty meat, like highly amplified pork, but mostly I feel mam tom. I wash it all down with a snort of beer, and then lean back with a fake smile on my face.

“Well ... ?” Peter asks.

“You like?” says Mai.

I try to think of something polite. “Geez ... it was good. Just great. And that sauce is really something, too! Wowzers!”

I would have sampled every dish (minus the mam tom), but something happens. First, I feel a strange heat rising in my chest. It comes on as a subtle warming deep inside. But after a moment or two, I feel as if I’ve had a tanning bed’s heating element stuffed into my shirt pocket. I suspect the condiments, but Hong explains that the heat is from the dog itself—hence the dog’s power. It’s unnerving, but not as unnerving as what happens next.

Mai dips her chopsticks into the “feet dog,” a large bowl filled with broth and several submerged objects that are about as thick as big carrots. She hoists one of the objects and lays it in my bowl. The name “feet dog” is a pretty good description: toenails, skin, pads, the whole damned deal. I lift it, take the faintest nibble, then announce that I am finished.

The next morning, I ask the translator I’ve hired for the day, Cham, to take me to a downtown market. My mistake the previous night, I realized, was that I’d been trying to eat dog without first understanding where it comes from. If I knew that, I might be able to give up my association between the dogs on my plate and the dogs that have shared my home.

Cham leads me down a long stall covered by a tattered collection of low-strung tarps. Dogs hang above wooden benches that line each side of the stall, eviscerated but otherwise intact. They’re classic mutts: long, upward-curling tails, pitched foreheads, medium size. The hair has been singed off with a propane torch, leaving the skin as golden brown as a Thanks­giving turkey. Teenage girls wearing skirts and dresses are butchering the dogs into manageable cuts.

As we walk out, we pass a woman selling live, fluffy puppies out of a cage.

“Is that for people who like to raise their own meat?” I ask.

“No, not meat dogs,” Cham says. “For pets.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference?” Cham says with a shrug. “The customer buy these for a pet dog, not a meat dog.”

Two weeks later, the moon hits an appropriate phase for dog-eating one night while I’m in Nha Trang, a beach town on the South China Sea. Cruising around on a rented moped, I finally find a promising-looking thit cho restaurant with its light still on. Peeking in, I see a dog hanging from a meat hook above the cash register.

A scattering of men in their 20s and 30s are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes over plates of grilled dog. The sight of a Westerner traipsing into a dog restaurant causes a ruckus. I’m toasted many times.

As I sit down, it occurs to me that the men in this restaurant would have a very difficult time understanding my feelings about eating dog. I imagine getting up and telling them about Bobo II—or maybe even about Muffin Man, a corgi terrier mutt I once knew who had a lame rear leg that had been haunting me since I sampled “feet dog.” But I know I’d get laughed right out of the restaurant.

My meal comes. One dish holds little strips of dog dredged in sesame seeds and grilled to a crisp. The other has cross sections of boiled dog leg, not unlike Christmas ham. I lift some crispy dog with my chopsticks and chew it up. Then I have another strip. Then I have a piece of boiled dog. I’m trying to will myself into a nonchalant attitude—just a guy in a restaurant eating his meal. I can’t do it. I’m forcing it down, and it is not enjoyable. At this point, I’ve answered for myself the question I wanted answered: If your culture and your culinary curiosities go head to head, culture’s going to win. It’ll win even if you’re rooting against it.

The only thing left is the heat. It has risen in my chest just like I knew it would. I concentrate on the heat, as though I might someday have to describe it to a doctor. It’s not the spices. I believe it’s more psychosomatic, equal parts adrenaline, fear, and shame. It’s centered right on my heart.

From a longer story that appears in the October issue of Outside magazine. ©2007 by Mariah Media, Inc. Reprinted with permission.