This post is going to make me hungry, in fact one of the first things I did when I got home from Vietnam was google local Vietnamese restaurants – I think I have found my second favourite food in the world (first will always be Japan) so bear with me, this post is about the food & restaurants, with a little bit of field recording…

Food provides a window into any culture, and before I went to Vietnam I did some initial research by reading a book by local foodie Peta Mathias called Noodle Pillows which details her mission to find the best Pho in Vietnam. It is a great read but surprisingly the book has few photos in it, so I’m about to fix that!

The first restaurant we visited in Ho Chi Minh City was Quon An Ngon (138 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia) and it was a great first choice as it is a restaurant with a vast menu offering a huge variety of Vietnamese street food, in fact we went here a couple of times!

The second time we sat upstairs and I noticed there was no music playing so I recorded some of the busy crowd ambience and activity…

The food was delicious, my immediate favourites were the banana flower salad, crisp savoury pancakes/crepes and bun cha… plus a drink called che suong sa hot luu for dessert – a delicious combination of coconut milk, tapioca pearls, water chestnuts and jelly worms! Add a couple of beers to the bill & we still only paid us$15 for the two of us!

The following day we went to the Museum of Literature which was interesting but packed with tourists, and as it was very hot & humid we started walking back & I was so thirsty I suggested we stop at the first cafe we came across. We walked inside only to discover it was Koto, a restaurant I had read about & also heard an interview with Jimmy Phan who started it as a non-profit restaurant to help educate some of the Vietnamese youth who live in poverty & on the streets. Every six months they take in 25 new recruits who spend 2 years being trained – KOTO stands for ‘know one teach one’ and it was lovely to see their process. We were served by three immaculately presented young staff, with a slightly older maitre de directing proceedings … and the food was excellent!!!

That night after a 90 minute massage (thats as long as a feature film!) we went & had dinner at a fairly rustic spot which I’d read about and is well known for the one dish they serve:

We’d been there for 15 minutes or so when a couple of other tourist wandered in – I heard them ask for the menu, to which they got the broken english reply “No menu!” so I explained to them that you come to this restaurant for one dish and one dish only, so best they order it! It was one of many such situations in Vietnam where you had to slyly watch one of the locals to see how exactly you eat dinner!

So after two packed days in Ho Chi Minh City we jumped on a plane and flew to Hanoi, staying in an excellent hotel in the old quarter which i simply cannot reccomend highly enough – great location & incredibly helpful staff. If you are going to Hanoi you should consider staying at Ruby Elegance Hotel, and as fate would have it, the location of this hotel was half a block from the main street of music instrument shops! More on instrument shopping in a future post though….

First meal in Hanoi was at a restaurant I can’t remember the name of, but I remember this eight mushroom dish VERY clearly!

That night we ate at a highly reccomended restaurant Old Hanoi and had an exquisite 5 course meal for US$20 including drinks and it was so delicious!!!

One of the other intensely memorable meals we had was during our Mekong Delta trip, after an early start, a 90 minute trip by speed boat & lots of visiting interesting villages & locations we were taken to temple where a meal had been prepared for us, and this roasted fish was so delicious!

And lastly, of course I haven’t mentioned Pho at all – the day I got caught in the rain, after taking photos for about twenty minutes it seemed the rain was not slowing so I ducked into the first restaurant I came across, which turned out to be Pho 24

By the time I had finished enjoying it, the rain had stopped, I was refueled and had also worked out I wasn’t lost – I was actually only a block from the Reunification Palace, which I had been vaguely aiming for… Visiting that palace was like spending a few hours back in a strange version of 1975 (I swear David Lynchs production designer must have referenced it) but more on it in another post….

Lastly I’ll post a few photos from markets we visited – its fascinating to see where all the elements from such delicious food come from (although I’m glad I only saw the meat section on my last day!)

Hungry?