Our night at Maison Sen was excessive. And I don’t mean just by Southeast Asian standards. It was excessive by any metric you want to throw at it. But as soon as you arrive at the restaurant and are greeted along with loads of other dressed-to-impressed guests by the small army of staff whose job it is to greet you and make sure there is no chance of you opening the door yourself you realize not only that excess is the point, but also that the class of excess that Maison Sen specializes in is classy, indeed.
Gina and I discovered Maison Sen the old fashioned way. We were looking for a great place to eat tons of seafood and we found a YouTube video by a guy named Tim Lee who, inspired by a great Vietnamese meal he had in Vancouver, decided to fly to Hanoi to try the stuff on its home turf. I think it helps, budget-wise, that Tim Lee has a decent number of subscribers and so his travels are sponsored by Vessi, which is the brand of totally waterproof and not completely unstylish shoes you should buy if you ever plan to travel in Southeast Asia during the torrential and could-happen-at-any-moment-without-warning rainy season.
Tim Lee seems like a cool and genuine type of guy and that’s really what he’s got going for him in terms of ethical appeal. You can trust him. It’s easy to imagine that he really is a fun guy to hang out with and eat plate after plate of delicious food and drink a little wine with, which the eagle-eyed viewers of Tim’s video will know means a whole bottle or two by the end of the dinner, which we appreciate about him and which supplies a lot of the pathetic, or emotional, appeal for us. Also, it’s clear from this video that Tim Lee needs instructions on how to eat some of the food at Maison Sen, which we can relate to and which rhetoric-wise is sort of like an ethical-pathetic speedball to the neck. He rounds out the rhetorical trifecta by indicating right there in the video’s title that Maison Sen is an “incredible $17 luxury Vietnamese seafood buffet,” and so we were duly persuaded to give it a try.
If you know anything about us, you that the only thing we enjoy more than a Game of Thrones-style feast is a Game of Thrones-style feast with friends. You will also know that there is nothing so reasonable cost-wise that we can’t make it totally unreasonable by going completely over the top. This is how we wound up at Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge afterward drinking Blue Label and whatever Gina was drinking and buying rounds for the ladies sitting behind us who were out enjoying a girls’ night and who were friendly but didn’t give off a Vietnamese party girl vibe and so we didn’t even ask for body shots. It’s worth mentioning that Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge is the kind of place that really delivers on its promise and is a great bar no matter what city in the world you’re in so you should add it to your Hanoi itinerary.
We decided Maison Sen would best be enjoyed with our friend Miracle, whose Vietnamese name, it turns out, really does mean Miracle. This is totally different from a lot of people’s foreign language names, which are often just sort of made up or acquired in some way that has nothing to do with translation. My own Asian name is Jason. I got this name because the lady who owns Bay Ridge Sushi in Brooklyn called me Jason for the entire time we ordered sushi from them about once a week for years. I enjoyed being JAY-suuun and so I let it ride.
We decided to invite Miracle, for friendship not for tourism, but first we wanted to make sure we could get a reservation because one of the reviews of Maison Sen pointed out that you shouldn’t even try to show up without a reservation cuz this place is busy and can be booked out a couple of weeks in advance, easy. So I went to their Facebook page and, sure enough, right there at the bottom it says they take reservations. Except that there’s no link anywhere to make a reservation and their website maisonsen.vn doesn’t seem to work (still doesn’t, actually), which could be that they’ve gone over to Facebook only for their online presence, which is pretty common over here, or there’s an issue with our devices becoming confused and / or just unwilling to cooperate with the whole World Wide Web situation here, which is why I have to log in three times to access my Wells Fargo accounts.
