Food Travel
HANOI ROCKS THE TASTEBUDS
FEARLESS GASTRONOME GUY DIMOND FLEW TO VIETNAM’S CAPITAL TO SAMPLE ITS ACCLAIMED AND PUNGENT STREET FOOD, BUT DID HE BITE OFF MORE THAN HE COULD CHEW?
Photography By Jason Lowe
A tofu seller, above, waits for
her next customer
“You say you eat anything, eh?”, said Hai, smoking and sizing us up. He’d only just met Susan and I, and was to be our tour guide for the next few days. “You say you both write about food. And that’s a job is it?” He mulled this over, not sure what to make of us, a couple who claimed to eat for a living. It’s not so long ago that all Western journalists were treated with suspicion in northern Vietnam – and not because they wanted to know the recipe for spring rolls.
Far from being spies or agitators, our love of Vietnamese food had brought us to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. We’d discovered Ho Chi Minh City and the south; now it was time to try the street food of Hanoi, in the north. Our first test was a pho restaurant. Pho – pronounced a bit like ‘fur’ – a soup, is the signature dish of the country and, particularly, Hanoi, where it originated. The stock is generally made from beef bones and comes with flat, white rice noodles.
A Vietnamese street
vendor
serves up a
plate of noodlesMai Anh (32 Le Van Huu Street, +84 4 943 8492) is an open-fronted, busy little café, in which plastic stools huddle around wipe-clean tables and wall fans substitute for air-con. There’s one dish on the menu: pho ga (pho with strips of chicken breast). Hai watches as we season our soup with lime and fish sauce, and add in fingers of doughnut-like fried bread. At 30,000 dong (about £1), it is aromatic, soothing and refreshing all at the same time.
Hai explains many cafés in Hanoi specialise in one dish, for example cha ca, which originated in Cha Ca La Vong (14 Cha Ca, Old Hanoi, + 84 4 825 3939). This street café looks much like any other, but has an internationally famous speciality and an English menu with the legend ‘One dish only grilled fish’.
A charcoal brazier is brought to the table, followed by turmeric-marinated chunks of deboned fish, sizzling in a pan that is placed on the burner; water is added, along with handfuls of spring onion and dill. Waitresses hand out baskets of rice noodles and bouquets of green herbs. When boiled, we ladle the fish into ceramic bowls of noodles and season it with nuoc cham. This is the name for dipping sauces, based around chillies, garlic and sugar, but with the tang of lime juice and nuoc mam, the salty fish sauce that gives so many dishes from South East Asia a distinctive aroma. Dinner for two, with a Haida beer each, is pricey by local standards – 70,000 dong (about £2) per head – yet booking is recommended.
A Hanoi vendor
prepares his
food for the day.
Many of the
city’s street
cafés specialise
in one dishSeveral Hanoi streets, such as Ma May Street, Tong Duy Tan Street and Hang Khoai Street, are renowned for their informal food vendors – and, for those who like their food extreme, there’s no end to the unusual fare you can eat in the city. There is thit cho (dog, cooked seven ways), pigs’ ears rolled in giant leaves and chao (congee, or rice porridge) of pigs’ guts, called chao long. The water buffalo penis restaurant was closed on our visit, which was as much of a relief for me as it must have been for the water buffalo. One dish I’m in no hurry to try again is duck embryos (trung vit lon), cooked in the shell. They’re considered a delicacy, but, frankly, I’d rather eat dog. The lowest point had to be frogs’ legs served with fermented bamboo shoots; the frogs’ legs were fine, but the bamboo shoots smelled like pork sausages that had gone off.
Among the high points was bun cha (at Bun Cha Dac Kim, So 1 Hang Manh, no telephone), a dish I now order whenever I see it on a menu – smoky, chargrilled pork patties in a sweet-and-sour stock, served over cold rice noodles and minty fresh herbs, and often with deep-fried Hanoi spring rolls.
