Word: lakes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When chef Donald Berger opened his first restaurant in Hanoi six years ago, he chose the unlikely district of West Lake (or, in Vietnamese, Tay Ho). Except for rows of dog-meat restaurants, the area didn't offer much in the way of dining - certainly not of the international variety that foreign residents and travelers were starting to seek out. "There was nothing here," says Berger. "People said I was a moron." But today, West Lake is home to cafés, bars and high-end restaurants - among them top names that have relocated from the chic French Quarter...
...cramped, but fans will find the bordello red curtains, shisha-smoking rooms and irreverent menu essentially unchanged. Another French Quarter landmark forced to close was the perennially popular Emperor. The owners recently opened a fresh venture, the Mandarin, tel: (84-4) 3719 1168, on the banks of West Lake. Though the new venue lacks the imperial dining ambiance of the original, patrons can still sample some of the old Emperor's signature dishes...
...delightful addition to West Lake is the Love Chocolate Café, tel: (84-4) 2243 2120, plugging a gap in the market for decadent Western desserts, heart-shaped cookies, cayenne-pepper-espresso brownies and the like. But perhaps the most telling opening - in terms of the area's newfound cachet - is that of the Intercontinental West Lake, tel: (84-4) 6270 8888. The hotel has three smart restaurants - a French bistro, an Italian restaurant and one that serves Vietnamese-Chinese cuisine - as well as a bar set on its own island in the lake. Only the prices are hard...
...robust beaches. This spring, Chicago opened its newest beach, on the South Side, and a former resident of the South Side - the city's favorite adopted son, Hawaiian-born President Barack Obama - is a surfer, although it's hard to imagine him ever taking to the shores of Lake Michigan. The city's beaches have more than a century's worth of history. In the 1890s, a group of prominent Chicagoans, including doctors and businessmen, lobbied for the creation of public beaches along Lake Michigan, in part so working-class residents would have access to clean bathing water...
Those differences, however, don't matter much to Midwestern surfers. Last December, Vince Deur, co-chair of the Surfrider Foundation's chapter here, took a group of friends to the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The air temperature was about 25 degrees. A winter storm covered much of the lake, sending fierce winds from the north to create waves nearly 2 ft. above Deur's head. "The waves," he recalls, "had some nice shape and power." "But look," he continues, "we know that in the world of great surfing, as far as quality goes, we're at the bottom...