Eating your way through Hanoi in three days

This is three days of Hanoi eating arranged by meal and by district, written by people who eat here regularly and who send travellers to these streets every week.

How Hanoi eats, and when

The city eats early and it eats in specialist shops. A place that sells bun cha sells bun cha, from eleven until it runs out, and is closed by two. A pho shop opens at six in the morning and the good broth is gone by ten. Nothing here is an all-day menu.

Practical consequence: your eating day starts at six thirty, not nine. If you plan to have breakfast at your hotel and go looking for street food at one in the afternoon, you will miss most of what you came for.

Districts, briefly. Hoan Kiem contains the Old Quarter, the thirty-six trade streets, and most of the famous addresses. Ba Dinh is government Hanoi, quieter, with excellent unshowy local shops. Tay Ho and Truc Bach, around the West Lake, are where the modern Hanoi restaurant scene lives and where the expatriate money eats. Hai Ba Trung, south of the centre, is where you eat if you want almost no other visitors present.

Day one: the Old Quarter, Hoan Kiem

Breakfast, 6.30am. Pho bo. Northern pho is a clear beef broth, flat rice noodles, thin slices of beef, spring onion and nothing else. There is no plate of basil, bean sprouts and lime on the table because in the north there is not supposed to be. Add a little vinegared garlic and chilli sauce from the jar if you want. Order pho bo tai for rare beef, chin for well done, or tai nam for both. Around $2.

Second breakfast, 8am. Banh cuon. Steamed rice sheets rolled around minced pork and wood ear mushroom, made in front of you on a cloth stretched over a pot of boiling water, served with fried shallot and a bowl of thin dipping sauce. This is one of the great Hanoi dishes and it barely exists in the south. Watching it made is half the pleasure.

Coffee, 10am. Egg coffee. Invented in Hanoi in the 1940s when fresh milk was scarce: egg yolk and condensed milk whipped into a thick warm custard over strong coffee. It sounds unpromising and it is very good. Drink it in an upstairs room off Nguyen Huu Huan or Hang Gai, where the cafes are up narrow staircases above shops.

Lunch, 12pm. Bun cha. Hanoi’s own dish and the one to eat first if you eat only one. Grilled pork patties and pork belly, charcoal-blackened, dropped into a warm bowl of diluted fish sauce with pickled green papaya, eaten with cold rice vermicelli and a plate of herbs you add yourself. Order a nem cua be, a fried crab spring roll, alongside. Around $3 to $4.

Afternoon, 4pm. Bia hoi. Fresh draught beer delivered daily, drunk on plastic stools on the pavement, under 50 cents a glass. The Ta Hien corner is the famous one and it is now mostly visitors. Walk ten minutes in any direction and you will find the local version.

Dinner, 7pm. Cha ca. Turmeric and dill marinated fish, finished at your table in a pan of hot oil with a great deal of fresh dill and spring onion, served over rice noodles with peanuts and shrimp paste. It is a single-dish restaurant tradition specific to one street in Hanoi and it exists almost nowhere else in the country. Around $10 to $14 a head.

Day two: Ba Dinh and the West Lake

Breakfast, 7am. Xoi. Sticky rice, sold from a basket, in versions ranging from plain with fried shallot to loaded with chicken, pork floss, sausage and a hard-boiled egg. It is what Hanoi actually eats on a Tuesday and it costs about a dollar.

Mid-morning. Bun rieu. A tomato and freshwater crab noodle soup, sour and light, with a floating raft of crab paste. Northern comfort food, and a very good dish for anyone who finds pho monotonous by day three.

Lunch, 12pm. Bun bo nam bo or pho cuon. Bun bo nam bo is a dry noodle salad with seared beef, peanuts, fried shallot and dressing rather than broth. Pho cuon, from the Truc Bach area, wraps the same pho noodle sheet uncut around beef and herbs. Pho chien phong, the puffed fried version, comes from the same few shops.

Afternoon. Coffee, properly. Vietnam grows robusta, not arabica, which is why the coffee is dark, bitter and high in caffeine and why it is drunk with condensed milk. Order ca phe sua da, iced coffee with condensed milk, which is the national default. Ca phe muoi, salt coffee, came up from Hue and is now everywhere. Coconut coffee is a modern invention and it is genuinely good. A third-wave arabica scene exists in Tay Ho if you want a filter coffee that tastes like one.

Dinner, 7pm. Modern Vietnamese in Tay Ho. Hanoi now has a serious restaurant scene: Vietnamese cooking with technique, sourcing from the northern highlands, at $30 to $60 a head rather than $4. It is worth one evening of three, and our Hanoi office books the tables, because the good rooms seat twenty people and take reservations in Vietnamese.

Day three: the south of the centre, and the market

Early, 6am. A market breakfast. Go with a guide for this one, because the point is to be told what you are looking at. Long Bien market at dawn, when the produce comes in from the provinces, then a bowl of something at a stall inside. This is the morning we build into our food and culture route.

Mid-morning. Banh mi, the northern version. Hanoi banh mi is smaller and plainer than Saigon’s: pate, cha lua sausage, a little cucumber and coriander, chilli, and none of the pickled abundance the south piles in. Both are excellent. They are not the same sandwich.

Lunch. Bun dau mam tom. Fried tofu, rice noodle blocks, boiled pork, herbs and a bowl of fermented shrimp paste whipped with lime and chilli. The shrimp paste is pungent and it divides people entirely. It is also very Hanoi and you should try it once, with the caveat that if strong fermented flavours are not for you, ask for the sauce on the side.

Afternoon. Che. Sweet soups of beans, jelly, coconut milk and crushed ice, eaten in the heat. Very cheap and very good.

Dinner. Lau or a cooking class. Northern hotpot in winter, or the cooking session we build into most Hanoi stays, which starts at a market and ends with you making bun cha over charcoal.

What Hanoi does that Saigon does not

• Bun cha. Southern versions exist and are not the same thing.
• Cha ca. Effectively a Hanoi dish.
• Banh cuon made to order on a steamer cloth.
• Bun dau mam tom in its full fermented form.
• Egg coffee.
• Pho without the herb plate. The absence is the point.
• Bia hoi as a daily institution.
• Real cold-weather cooking in January, which the south has no use for.

The reverse is also true, and worth saying: com tam, hu tieu, banh xeo at proper size, and the fruit are all better in the south. Travelling the length of the country is a food argument as much as a scenery one.

Street food safety, honestly

Most advice on this subject is either fear or bravado. Here is the practical version.

The busy stall is the safe stall. High turnover means the ingredients have not been sitting. A stall with a queue of local office workers at noon is a better bet than an empty restaurant with an English menu.

Watch it cooked. Anything that comes out of boiling broth or off a charcoal grill in front of you is very low risk. Pho, bun cha, banh cuon and xoi are all cooked to order.

The realistic risks are the raw plate and the ice, not the meat. Fresh herbs are washed in tap water. In busy central places this is routine and fine. At a roadside stall in a rural province we would be more careful. Ice in established restaurants and cafes is made industrially and is fine; we would skip ice from a bucket at an unattended stall.

Give your stomach two days. Most travellers who have trouble had it on day one after arriving jet-lagged, dehydrated and eating four unfamiliar meals. Build up.

Do not drink the tap water. Bottled or filtered only, including for teeth.

Tell us about allergies before you fly, not at the table. Fish sauce, shrimp paste and peanuts are in a very large proportion of northern cooking, and strict vegetarian is harder here than it looks. Our Hanoi office briefs restaurants in Vietnamese in advance, which works far better than a card handed over at the door.

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