Hunting Through Hanoi for Some Delicious Eats

We arrived in Hanoi late last night after a long travel day (19 hours). We crashed almost as soon as we got to the hotel because of a) jet lag and b) we had a street food tour booked for the morning. So, we got up early enough to meet our tour guide Mark and a dutch couple to explore the street food scene. Mark is an expat Australian who's lived in Hanoi for just over 10 years and has a blog that turned into a tour business called Street Eats Hanoi.

For more pictures in Vietnam, see the album.

Street food is an institution in Hanoi, just like many Asian cities. Vendors often make only one or two dishes and keep selling until they run out. Then they pack up shop and go home for the day. They are masters of their dish, so it's one of the best places to eat. When you order, you usually sit down on a small blue plastic chairs and are expected to eat relatively quickly so that somebody else can sit down.

All the main ingredients for Vietnamese
cooking.

Our first stop was for a traditional vietnamese breakfast of noodle soup. Not the ubiquitous pho, because Mark wanted to dig a little deeper than that dish for the purposes of the tour. This was a chicken soup made with a broth so rich that your taste buds will melt and chicken so tender and juicy that it flakes apart at the first touch. The soup comes well balanced, but if you want more heat or acid, you can add some chili paste, dried chiles, garlic vinegar, or lime juice. This is a typical approach in Hanoi where people can customize to their own tastes. The vendor also served the same chicken over sticky rice with a soy-based sauce and a side of pickled carrots and papaya.

Now that we had some breakfast in our bellies, it was time for a morning coffee. In this case, Mark took us to a place that specializes in egg coffee. Egg coffee is made by first beating up a frothy cream of eggs, sugar and a touch of condensed milk. Then, you pour in lukewarm coffee like you would with a cappuccino. You use lukewarm coffee for two reasons. First, it won't cook the egg and second, it's Hanoi and it's bloody hot out! The cafe we went to is perched above a luggage shop that you reach by going into the back of the shop and climbing the stairs. The room itself was packed wall to wall with young people enjoying their coffees. It was dark, with some creaky fans and peeling paint that reminded me of an Ernest Hemingway scene.

Not squeamish

After the egg coffee, we headed north through the streets to grab a glimpse of the various street markets to our next stop: square imperial rolls. We tried both the crab and straight pork varieties, which were paired with a healthy pile of fresh herbs and some of the standard dipping sauce. That sauce is made with fish sauce, water, garlic and rice vinegar. This was one of Catherine's favorite treats.

After the crab rolls, we popped across the street to have a snack of fried rice balls. They came in either sweet (filled with coconut and bean paste) or savoury (filled with a pork mixture). They were good enough that even Catherine, who normally hates the gooey glutenous rice texture, loved them. It's probably because they were super fresh, straight out of the fryer, and thus so crispy they sounded like firecrackers in your mouth.

After fried rice balls, we tried another fried snack: shrimp fritters. They are rice fritters topped with whole shrimp so they stare out at you from the wok that they are fried in. They are fried twice to make sure that they are extra crispy and you can eat just by chomping down.

Shrimp fritters frying away

The last stop on the tour was for pho tiu, a rice noodle dish toped with slices of pork, peanuts, herbs and fried shallots, topped with a light sauce. We were totally stuffed by this point, but somehow found space to fit in just a little bit more because it tasted so good.

By this point, it's only about 1pm, so we still had the afternoon to waddle around Hanoi. We tried going to the ethnography museum but it's Monday, so they were closed. So, instead, we walked over to the Hall of Literature where students used to come to because masters of Confucian philosophy. It's a small, but pretty set of gardens with shrines.

Next, we walked back towards the turtle lake in Hanoi through the French quarter. This part of town is more wide open compared to the Old Quarter where the street food tour was. As a result, there is more traffic whizzing by. Oh, and a note on traffic. Saying it's chaotic is an understatement. You have to walk on the streets because the sidewalks are covered in parked motor bikes, street stalls, or whatever else. Also, you cross the street wherever you want. Traffic won't stop, so you just have to start walking in a predictable pace and trust that people will avoid you.

Catherine at the Hall of Literature

Around turtle lake, we had an expensive fruit drink and watched people passing by. It was quite picturesque. At the other end of the lake, there's a beautiful little temple on an island. The shrine has a 150lbs stuffed turtle that apparently used to live in the lake. Hard to believe.

For dinner, we took a recommendation from Mark and took a taxi out to Quan Kien. There we sat at a low table and had some of the house specialities after a little confusion with the waiters to get food that Catherine could eat. They make their own liquor, so we tried the plum and kumquat. We also had the sticky rice fried in chicken fat and dipped in salty peanuts. It's surprising tasty. The other dishes we tried were the pomelo salad, these little clams cooked in their shells with oil, scallions and dipped in a wasabe soy sauce and finally, some ant lavae hash served on large rice crackers. Insects are a common thing to eat in Vietnam, although they are very seasonal. The ant lavae were probably the easiest dish on the menu to get a hold of, but it's possible to get things as varied as fried grasshoppers or sautéed bees.

Ant Lavae Hash