So I call. And when someone answers I ask if they speak English and it doesn’t take long for it to be pretty clear that they don’t. And so I ask if I can make a reservation, which, admittedly, isn’t brilliant because I asked in English and I already new damned well that they didn’t speak a lick of it, and so when they hung up on me I was a little like, “Well, that was uncalled for,” except in hindsight it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do because while I suppose there’s some possibility that they could just learn enough English right there on the spot to answer my questions and take down my reservation, this was unlikely, and there was no chance I was going to magically acquire enough Vietnamese to get the job done and from the sounds in the background it seemed like they were pretty busy and didn’t have time for comedy and so click.
But I’m resourceful. Plus, who uses phones to make reservations anymore anyway? No one. That’s who. The last time I used a phone to make a reservation I tripped over my pet dinosaur. So I did what anyone who is over the age of 25 and has no idea how Instagram works would do: I messaged them on Facebook. And it worked! Kind of. At least, I got a response in English. Here is a transcript of my Facebook Messenger conversation with the folks at Maison Sen:
. . .
Actually, scratch that. The point is that after eight hours of messaging them on the Facebook Messenger, we were able to get a reservation for four people in about a week. Pointing out that it took quite a lot of time and trial and error and that, on the whole, the reservation process was—how do we say?—quirky, is not meant to reflect poorly on Maison Sen at all. Maison Sen is a classy operation and a well-oiled hospitality machine. And the fact that it was packed to the gills with classy people the night we went indicated, pretty clearly, that the quirky reservation situation was a problem on our end because the classy Vietnamese clientele who speak Vietnamese clearly were able to make reservations with no problems because if every reservation made at Maison Sen took eight hours to make the time and human resources needed to handle reservations alone would pretty much guarantee that Maison Sen would fail before it ever even got going. And Maison Sen was, as I said, packed and thriving, indeed, business-wise, because it’s a well-oiled hospitality machine.
Reservation made, we texted Miracle to invite her to enjoy a seafood feast with us at Maison Sen, and we were delighted to hear back from her almost immediately that, Yes, she would be delighted to join us. We were particularly delighted with the speed of her response because we’d just spent eight hours making the reservation. Because we wanted the feast to be a party, we suggested that Miracle invite someone, and Miracle responded immediately to ask if she could invite her sister or maybe her mom. And we responded, also immediately, that she should bring whoever she wanted and maybe she should choose based on who she thought would enjoy it more because enjoyment was definitely in the cards. This exchange was super efficient because, as you know, Miracle’s English is very good and even her texts are mellifluous except that, sadly, her posh and unplaceable accent doesn’t come through that way, and so it took no time at all to make the arrangements and we were on.
Basically every day since we’ve been in country, Gina and I have done a lot of walking. And if you’ve ever been to Hanoi you know that walking affords lots of opportunity to see premium outfits for sale in the shop windows. I’ve been making suggestions for Gina to buy a premium Vietnamese-style outfit since day one. And she even likes some of the outfits that are maybe a little less Vietnamese party girl oriented, but she always says, “Maybe next time,” which if you know anything about Hanoi you know that there will not be a next time because there is so much here you will never find that shop again. So while I got dressed in some nice navy dress slacks with a pink button-down and a nice pair of Allen Edmonds that I couldn’t bring my self to part with during the Great Purge, Gina put on a flowy and wispy shirt she’d bought here, which I admit is pretty premium even though I didn’t pick it out, and a pair of green cargo pants that she’d brought from real life. And of course she looked amazing because she always looks amazing and especially when she dolls it up a little, except those cargo pants made a pretty good case for her buying one of the premium outfits I’d found for her pretty much every day we’d been in country. Gina suggested we walk to Maison Sen because she refuses to assimilate to the culture here in certain regards, but she was defied because I wanted to arrive looking sharp and classy and not totally soaked through. We took a car.
