Hanoi
I’ve spent roughly 100 days in Hanoi over the past 12 years, and I don’t recall ever once seeing blue sky. Not that I’d have it any other way. Like London or Seattle, this is a city that becomes itself under cloud cover. During those moist, moody afternoons, when mist hangs over the streets like smoke from a cooking fire, Vietnam’s gorgeous old capital feels more intimate than it already is.
Even in the heat of summer, Hanoians favor cockle-warming dishes suited to far chillier climes. The most renowned of these is Vietnam’s de facto national dish: pho bo, eaten at any time of day but especially for breakfast. Taking root in an earthy, long-simmered beef broth—shot through with clove, ginger, and star anise—the soup is filled out with rice noodles and one or more varieties of raw or cooked beef, tendon, or tripe. Southerners sprinkle fresh herbs and bean sprouts on top, but a Northern pho is generally unadorned, with only a few scallions and a bit of cilantro cooked into the broth and perhaps a squirt of rice vinegar. North Vietnam travel packages
Pho Gia Truyen, on Bat Dan Street in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, doesn’t look like much from the outside—or from the inside, for that matter. The room has a clock, two fans, three bare lightbulbs, and a handful of communal tables. The only decoration is the food itself: hulking slabs of brisket suspended from hooks, a hillside of scallions on the counter, and a giant cauldron puffing out fragrant clouds of steam like some benevolent dragon. A cashier takes your money (about a dollar a serving), her colleague fills a bowl with noodles and chopped scallions, and a teenager with a faux-hawk ladles strips of ruby-red beef into the broth to cook for two seconds, then spoons it all into the waiting bowl. Half of Hanoi queues up for a seat, while others slurp their soup perched on motorbikes outside. All wear serious expressions, and eat in a silence that feels not joyless but reverential. The stock is so wholesome and protein-rich you feel yourself being cured of whatever might ail you, perhaps of anything that ever could. Huong Hai Sealife cruise
A proper restaurant culture, the sort with waitstaff and normal-size chairs, is still in its infancy here, but Vietnam has a long tradition of eating out—quite literally so. Western notions of indoors and out are reversed: at a typical Old Quarter house in Hanoi, the motorbikes are in the living room and the stove is on the sidewalk.
When people here crave a particular dish, they usually visit a particular street vendor, often on a particular lane (which may even be named after said dish). The best way to tackle Hanoi is to treat the city as one vast progressive buffet, moving from the spring-roll guy to the fermented-pork lady and onward into the night. (For an exhaustive guide to Hanoi’s top street stalls, check out stickyrice.typepad.com.)
Or you could make it easy and hit Quan An Ngon (locals call it simply “Ngon,” meaning delicious). The owner recruited an all-star roster of street-food vendors to cook their signature dishes in the courtyard of an old villa, added menus and table service, and watched the crowds pour in—not just foreigners but also well-heeled Vietnamese, who can’t get enough of the place. (There’s also a branch in Saigon, a.k.a Ho Chi Minh City.) The quality is excellent, the atmosphere convivial, and seats hard to come by after dark. Come for breakfast and the food is even fresher (and the cooks outnumber the patrons). Most of these dishes are traditionally served all day, so the morning menu is much the same. My ultimate breakfast: an order of bun cha (grilled pork in a marinade of sweetened fish sauce with a side of rice vermicelli) and a bowl of banh da ca, a fabulously tangy fish soup from Haiphong laden with chunks of tilapia, chewy, fettucine-like banh da noodles, dill, scallions, and the magical rau can (a woody stalk with a strong, cedary bite).
Speaking of fish, Hanoi cha ca is one of the great Vietnamese dishes, a note-perfect blend of raw and cooked ingredients, assertive and delicate flavors, with a DIY element as a bonus. It’s often associated with a century-old Hanoi institution called Cha Ca La Vong, which is very good, indeed, though I prefer the more peaceful surroundings and local clientele of its rival, Cha Ca Thanh Long, a few blocks away. The firm white flesh of the snakehead fish is first marinated in galangal, shallot, shrimp paste, and turmeric, and briefly seared on a grill. It’s then brought to your table in a large pan with bowls of shaved scallions, crumbled peanuts, chiles, and a hedgerow of bright-green dill. A tabletop brazier is ignited. This is where you come in: tossing everything into the sizzling pan, sautéing the fish to a golden brown, then laying it onto a bed of cool vermicelli, with a few more dill sprigs for good measure. Add a dollop of supremely funky shrimp paste if you dare (and you should).