But Hanoi’s food isn’t all low-budget and served in basic surroundings. Several smart restaurants now cater for wealthy ex-pats who want the romance of Hanoi without the grubby floors. The best-known of these is a lounge bar and restaurant called Bobby Chinn (1 Ba Trieu Street, +84 4934 8577, bobbychinn.com) after the owner, a gregarious westerner who adopted Hanoi as his home in 1996. “Hanoi’s a great city, but it’s a nutty place to run a restaurant,” he tells us. “I was one of the first in here after the liberalisation of the 
A local man reads the
paper while eating his
lunch. An adventurous
palate is needed by
visitors to Vietnam,
but is often rewarded
with great flavourseconomy more than a decade ago and it’s been tough – but I love the place.” Bobby’s passion for Asian food and his charismatic personality led to his own show, called World Café Asia, on the Discovery Travel satellite TV channel and a cookery book called Wild Wild East (see sidebar). His own dishes are oriental-western fusion creations, but he admits his favourite places to eat are the street food cafés, such as Bahn Cuon (71 Bat Dan Hang Bo, no telephone)
We arrive at Bahn Cuon – the name of the café and of the dish, as is often the way here – and ask for Ms An. She looks me up and down (at more than six feet tall, I am freakishly tall to Vietnamese people) while frowning, until we utter the words ‘Bobby Chinn’ and she smiles, returning to her pancake making. She smears rice-flour batter over a huge griddle then, seconds later, peels it off like a new skin. She has the filling ready: cooked mushroom, chicken, and pork, with ground dried prawns. The bahn cuon are then rolled like cannelloni. Dinner for two comes to 7,000 dong (about 20p).
Bun bo was another great discovery; rice vermicelli eaten with a nuoc cham dressing and grilled beef or pork. I’d liked to have had more time to explore the full range of aromatic Vietnamese hotpot called lau – and, of course, nem, the fat, flavour-packed Hanoi spring rolls you now find from Melbourne to Shoreditch. But they taste so much better here, with the sound of rickshaw horns, beads of sweat on your brow and the giggles of other diners as they watch you put something unfamiliar, but usually delicious, in your mouth.
Guy Dimond is the food and drink editor of Time Out London
TRY IT YOURSELF
BUN BO (SAUTÉED BEEF WITH RICE NOODLES)
INGREDIENTS
• 100g beef fillet, thinly sliced
• 5g coriander, chopped
• 20g shiso (a Vietnamese minty herb)
• 50g mixed salad
• 100g rice noodles
• 1 tsp vegetable oil
• 1 tsp garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tbsp beef stock or water
• 50g beansprouts
• 2 tbsp sweet-and-sour sauce
MARINADE
• 1 tsp vegetable oil
• 1 tsp lemon grass, finely chopped
GARNISH
• 1 tbsp crispy-fried shallots
• 1 tbsp white sesame seeds
• 1 tbsp roasted peanuts
METHOD
First marinade the meat: oil it, then coat with the lemon grass and leave for about 15 minutes.
Prepare each serving bowl by adding some herbs and salad, and topping with rice noodles.
Lightly oil a stainless steel sauté pan almost to smoking point. Place the meat in the pan and sear, then let it sit a bit before shaking the pan to create a little caramelisation.
Stir to ensure it is all evenly cooked, then place the chopped garlic in the pan and sauté a little more, making sure it does not brown.
Keeping the heat high, deglaze with beef stock or water, scraping the pan to release the caramelised juices, creating a brown sauce.
Throw in the beansprouts and cover for a minute while the sprouts cook a bit. Add a little sweet-and-sour sauce and taste. Spoon the beef and beansprouts, with their juices, into the bowls. Garnish with shallots, sesame seeds and peanuts. Serves 2.
Recipe taken from Wild, Wild East, Bobby Chinn (Octopus)
GETTING THERE
FOR MORE ABOUT THOMAS COOK’S RANGE OF HOLIDAYS TO VIETNAM, VISIT YOUR LOCAL THOMAS COOK OR GOING PLACES STORE, CALL +44 (0)844 412 5966, VISIT THOMASCOOK.COM OR TUNE IN TO THOMAS COOK TV ON SKY CHANNEL 655
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