Miracle decided to invite her sister Stephanie whose English name has nothing to do whatsoever with her Vietnamese name, and even though I’d never met Stephanie before and she looks nothing like her sister, I saw her first looking out for us as we pulled up. Miracle and Stephanie live in Thạch Thất, which is a district of Hanoi that’s way on the outskirts and it takes nearly three hours to get to the city center from there by bus. So we were extremely grateful and flattered that Miracle and Stephanie took the trip all the way in to have dinner with us for friendship and not for touristic purposes. This not only because we are not tourists, but also because Miracle is definitely the kind of person we wanted to be friends with. This might strike some of my less liberal or monk or Prozac’ed-up readers as a little strange given that Miracle is 16 years old, but I just want to point out that you haven’t met Miracle and age ain’t nuthin’ but a number. Stephanie, by the way, is 12 years old and she’s already giving tours with Hanoi Free Tours and her favorite tour to give is the Hoa Lo Prison tour because her uncle took her there and taught her a lot about it and so she is particularly knowledgeable about the horrors that transpired there under French colonial rule.
Look, I get it. I’m not delusional. I used to live in real life. I know that for many of you the idea that a 16-year-old girl and her 12-year-old sister traveling nearly three hours by bus from the outskirts of Hanoi to enjoy an “incredible $17 luxury Vietnamese seafood buffet” with an American couple who could easily be their parents—except that neither of us is Vietnamese and so one would wonder where the Vietnamese traits came from—for dinner together as friends is maybe a little crazy. Inappropriate, even. And my god, where are their parents?!?! But you’re gonna have to trust me here because if you’ve been reading the Southeast Asia Escape plan you know that my stuff is pretty one dimensional and that I don’t have the narrative skill or facility with characterization to impress upon you how mature and competent and interesting and engaging and fun to eat dinner with Miracle and Stephanie are, and I think it’s a good exercise in moral and cultural relativism to set aside your ethnocentric prejudices and entertain the idea that friendship can and often does, actually, transcend whatever limitations you want to place on it in terms of age and culture and so on. And if you’re thinking there was anything even remotely creepy going on I invite you to get your mind out of the gutter because I will fucking fight you if you even think about having a thought that isn’t entirely respectable about Miracle or Stephanie.
As you enter Maison Sen you cannot help but be struck by the fact that this place is gorgeous and is clearly going to be an experience to remember. I asked Miracle if she’d ever been there before and she laughed a little before graciously reminding me that they live on the outskirts of Hanoi and no, they’ve never been to a buffet. Because Miracle’s an excellent conversationalist she asked me if we eat at buffets often. This question really put my conversation skills to the test because how do you explain the difference between Golden Corral and a place like Maison Sen? Maybe buffet simply isn’t the best English-language translation for what goes down at the buffets in country. Because as we are soon to discover after we order the wine—which is one of the ways to make a reasonable outing unreasonable, in terms of expense—and are shown to the buffet room, which is down a wide, Titanic-esque flight of stairs, the buffet at Maison Sen is lavish. Lavish. And everything about the place is so well appointed I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see Leonardo DiCaprio waiting for me in his borrowed tux as I made my way from the buffet room back to our table.
“Lavish, huh? It seems like you might be rhapsodizing again here, Kampff. What exactly do you mean by lavish.”
Look, skeptical reader, I may not possess the kinds of descriptive powers to convey to you just how lavish the spread is as Maison Sen, but I’ve got a pretty good vocabulary, and “lavish” is definitely the right word. Now, are you gonna let me tell the story or what?
So the place is lavish. It’s the kind of place where you need a plan because there’s such a wide range of enticing and delicious foods to be enjoyed that you don’t want to miss anything and looking around the room and seeing all the stations you know that there’s a good chance you will. It’s practically inevitable. And since Miracle is the sort of accomplished planner who can get from the outskirts of Hanoi on a nearly three hour bus ride with a handful of transfers and arrive at Maison Sen precisely 15 minutes early, which is to say, right on time, we defer to her judgment in the matter.
“We need a plan. How do you think we should approach this situation?”
“Seafood first,” says Miracle in her confidence and enthusiasm-inspiring way.
