Spotted: Bobby Chinn at Top Shelf, Fully Booked

Bobby Chinn signs his Wild, Wild East cookbook at Fully Booked. A bottle of Johnny Walker sits nearby, a key flavoring ingredient from his cooking demo for beef and noodle salad.

Seen hamming it up at Fully Booked Bonifacio High Street’s Top Shelf last Friday was international chef Bobby Chinn. An incorrigible comic, Chinn poked fun at himself and his hosts while demonstrating his recipe for a beef and noodle salad. The irreverent host of Discovery Travel and Living’s World Café Asia traveled to Manila as part of a World Tour to promote his new cookbook, Wild, Wild East: Recipes & Stories from Vietnam.

“It’s good but give it a colonic or something,” Chinn told his Filipino fans of his experience tasting isaw (barbecued chicken intestines). For the past seven days, he had feasted on Filipino street food (balut, isaw and kwek-kwek, which he joked was “so good you say it twice.”), talked to our local chefs and got impressed with our wet markets. He also makes the smelly connection between our fish sauce (patis) and the Vietnamese version (nuoc mam).

In Wild, Wild East, Chinn takes readers on a culinary tour of Vietnam through its wet markets, simple recipes like spring rolls and grilled chicken wings, and narratives about his experiences as a chef in Vietnam. Lens man, Jason Lowe, accompanies Chinn’s lively stories and one hundred-plus recipes with beautiful photographs.

Wild, Wild, East’s foreword was written by another internationally acclaimed and beloved chef - Anthony Bourdain - who just left our shores last week!

A Chinese-Egyptian by birth, Chinn was raised in England, lived in San Francisco and New York and now calls Hanoi home where he has opened a number of restaurants including his eponymous establishment in Hoan Kiem Lake. The beef and noodle salad he prepared for his Filipino audience at the book launch echoes his personal take on beloved Vietnamese staples, which should be fun and easy to make. Wild, Wild East: Recipes & Stories from Vietnam is available at all branches of Fully Booked.

Text and Image 1 by Jenny B. Orillos. Image 2 provided by Fully Booked.

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