The name of the restaurant, Lang Nuong Nam Bo, means "Grill-Town of Southern Viet Nam". Although the salamanders come from the central highlands of the country, grilling them up has long been a southern specialty.

The restaurant staff place four live salamanders on my table. A generally reserved and dignified lot, the salamanders strike motionless poses. I order both the house’s varieties of salamander: duong dat nuong xa ot (lemongrass-grilled salamander) and duong dat nuong moi (plain roasted salamander).

The four salamanders are plucked from their statuesque poses and, after a short while, two are returned to me even more motionless. I stare stupidly at the pair of salamanders on the plate, and then dig in Vietnamese style by just ripping them apart with their hands.

 

Salamander is definitely more of a drinking snack than a meal - there just isn’t much meat. The beginning part of the tail has the beefiest chunks. Between the scale-like skin and the tender, white, flaky flesh, it is most similar to fish.

Undoubtedly, the most difficult part of the meal was tackling the plain-roasted salamander. While the lemongrass-grilled salamander is gutted and filleted, the plain-roasted salamander is just thrown on the grill until done. Ripping open its abdomen to nibble on the meat thus reveals all the internal organs.

These are different from city mice," the host assures me. "Our mice are from the meadow - they eat only rice." It doesn’t help that the Vietnamese word - doung - is more often translated as "rat" than "mouse".

The menu offers four different varieties of rat, and I settle on two: fried with pickled salt and citronella, and roasted. I can’t decide if the price of 12,000 dong (86 cents) is reasonable or not for eating vermin.

It is more something to munch on while drinking than part of a serious meal. A table of four drinkers, say, would probably order a couple of rats to nibble on along with several other drinking snack dishes.

The animals are presented whole - little rat heads with little rat teeth. The tails are gone, but the little rat legs are still there.

After giving us a chance to savor the view, the waiter takes away the rat to be cut into chopstick-manageable chunks. I'm assured that this is standard practice, not a concession to an inexperienced foreigner.

The plates return with the rats cut into about six or seven pieces. Taking a nibble, I quickly discover that there is not much flesh on the bones. What meat there is tastes more or less like chicken that is a tad stringy. The brown glaze and grilled taste of the roasted rat has a nice, almost rich flavor. The salt-and-citronella sauce adds a terrific zing to the taste of the fried rat.

I nibble on the meat of the legs, abdomen, but the heads of the two rats remain untouched. A couple days later, I went to a rock club which was showing Tom and Jerry cartoons before the bands come on. As I watch Jerry the mouse hopping around the club’s huge TV screen, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out why I suddenly felt nauseous.

Lizard from Lang Nuong Nam Bo, 367 Cach Mang Thang Tam.
Rat from Bong Lua restaurant at 15 Ky Dong Street in District 3.