Dinner of Champions: Fresh Cobra--Every Bit of It!

Well, it’s been a while since we experienced this insane dinner, so it’s high time we wrote about it.

Let me start at the beginning. Ricky and I are big fans of Top Gear. For all you ‘Mericans and others who may not be familiar with it, the show is a BBC production. It  features three middle-aged men mocking each other’s hair, racing cars against men wearing jet-packs, and occasionally giving consumer advice. A few seasons ago they did a “Vietnam Special” where they bought 3 motorbikes and traversed the country from south to north. This inspired our motorbike trip. Our mistake was starting in the north, though, which wasn’t all that enjoyable. 

Well, on their trip, they stopped in the city of Dalat and had a unique dinner—Cobra. Real, live (at first) hissing cobra. Well, we decided to go to Dalat just to eat there. We didn’t have much information to go on, so we just started by asking people if they new of a restaurant that served snake. We mostly got strange looks. This wasn’t working.

After a couple days of this, Ricky got the brilliant idea of pulling up the video of the episode to see if there was a sign in front of the restaurant. It was pretty hard to see, but we started showing it to people every couple of blocks or so and got slowly guided to the right direction. Eventually we ran into a young guy that spoke English very well. He deciphered the sign perfectly and told us exactly where to go. So we headed there, and saw a sign with the same name, but it definitely wasn’t the same number on the street, and it was a different sign. And it was closed, so there was that. There was a group of people outside so we showed them our terrible ipod picture and they said it was the same restaurant.  They couldn’t do snake that night because they had a church thing to go to, so we set a reservation for the next night.

I could tell you exactly what happened, but I’m going to let the videos and pictures do the talking. It began like this:

Then this happened:

And then I had a tasty treat:

And we got ready for a drink:

After all the excitement of that, we sat down and waited for our meal: a spicy salad with vermicelli and snake organs, and hot pot with the rest of the snake meat, noodles, and veggies.

Snake innards salad

I got the tail!

Ricky prepares for a glass of blood. He doesn't look thrilled.

Snake tastes good, but look at all those tiny ribs!

Our new buddy, the champ that cut the heart out.

It was a great meal, and the family that run the place are so kind and friendly. If anyone wants to be adventurous and go there, we can help you find it. And if you're lucky, you might get a nice souvenir...