Some of you might be interested in the Hanoi street food guide I made on Nextstop. It’s a collection of all the dishes I think anyone who visits Hanoi or Vietnam should try to eat before they leave. Most of the places listed in the guide were brought to my attention by my students, friends and some of the food blogs I read.
Be sure to look around Nextstop while you’re on the site. It’s an easy way to share information about where you’ve lived and traveled and to learn about where you’re going next. I’ve also been using the site as a way to preserve some of my memories of the places I’ve visited or lived (see my Switzerland guide).
Busy times in Hanoi. Sorry for the lack of updates. I thought I’d write a short entry to let you know about my new favorite fruit, the mangosteen! They started showing up a couple weeks ago, and I finally got to taste one a few nights ago at a friend’s house. They look like giant blueberries but taste sort of peachy and pineapple-y. To eat one, you score its shell and pry open the rind with your hands. Inside are these tiny white arils, the delicious juicy wedges that you eat. The seeds are large and aren’t really edible, but I’ve noticed that sometimes they’re soft and taste okay. I bought three kilograms at the market for 20 000 dong, though it was about time for the market to close so mine weren’t really of the best quality. Still refreshing though. Apparently these fruits made their way to the US in 2007 after some trade ban was lifted with Thailand and sold for about $45/pound at specialty produce stores in NYC. Do they still cost that much in the States?
We just returned from our vacation to the imperial city of Hue, the culinary capital of Viet Nam. According to various guidebooks, we can thank Emperor Tu Duc for the city’s culinary diversity: when the former emperor sat down for dinner, he insisted on being served fifty different dishes, each prepared by a different chef. Of course, the chefs didn’t always create entirely new dishes–they’d make minor alterations to meals by mixing up the garnishes, for instance–but they certainly did manage to diversify the cuisine in the region quite a bit.
Our first mission was to find nem lụi and bánh khoai1. Nem lụi is grilled minced pork that comes on a bamboo stick. Like almost all the pork I ate in Hue, it’s brushed with some kind of shrimp sauce that makes it taste a little sweet2. You build each roll of nem lụi at your table by putting some greens on a sheet of rice paper, pulling the pork off the stick and onto the paper, and rolling it all up into a “nem.” Then you dip it in peanut sauce and enjoy. Bánh khoai is a fried rice flour pancake filled with bean sprouts, pork and shrimp. So greasy and delicious.
Desserts in Hue are fantastic. I had my first glass of chè–a gooey, gloppy drink that originated in Hue–on a street corner near the Perfume River. The drink consists of crushed ice and coconut milk plus whatever else the chè-maker feels like throwing into the glass that day. You drink/eat chè with a spoon, and each bite tastes different. In the photo, the chè on the right contained red beans, sweet corn and tapioca, among various other ingredients. At another chè place, we had chè xoa xoa, which, according to our Vietnemese friends3, literally translates as “chè touch touch.” Chè touch touch consists of a bunch of colorful jello-like squares4. I also tried chè heo quay, which is essentially a glass of crushed ice and coconut milk with about 6-8 pork dumplings thrown in. Pork in a dessert drink confused my tastebuds, but didn’t stop me from gulping it down. We also tried lotus chè and banana chè, both refreshing and a little less extreme.
Another popular drink is nước mía, or sugarcane juice. Ours came in a clear plastic bag, like the kind goldfish come in, with a straw sticking out. The best thing about nước mía is that the stands are easy to spot: you just look for a bucket of sugarcane stalks next to a metal crank-powered stalk-crushing machine. (Lucky for us, in the last week or so a few chè and nước mía stands have popped up on our street in Hanoi.)
We also found some scrumptious candy. One is a gooey sesame seed-covered square5, and the other is a tiny peanut bar6 that tastes sort of like a Payday, minus the sticky caramel part.
