What Goes with Asian Food

Posted 03/12/2008 at 01:19 PM by Ben

    Last week I had the pleasure of visiting a neighborhood Vietnamese restaurant for a casual dinner with a few friends. Normally when a waiter comes by with the wine list, I'm the first to grab for it because I enjoy choosing the wines, and even if I don't grab for it, the duty normally falls to me anyway as the resident wine guru. But not this night. Instead, I said bring me the beer list.

    It wasn't because there weren't some pretty decent wines on the list, or that I didn't want to spring for a decent bottle, and certainly not that I wasn't in the mood for undertaking the sometimes tricky decision of matching the dishes of several different diners with one or perhaps two different complementary wines. The sole reason is that I think the best match with Vietnamese food, as with virtually all Asian food, is an ice cold bottle of beer.

    This is primarily because Asian dishes tend to be highly spiced, with rich, relatively strong flavored sauces. This makes them a tough match for most wines. Most of the world best-known lines, whether Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, and even wines like Gewurztraminer and Riesling, which are sometimes recommended for Asian food, have difficulties standing up to Asian sauces and condiments. That's because these wines and grape varieties were developed in the context of European cuisine. Italian and French cuisine in particular tend to be subtly flavored, which is why over the course of centuries the wines grown within these regions have grown to be equally subtle in order to provide a compatible match with the local cuisine. Although there is an increasing interest in Asia in fine wines, this is a relatively recent development which is not reflected in the style of the foods.

    Beer on the other hand developed in Germany, Austria, in Czechoslovakia, where the foods tend to be more strongly flavored, e.g., spicy sausage, wienerschnitzel with sauerkraut and similar dishes. Beer is a natural match with these because of its full flavor and dry, bitter finish, to say nothing of all those frothy bubbles to clean away the hot pepper burning up your palate.

    But I have to admit that even when I'm choosing the beer for an Asian dinner, my favorite beers have a little bit of French heart. I recommend the better beers from the French region of Alsace, located adjacent to Germany (and at various times literally a part of Germany). Alsatian beers are quite similar to German beers, but I find them to be a little livelier, lighter, and, to be frank, more wine-like than typical German beers. My favorite Alsatian beers are Kronenberg and Fischer, which are the ones you are most likely to find at Asian restaurants. Another good choice with Asian food  is Tsing-Tao, which is made in China.

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