In Da Nang, Vietnam, Looking to the Future

Mike Ives

Tang Thi Vui, right, sells savory rice cakes at a market in Da Nang, Vietnam. The central region's best-known foods can rival specialties from other parts of the country.

DA NANG, VIETNAM — Le Ha Uyen never tires of searching her hometown's shady alleys and side streets in search of the perfect bowl of noodles.

"It takes time to explore," said Ms. Uyen, a 24-year-old foreign affairs officer who blogs about Da Nang and its vast food culture. "We have a very diverse cuisine, and different shops have different types of cooking."

Travelers arriving in Da Nang typically travel by road 29 kilometers, or 18 miles, south to the former trading port of Hoi An, which Unesco has designated a cultural heritage landmark. Others drive north to the former royal capital of Hue, another designated heritage site, where a preserved citadel offers glimpses into a former feudal empire.

But some residents and expatriates say Da Nang, a coastal city that was host to a U.S. air base during the Vietnam War, is emerging as an appealing destination in its own right. The city's charms include a riverfront promenade where locals sip iced coffee, and a museum displaying artifacts from the Champa kingdom, which ruled for centuries along Vietnam's central and southern coasts.

And the central region's best-known foods, like the noodle dish mi quang and the chicken-and-rice medley com ga, easily rival salty specialities from Hanoi and sweet ones from Ho Chi Minh City. It is easy to spend less than 200,000 Vietnamese dong, or about $9.60, on a day of eating in Da Nang, and hard to resist sampling the noodles, snacks and desserts that confront you at every street corner.

Ms. Uyen, who lived in Japan and Australia before coming home in 2011, says dishes from Da Nang and Vietnam's central coast are underrepresented outside the country, especially when compared with the interest in foods from the north or south. "They deserve to be more popular," she said.

Da Nang, Vietnam's fourth-most populous city, also has a crescent-shaped beach that lies largely vacant by day except for some expatriate surfers. Vietnamese revelers arrive just before dusk, tossing volleyballs or strolling in the surf as vendors sell beer and quail eggs from foam coolers.

Farther up the beach, fishermen prepare the thatched, circular boats that they row most evenings into the South China Sea, catching squid and prawns as their grandparents did before Vietnam won its independence from France in 1954.

"I catch anything in the sea," Huynh Ba Son, 41, said recently on the beach before beginning his nightly fishing shift. "Anything that swims into my net."

The boats leave shore at sunset, passing a hilltop pagoda complex where a 67-meter, or 220-foot, female Buddha gazes back at the twinkling green lights of Da Nang's modest skyline of low-rise concrete houses and occasional office towers. According to local legend, she has kept away typhoons that typically ravage this coastline during the winter rainy season. The city may not stay lucky forever: Like some of Da Nang's shinier buildings, the statue is a mere three years old.

In the 1960s, U.S. troops used the Da Nang air base to mix and store dioxin, the toxic ingredient in the defoliant Agent Orange, which was sprayed over swaths of Vietnam — the total area affected was about half the size of Switzerland — to deny cover to North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong guerrillas.

Vietnam says millions of its citizens continue to suffer as a result of dioxin exposure. The United States finances rehabilitation services for Vietnamese living with disabilities, regardless of cause, but maintains that no link between exposure and health consequence has been scientifically proved. Although the two countries normalized relations in 1995, the United States has long resisted Vietnamese requests for help with dioxin remediation, even as it has spent billions on disability payments and health care for its soldiers who were exposed to Agent Orange during the war.

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