The first night I had bánh bao1 was outside a bar at around 3 in the morning. In Ha Noi, when it’s late enough and the city quiets down, you can hear calls for different types of food. Some calls grow louder and nearer, and some fade away. The calls come from megaphones hooked up to cassette players set between the handlebars of old bicycles. Many things in Ha Noi are sold on bicycles, and usually–particularly when the seller pedals one item exclusively, it seems–he plays a prerecorded track on a cassette advertising his goods. So that night when we2 headed out of the bar and into the empty streets of early-morning Ha Noi, we heard, “bánh bao” over and over again, growing louder and louder until finally, out of the fog/smog, a woman on a bicycle emerged. A man on a motorbike was the first to order. We watched as the woman on the bike took the lid off a tall pot attached to the side of her bike, near the back wheel, and reached into the steaming pot to grab a bun that resembled a larger version of the pork buns I’ve eaten at dim sum3. The man on the motorbike informed us that bánh bao is a steamed bun filled with “pork, fungus and onions,” and admitted to not knowing what else was really in it. One of my students said sometimes people put mouse meat in them instead of pork, but I think that’s mainly in rural areas, not here. Bánh bao is sold on sidewalks throughout the day, but it seems to be most popular in the early morning and after dark. Sometimes they have two hard boiled eggs in them. Not chicken eggs, though–maybe quail eggs?
what a shot
Bánh – which describes the class of foods that includes cookies, cakes, biscuits, and breads – is a word you’ll be seeing often on this site. This is because all things bánh are delcious. [↩]
Full disclosure: I have no idea what the title of this post translates to literally, but my housemate says “cháo” means “rice soup” or “rice porridge,” and that’s what’s important for now (more on the translation and meaning below).*
The first time I had cháo sườn was at about five o’clock on a weekday. Erin and I were looking for something quick to eat before seeing a movie and noticed a few stalls lining a narrow alleyway on Hai Ba Trung street. On a sign we recognized the name of a dish we’ve been eager to try, so we went wandering down the alley. We stopped at a small table where a lady was serving two young women in work uniforms bowls of something. She’d dip her ladle into a giant vat of white soupy stuff and put it into a bowl. She sprinkled some kind of finely chopped greens (cilantro perhaps?) onto the porridge and then topped it all off with chunks of crispy, fried bread (which, as is the norm here, she chopped up using her trusty pair of scissors). The finished product looked something like this:
served piping hot
It’s not the most beautiful dish. It looks bland and decidedly unappetizing, but it’s actually one of the more satisfying dishes I’ve eaten here. Erin described it as a comfort food that, unlike a bucket of fried chicken and mashed potatoes, doesn’t make you feel disgustingly full after consuming it. Although I’ve only eaten this in the afternoon or early evening, cháo sườn tastes breakfasty. The consistency of the porridge (rice cooked in a lot of water) is like that of country gravy. Sometimes it’s grainy like grits. I imagine sopping up the porridge with hashbrowns, but I can only dream. The bread bits on top are crispy on the outside, airy on the inside. They do a good job of sopping up the porridge. There’s a garlic or onion-y taste to them.
investigating the dish
When I find the Vietnamese wikipedia entry on “cháo” and then click on “English” to translate the page, I’m taken to an entry on rice congee. There’s a subsection on Vietnamese congee which confirms that congee is indeed cháo, and we’re given this little tidbit of information: “Many people tend to eat cháo when they feel sick because it is easy to digest. It is also made for death anniversary ceremonies, during which it is offered to the spirits of one’s ancestors.” Interesting.
As for “sườn,” we get less reliable results. An online translator says it means, among other things, “the side of a man’s chest.”
*Thanks to this website for filling me in on what this dish is called.
Busy times in Hanoi. Sorry for the lack of updates. I thought I’d write a short entry to let you know about my new favorite fruit, the mangosteen! They started showing up a couple weeks ago, and I finally got to taste one a few nights ago at a friend’s house. They look like giant blueberries but taste sort of peachy and pineapple-y. To eat one, you score its shell and pry open the rind with your hands. Inside are these tiny white arils, the delicious juicy wedges that you eat. The seeds are large and aren’t really edible, but I’ve noticed that sometimes they’re soft and taste okay. I bought three kilograms at the market for 20 000 dong, though it was about time for the market to close so mine weren’t really of the best quality. Still refreshing though. Apparently these fruits made their way to the US in 2007 after some trade ban was lifted with Thailand and sold for about $45/pound at specialty produce stores in NYC. Do they still cost that much in the States?
Our first mission was to find nem lụi and bánh khoai
The first night I had bánh bao
