Ms. Nga's rope-lowered chicken skin rice

A chicken skin rice shop that delivers by lowering a basket on a rope from the floor above

This is a small rice shop inside an apartment block in Khanh Hoi ward. The owner, Ms. Nga, has followed a strict vegetarian diet for decades yet still cooks and sells meat dishes; she judges the amount of seasoning by smell, since she does not taste non-vegetarian food herself. She sold herbal drinks for nearly 30 years before opening the rice shop in 2014. The shop's distinctive way of selling: the meals are cooked upstairs, put into bags and lowered on a rope to be handed to customers below. The practice began during the pandemic to keep a distance when handing over the food, and then became a habit. The chicken skin is fried continuously for one to two hours until it is completely dry and crisp, and only then simmered down with fish sauce and sugar. The shop puts no vegetables in the rice boxes because the moisture would soften the chicken skin.

English text: machine translation from the Localis platform — proper names kept in Vietnamese.