Lau Dac Biet

There's a big Bia Hoi not far from my house. We went there in the early days but I've not been there since 2007, so it was a surprise when a couple of friends texted me to say would I join them for a Lau and when I finally worked out the address I realised it was the big Bia Hoi.

This is also the place where I could see them roasting dog when I lived in the apartment (did I mention I moved out of the apartment in June? Maybe not)

I think the owner must have bought a job lot of table top gas cookers, because I don't remember Lau being on the menu before. Now they have a whole page of Lau and by the time I arrived my dining companions had already ordered Lau Dac Biet.

Lau is sometimes translated as "fire pot" or "hot pot" or "fondue". It is basically a metal or ceramic bowl of tasty broth placed on a stove on your table. The broth boils and you drop in whatever you have chosen to purchase. It goes in raw and comes out cooked to your taste. The flavour of the broth increases as the evening passes and usually by the time you are reduced to cooking noodles it is delicious. The meat or seafood is usually very fresh when it arrives at your table. On one occasion I picked up a prawn to drop in the broth and it promptly wriggled out of my chopsticks and hopped across the table heading for the door. It didn't get far before a Vietnamese friend caught it deftly and tipped it into the pot.

Prawns were on the menu tonight. Dac Biet means 'speciality' and the steaming pot arrived accompanied by a heaped tray of mixed meats and seafood and baskets of raw vegetables and noodles.

The delicacies included Frogs and snails along with slivers of fish and beef, large whole prawns, slices of eel and squid, which appeared to be mainly the tentacles. Topping the broth were sheets of fried tofu, spring onions and one of the many Vietnamese vegetables which they say is 'cabbage' but which looks nothing like cabbage.

Accompanying all this were glasses of Bia Hoi, the light refreshing beer brewed daily. Bia Hoi is no longer brewed at the restaurants, now it is factory produced just outside Hanoi. We ate and drank.

Its a long time since I ate frog and I had forgotten how delicate the meat is when cooked to perfection, the frogs are big so the small bones are big enough to remove either in your mouth or, for the more skillful, with your chopsticks. The snails taste like tyre rubber, but that is just my opinion of snails. Everything else was great and we finished the whole pot, eating the noodles last and slurping the dregs of the soup like we hadn't eaten for weeks.

It may be shorter than a year before I go back to this place, especially as the bill divided by four came to less than £3 each including the drinks.