For all their obsessive eating and snacking, Hanoians tend not to linger at table. Most finish dinner in seven minutes flat. Where they do while away the hours is at the local café. Hanoians drink a lot of coffee: thick, rich, tar-black stuff, sometimes cut with condensed milk but often taken straight. The bohemian soul of Hanoi’s café scene is Nang, a 1956 landmark on Hang Bac Street whose 74-year-old owner, Ms. Thai, still brews nearly every cup herself. (Her father-in-law, who lived in Paris for a spell, taught her how to French-roast the beans.) Ms. Thai’s blend, sourced from Dong Giao, in the northern Nghe An province, is strong enough to power a 125 cc motorbike. The café is only eight feet wide, with tiny wooden tables and tinier wooden stools, occupied all afternoon by young Vietnamese men sporting the currently in vogue greaser look: slicked-back hair, black leather jackets, skinny jeans, white pocket T’s with single cigarettes poking out. The place looks exactly as it must have in 1956—a perfect microcosm of a city that’s always had a tenuous relation to the present tense.
Hue
Hue is a slow-burn town. While Vietnam’s former imperial capital is certainly beautiful (the flame trees lining the boulevards could make a grown man swoon), it’s also sleepy and standoffish, more village than city. There’s an upside to this: a short bike ride out from the center will bring you into unkempt wilderness, where only cicadas break the silence. But even downtown isn’t much livelier. And though Hue figures into plenty of travelers’ itineraries—for its magnificent Citadel, pagodas, and imperial tombs—many find it tough to crack.
In all my visits I never really “got” Hue, until I met Vo Thi Huong Lan, a friend of a friend who offered to show me its elusive charms. Lan is something of a professional enthusiast (her three favorite words: “I love it!”) and is positively mad for her hometown. “They say Hue is a place you leave, so you can miss it when you’re gone,” she told me, “but I never want to live anywhere else.” Most of all, she’s crazy about the food. Hue is renowned for its elaborate cuisine, developed by the skilled cooks of the royal court. Legend has it that the Nguyen kings, who ruled a united Vietnam from Hue in the 19th century, refused to eat the same meal twice in a year, so their cooks came up with hundreds of distinct, visually arresting dishes (most using the same few dozen ingredients). This tradition endures in the local craze for dainty, flower-like dumplings and cakes such as banh beo, which aesthetically owe much to China and Japan. Banh beo is an acquired taste (“I love it!” Lan says), a bit too gluey for my own; it may be the only Vietnamese food I don’t enjoy.
But I was knocked out by Hue’s other specialties, from com hen (a spicy clam-and-rice concoction) to banh khoai (a fajita-size rice-flour crêpe similar to the Southern favorite banh xeo). Lan, it turns out, eats like a five-foot-tall Anthony Bourdain, reveling in the bottom of the food chain: pig intestines, chicken heads (“I love the brains!”), and shrimp eyes (“My mother says if you eat them, your own eyes will brighten”). For breakfast at Quan Cam, we tucked into a stellar bun bo Hue, the city’s signature dish: a fiery broth of long-simmered beef bones, suffused with lemongrass and stained red from chiles, ladled over a bowlful of umami: paper-thin strips of beef, crab-and-pork meatballs, pig’s trotters, and huyet—quivering cubes of congealed pig’s blood. (These are way, way better than they sound.) The bun bo is served only until 9:30 a.m., so early mornings are the busiest time. Some customers grabbed takeaway portions in skimpy plastic bags tied with a string. Lan, meanwhile, gobbled up huyet like so many Snickers bars (“I love it!”), then cast a still-hungry eye on my bowl: “Are you going to finish that?”
In the leafy enclave of Kim Long, we lunched at the open-air canteen Huyen Anh, which serves two dishes only: banh uot thit nuong and bun thit nuong. The former, dim sum–like ravioli stuffed with grilled pork, are terrific. But it’s Huyen Anh’s bun thit nuong that sums up everything that’s simple and delightful about Vietnamese cooking. Bun means noodles—in this case a bowl of vermicelli—that arrive still warm and soft, with a moistening drizzle of nuoc cham (fish sauce and lime juice infused with clove, chili, and garlic). Shaved banana blossoms, shredded lettuce, bean sprouts, peanuts, cucumber, and green papaya provide a textural counterpoint, while sprigs of cilantro and aggressive peppermint fill in the high end. The crowning touch: glistening slices of char-grilled pork. At home in New York I used to order bun thit nuong twice a week at our local Viet kitchen; alas, Huyen Anh has ruined me for anyone else’s.
