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).
Tonight we wandered around Ha Noi until daybreak. We made our way to Long Bien Bridge, where we looked out onto the Everglades-esque terrain and at intricate spider webs. Best of all, we found the market of markets–”the mother market,” as Erin dubbed it–the place where all the street vendors who carry around baskets full of food on those bamboo poles get their bananas and mangoes, their greens and giant slabs of meat, their buckets of snails–you name it. It’s chaotic and pushy, not a place to stroll and gaze. Everyone has a defined route, a set agenda. Here, you buy by the bushel, not by the pound.
We got there at around 4:30am. In order to enter the market proper, we had to wait for the right moment to cross the street. I shadowed a woman who looked like she knew what she was doing, dodging motorbikes and trucks and trying not to get trampled by street vendors heading away from the market, en route to neighborhoods across Ha Noi. Once we made our way across the busy street, we entered the market.
One of the first things I noticed about the market was that 95% of the people there were female. Alex and I seemed to be the only other males there not lifting and hauling boxes, or delivering buckets of squid or slaughtered pigs via motorbike. And of course, the market is not designed with tall people in mind. I had to duck beneath elaborate networks of extension cords and electrical wiring as we made our way through.
The market is divided into sections. There’s the fruit and vegetables section, the meat section, the seafood section, etc. Each of these sections is further divided into subsections–for instance, there’s quite a large area in the seafood section devoted to the sale of different types of squid.
The squid is housed beneath large tents and shares this space with a few other creatures, including crabs and snails crawling around in large buckets. Outside the squid tent is more seafood, mostly live fish swimming around in circular tubs, just like you see at any other market in Ha Noi. The difference here is that there’s just so much of everything and so much to choose from, which means that the smell of fish is particularly potent. The ground in the seafood section is wet and puddly, and most of the women selling and buying wear clogs or waterproof boots. My feet managed to stay dry, despite the fact that I was wearing my old hightops with holes in the soles.
The meat section was probably my favorite section. We can get pretty decent cuts of meat at our neighborhood market, but the slabs of beef here looked so good. There was also lots of delicious-looking pork sitting on tables, waiting to be chopped. I’ve been told the Vietnamese like fatty portions of meat, and I think I can believe that after seeing the fatty cuts people were buying up at this market.
I don’t recall much about the fruits except for the fact that the hands of bananas were a deep green color, far from ripe. It’s not unusual here to see unripe bananas, but these were the freshest I’ve seen. Maybe people prefer really unripe bananas for certain dishes or stews?
A friendly man wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else beckoned us over with cries of “ca phe, ca phe!” We stopped and asked how much. He said 10000 for a cup, and even though everyone else probably pays half that, we decided it’d be nice to sit down and take a break from our meanderings. For whatever reason though (I can think of many), the lady behind the table, who was working frantically, preparing something (not sure what), said, “I can’t.” So no coffee for us.
On the edge of market territory was a pleasant, relatively calm space where shirtless men shot pool on two different pool tables. Across the street, inside a quiet garage-type shop, a girl made long ropes of tofu. I want to go back to take better photos and video, but this will have to do for now.
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.
As someone who’s had the pleasure of working at Stumptown and Ritual–where I prepared and served and drank some of the finest coffees in the world–I admit I feel a little guilty indulging in robusta on a daily basis. But this is Viet Nam, not Portland or San Francisco. My morning dose of cà phê sữa đá comes in a tall glass with one giant ice cube and a thick layer of condensed milk at its base. Sure, in the States I tend to like my coffee to have a flavor profile other than “sweet and caffeine-y,” but there’s something sort of refreshing about being in a place where nobody worries about how pouring hot coffee over ice makes it bitter–because, you know, there’s all that condensed milk.
"coffee milk ice" and the wonders of stirring: before and after
That said, I would be interested in tasting whatever Vietnamese specialty coffee would be. I am in full support of figuring out a way to improve the quality of the beans farmers here are producing, so that they–and the people who work for them–could reap the benefits that’d come along with such improvements: higher wages, better working conditions, etc. So yes, I want Vietnamese coffee to remain what it is–sweet and milky and robusta-based–but there’s certainly room for branching out. Viet Nam’s already the second-largest coffee-producing country in the world, but it produces 95% robusta beans. It has the potential to evolve into an arabica-producing region, though, despite several unsuccessful past attempts. Sometimes I wish an organization like Sustainable Harvest would invest the time and resources necessary to make this happen. If a country like Colombia, the land of Juan Valdez, has begun to produce amazing arabica beans, why can’t Viet Nam?
Perhaps most intriguing for me about the notion of a US-based roaster or organization working with Vietnamese growers is that doing so would allow many more people to learn about the coffee culture here. For instance, while other coffee geeks and I experimented with the nuances of various coffee preparation methods–vac pots and Moka pots, single-cup drip coffee cones and French presses–it wasn’t until I came to Ha Noi that I learned how to use a Vietnamese coffee filter. More generally, thanks to Direct Trade programs (which I talk about in more detail at the beginning of this article), roasters now place a greater emphasis on developing relationships with farmers and educating consumers on where their coffee comes from. It’d be kind of cool if more Americans could name a city in Viet Nam besides Saigon and Ha Noi.
I’ll write more on this (and, with any luck, more intelligently) after I visit the Central Highlands in June.
Our first mission was to find nem lụi and bánh khoai
