Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

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      A hazy morning heralds a hot day at the end of the rice harvest, the preferred season for trapping rats, once the fields are clear of their crop.

      bats

      The Tri Ky Restaurant doesn’t exist in Saigon any more, having been replaced by a high-rise office building not long after the city was renamed for the country’s founder, Ho Chi Minh. A pity, too, because it had one of Southeast Asia’s preeminent “strange food” menus, offering dog, bat, turtle, and a variety of wild game, as well as a selection of blood cocktails for the end of the difficult workday. The restaurant was in a fair-sized, ground-floor room in a building near the Saigon River. I discovered it in 1993, during its last days, when such drinks were supposed to gird your loins-so to speak—for what came later in the evening, probably in Cholon, the city’s notorious Chinatown.

      Stir-Fried Bat

      6-8 bats

      2 medium onions, sliced

      2 turnips or similar vegetable, cut into small pieces

      1 red chili pepper, de-seeded and finely chopped

      2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

      Salt and pepper to taste

      Cooking oil

      Singe hair over open flame, remove wings and heads, and cut bat meat into bite-sized chunks. Fry meat in a wok with a minimum amount of oil over a medium flame until tender. Vegetables and other ingredients are added only for the final two or three minutes.

      Collected personally in Thailand and Indonesia, 1997

      I entered, taking a seat by the large windows in the front near the door, looking out at a cluster of men in baseball caps napping in the seats of their three-wheeled cyclos, waiting for customers. I read the menu casually, as if I were used to encountering such dishes regularly. I recalled when I had decided not to drink snake blood in Taipei a few years before and figured this was the time to correct what I now hoped was a show of culinary cowardice.

      “I’ll have one of these,” I said, pointing to a line in the menu. “The, uh, cobra.”

      “Bat very good, sir,” the waiter said, pointing at the menu.

      Obviously, I hadn’t read far enough down the drinks list. “Bat blood?” I said. I tried to play it cool.

      “What sort of bat?” I asked, as if it really mattered and I would know what he was talking about, whatever he said.

      “The fruit bat, sir. Also have bat stew. Very good.”

      I told the gentleman (actually about a third my age) that I’d try it. With a can of 333, the local beer. Two of them. First a bracer. Then a chaser.

      What happened next surprised me. After the cold beer was delivered, the bat was brought to my table still alive, its legs and wings gripped in the waiter’s hand as he cut the creature’s throat with a small, sharp knife. The blood fell into a small glass.

      “Chuc sue khoe!” the waiter said. It was the standard Vietnamese toast meaning good luck.

      I raised the small glass and drank the warm liquid, tried to roll it around my tongue as if it were vintage wine, but then chased it rather quickly with a swallow of 333. The waiter smiled, still holding the limp bat in one hand, cupping the head with the other in a small bowl to prevent any blood from falling onto the floor.

      “One more, sir?” he asked.

      “Maybe after the meal.” Still trying to be cool. As for the bat stew, think Dinty Moore with very stringy meat.

      “How many foreigners order bat?’’ I asked as I paid the bill.

      “You are the first this year,” the waiter said.

      In American cinema, Tom Cruise’s presence in Interview with the Vampire (1994), and a number of actors playing Batman may have done something to soften the poor reputation held for so long by bats, but the fear of these creatures prevails in much of the world. The author Bram Stoker, who wrote the original Dracula (1897), must take some of the blame for this sorry state of affairs, but the American writer Anne Rice must share it for her series of best-selling vampire novels; it was the movie adaptation of her first that starred Cruise. With a hundred years of such inglorious history and images of neck-biting men who sleep during the day in coffins and who only can be killed by having stakes driven through the heart or shot with a silver bullet, is it any wonder that people turn away from the notion of deep-fried bat for dinner, or a glass of warm bat wine?