The highlight in Hue, however, was a three-hour dinner at Hoang Vien (“royal garden”), opened in March by the painter and chef Boi Tran in a restored French-colonial house. In an open-walled dining pavilion, long teak tables are set with vases of yellow roses: an ideal setting for a modern take on Hue cuisine, presented with appropriate flourish, like Vietnamese kaiseki. “Shrimp with five tastes” was reminiscent of Thai tom yum koong, with a single, plump pink prawn swimming in a consommé spiced with Kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass, chili, shallot, and ginger. Each flavor came through brilliantly. Hoang Vien’s nem ran (pork, shrimp, and mushroom spring rolls) were shrouded in wispy golden threads of fried rice paper and accompanied by a salad of rose petals. Across five more courses, all presented on exquisite china from Bat Trang, the famed pottery village outside Hanoi, Boi Tran and her chefs took the precious formality of Hue cuisine to a new place, where the pleasure of pure flavor, not mere visual dazzle, was primary.
Hoi An
It’s true that the quaint, narrow streets of this fishing village turned backpacker mecca turned resort haven are often choked with tour buses. But Hoi An still evokes Vietnam’s long-ago like few places can, especially at night, when the lanes are finally quiet and silk lanterns glimmer like rainbows off the river. Like Hue, Hoi An has a fine culinary tradition, including some dishes that are only made (or made well) here. One is the soup known as cao lau, whose thick noodles are cooked in water from one of five local wells. Any other water, people tell you, just won’t work.
Because Hoi An is still a town of fishermen—at least those who haven’t taken jobs at luxury hotels—it’s a fantastic place for fresh seafood. On nearby Cua Dai Beach, barbecue restaurants have set up tables in the sand; the best of the lot is the amiable, family-run Hon, whose muc nuong (grilled squid) and ngheu hap (clams with ginger, lemongrass, and fresh mint) are both ridiculously good.
The doyenne of Hoi An’s food scene is Vy Trinh Diem, whom everyone calls Ms. Vy. The 40-year-old chef owns four restaurants here, the flagship of which is Morning Glory, a bustling two-story house in the heart of the Old Town. Morning Glory is a tourist haunt, and proudly so. It’s also the best place in town to sample Hoi An cuisine. While you can get a very good cao lau from stalls at the Hoi An market, Morning Glory’s rendition is endlessly richer: a tangy broth spiked with anise and soy sauce, sprinkled with chives, mint, and cilantro, and topped with a crumbled rice cracker. In the center are juicy strips of xa xiu (soy-simmered pork, pronounced sa-syoo, as in the Chinese char siu). Ms. Vy’s cao lau noodles are so toothsome and chewy you’d swear you were eating soba, not rice noodles.
But what Hoi An is mainly known for is banh mi. Vietnam’s iconic sandwich is rarely served in restaurants, but sold from bakery counters and street carts. The term (pronounced bun-mee) refers to the baguette itself; the sandwich is formally a banh mi thit pâté (thit = meat, pâté = pâté) or sometimes a banh mi thit nuong (thit nuong = grilled meat). In the classic version, the pâté—a rich, velvety, offal-y spread—is paired with smoky barbecued pork and/or some mortadella-like cold cuts. Atop that goes a slathering of mayonnaise, strips of pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, chiles, a few sprigs of cilantro, and behold: the best sandwich ever.
That’s what I used to think, anyway. But no prior encounter could have prepared me for the marvel of Phuong Banh Mi, a sandwich stand on Hoang Dieu Street run by a young woman of the same name. I’d heard about Phuong from friends in Hanoi and Saigon. The concierge at the Nam Hai resort practically growled with hunger when I mentioned the place. Phuong’s banh mi is unique in that (a) she adds sliced tomato and hand-ground chili sauce, along with the standard trimmings; and (b) unlike in the South, where the baguettes are inflated to balloon-like proportions, Phuong’s are modestly sized, the bread-to-filling ratio spot-on. Come in the early morning or late afternoon (after the second baking) and the bread is still warm. Phuong wraps her creations in newspaper if you want them to go, but I devoured mine right there on the curb in about 47 seconds. It was unbefreakinglievable.