And so the four of us make a mad dash to the raw seafood and sushi bar that Maison Sen pretty clearly suspected would be first in our order of operations because they placed it right there at the bottom of the opulent staircase, first thing. Of course, we already knew that Miracle and Stephanie are pros: they give street food tours in Hanoi and have great tips like you shouldn’t drink bubbly drinks at a buffet because it’ll fill you up too soon, but their facility with the buffet was truly a thing to behold. And this I think should go a long way towards giving you some insight into how accomplished and impressive Miracle and Stephanie are: They’d never been to a buffet before, and Maison Sen may very well have been the fanciest restaurant they’d ever been to, yet nothing fazed them, even when they thought maybe there was a place we were supposed to take our used plates to clear the table between rounds at the buffet and discovered that in fact the server clears the plates. No embarrassment. Just confidence and composure and poise and impressiveness and engaging and fun to be around all the way. Plus they’re intrepid problem solvers, which helps when you eat at a Vietnamese buffet because a lot of the food is pretty exotic and seems like it should maybe come with instructions.
My point is this: I’ve been very lucky to enjoy all sorts of dinners with all sorts of company in my life. Dinner at Maison Sen with Miracle and Stephanie is up there with the best.
Gina pointed out recently that although the Southeast Asia Escape Plan is in many ways a travel blog, I don’t really do the stuff that other travel bloggers do that makes their blogs popular and useful. And so I was all like, What are you talking about? The Southeast Asia Escape Plan is pure gold. Everyone is sure to love it. And she was all like, Well, except that you write pretty often about eating non-fluffy dogs and obsess over the foxiness and ability to sort of glisten on demand of the girls here and you don’t ever invite the readers who who even knows if you even have any readers because you’ve disabled the comments and analytics on your website and even if by some miracle you haven’t turned off what few readers you maybe had because of the whole non-fluffy dog and foxy glistening party girl obsession you definitely don’t invite them to share your posts, and commenting and sharing, not to mention having a robust social media presence, which you don’t cuz you deleted your Facebook account and couldn’t figure out how to work Instagram, and well, these are pretty much the bread and butter of any popular travel blog. Plus, your sentences are long and unwieldy and hard to follow. Plus, have you ever even heard of serial commas? You were a writing instructor, for fuck’s sake, Joseph, and you’re always like and this and that and the other. And so I was all like, “Whatever.”
Except that I got to thinking and it occurred to me that my wife who still loves me can’t be wrong all of the time and maybe she’s onto something here. So here’s my pro-tip for maximizing the enjoyment of your vacation in Hanoi: Meet Miracle and take her out to Maison Sen for dinner. Pay for that dinner and also for her to take a car to her aunt’s place afterward, which is pretty close. And even if you don’t happen to meet Miracle while you’re in country, you should still go to Maison Sen and observe how the locals handle a buffet. You will see that the typical American buffet strategies deployed at Golden Corral are amateur hour compared to how they handle things here. Take that massive millipede-like sea creature that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for a kind of langoustine, for example: The Golden Corral way would be to nestle one or two, tops, onto your plate among the mashed potatoes with gravy and creamed corn and green beans, but this would be wrong, wrong, wrong. In Vietnam, the massive millipede-like sea creature that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for a kind of langoustine gets its own plate, on which you pile them 10 or 12 high, and which you carry gingerly back up the opulent staircase, past Leonardo DiCaprio, to your table and dispatch them one by one with the scissors they helpfully provide, and dip them into whatever seafood sauces you’ve chosen out of the nine options, and if you’re us, which we are, this is about the point where you order the second bottle of wine, which does nothing at all to help the quickly escalating unreasonableness in terms of expense situation.
