Suckling pig

As much as I stay away from using my Lonely Planet in places in Saigon, it really has its uses in smaller places.  Two miles away from the lovely and lively waterfront of Can Tho is La Ca restaurant.  When I was reading about this nice little city on the banks of the Mekong I read about this place.  This is a place that takes suckling pigs and butterflies them and then roasts them over an open flame.  Of course they have an extensive menu, which can go either way in my experience.  This is a restaurant where you should only order one thing and that is the pig.  I like when an animal is cooked in its entirety.  The combination of its fat and bones add flavor to the finished product and produces something succulent.  I wanted to add to my meal by ordering some vegetables because I knew that this was going to be a porky event.  This was the first dish I have not been satisfied with in Vietnam.  Squash flowers are a real treat and are common here, but these instead of being cleaned were dirty and sandy.  They had not been cleaned properly and that took away from the literally two heads of garlic that were thrown in.  Garlic is a good as ten mothers and usually I would have gobbled them up but these just tasted like a garden.  On the other hand the suckling pig was excellent.  It did not need sauce or accompaniments.  Vietnamese restaurants have a tendency to use a lot of salt in their dishes and they gave us soy sauce as our dipping sauce for the pig, which was unnecessary.  For people who like BBQ this would have been for you.  The skin was really crisp and the meat tender.  Like a Peking duck but with pork.  Crispy pork skin does make me weak.  I could eat it everyday if I knew it would not give me a coronary.