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.
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.
The first night I had bánh bao