There is a lot more to say about the evening. I haven’t even touched upon the stuffed shellfish station, the lamb and other roasted meats station, the lame salad bar (because they’re always kinda lame, right?), the porridge station, the crab, the fact that there’s spaghetti, which it’s no surprise is popular because everyone everywhere likes spaghetti, or the dessert yet. And then there’s the whole business of Gina and me (but mostly me, if I’m honest) not knowing when to quit and so after hugs and selfie taking, which Vietnamese people are pretty confused about how to handle and totally expert at, respectively, and sending Miracle and Stephanie off in a car to stay at their aunt’s place, which is nearby, we go to the really pretty premium Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge for a little nightcap. By nightcap, I mean four glasses of Johnnie Walker Blue Label—Keep walking, Vietnam—that are totally unlike what you get in the States where, even if you assure them that you want a three-finger pour like how your wife who still loves you pours ’em and you’ll pay whatever it costs, they still get out the old jigger and pour that sad little one-finger pour that you’re not quite sure what to do with it’s so sad. When I looked at the credit card statement after logging in three times the next day I noticed that the Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge is called Jigger on the statement. This is ironic because if they ever had any jiggers at Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge, they went the way of state-run economic planning long ago.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that despite all the hay I’ve made about the unreasonable and escalating expense of this outing, this is still Vietnam and the dollar is still pretty gosh darn strong. So the entire bill for four at the “incredible $17 luxury Vietnamese seafood buffet” Maison Sen came to $189 American, and this includes two premium bottles of French wine. Of course, this is gonna seem a bit pricey compared to dinner for four at Golden Corral, but I think I’ve sufficiently made my point that between Golden Corral and Maison Sen there is no comparison (nobody’s ever described Golden Corral as “lavish,” ever). The nightcap of four, three-finger pours of Blue Label that really was Blue Label and not snake-soaked rice whiskey plus Gina’s drinks, plus two rounds for the girls’ night at the table behind us, plus the lollypop they gave us because they seemed to be all the rage at Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge and which I’d asked about because I was sure they contained MDMA but which, I think, were just regular-old lollipops—all of this came out to about $138. I make such a big deal about the expense not because it was expensive for us, but because I know for a fact that $300 is about the monthly salary of a trash collector in Hanoi, and collecting trash in Hanoi is hard work, indeed.
So where do I leave you? I think you can probably imagine the vibe at Gallery Bespoke Cocktail Lounge and so maybe that’s not how I should expend my enormous creative energy and literary talent this morning. Instead, I’ll leave you with dessert.
If you’re eating at Maison Sen and you’re not getting the message about the class and lavishness and opulence and are not understanding that this is a very special place, indeed, you will get this message loud and clear when it comes time for dessert. You will know it’s time for dessert because the Vietnamese are excellent at buffet pacing and so they all get up to hit the dessert stations at the same time. And as I’m sure you can imagine the dessert stations are extravagantly laid out with many little cakes and tarts and fruits and ice cream and the cold liquidy stuff you put the impressive array of jellies into in super-slushy fashion like at 7-11 back in real life. Stephanie made us a cold liquid and jelly concoction to try which she soon confessed was made without a plan and wasn’t very good, so she headed back down the opulent staircase, past Leonardo DiCaprio, to the dessert station to concoct a flight of more carefully considered cold liquid and jelly desserts for us to sample. But dessert really got into full swing when the Minions appeared.
Yes, Minions.
Maison Sen is clearly very popular for the well-to-do Hanoians to celebrate their children’s birthdays, because children are very much loved and cared for here, despite what your ethnocentric prejudices might lead you to believe. And when it’s your kid’s birthday at Maison Sen, they bring you a whole birthday cake, which at Publix would be like a medium, with candles, and the Minions come out and they sing the Happy Birthday song to you in English, which is surprising because you had the impression from the whole quirky reservation-making process that nobody at Maison Sen knows a lick of English. And you’d never have guessed that is was Stephanie’s birthday too, of course it was, and so out with the cake and the candles and the Minions and the singing and everyone in the place joins in while Stephanie turns red and hides behind her hands and obviously the whole incredible $17 luxury Vietnamese seafood buffet is incredible and luxurious and definitely not $17 the way we roll, and it’s so much fun and completely amazing and definitely worth a try when you’re in Hanoi, particularly if you’re lucky enough to go with Miracle and Stephanie.
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