I mentioned in my earlier post about our time in Hue that the food we experienced in Vietnam was unique and wonderful but that I had been doing a terrible job documenting it.  With that in mind, I made a more conscious effort to document what we ate when we returned to Hanoi from Halong bay.

When we got back Varshan left to go on a two day motorcycle ride, leaving me, Dan and Megan to really dig into the Hanoi food scene.  We started with a cooking class. The class itself was fine, if not amazing, but it did start with a tour of Hanoi’s food market.

You may have noticed by now: Dan and I really like the markets here.  Just wandering through them, trying to guess what things are, watching the locals haggle and trade and trying to absorb all of the sites and smells can provide us with hours of entertainment.

The Hanoi market is not contained in any structure but just spills into a little maze of alleyways in a corner of the Old Quarter.  It was great exploring it with our cooking teacher, who explained what some of the stranger things were and bought us a few snacks to sample.

The next day we continued with the food theme and scheduled ourselves a street food tour of Hanoi. Having been in Vietnam for almost a month at this point, Dan and I figured we would have eaten most of the food highlighted on the tour but we were still excited to have a local show us around.

Our guide, Rocky, started out with banh xeo, a crispy rice flour pancake stuffed with pork, beansprouts and shrimp.  You eat it by wrapping a piece in rice paper along with some greens and dipping it in fish sauce.

Dan and I first discovered this treat at a street stall back in Ho Chi Minh City when we were waiting to get on the overnight train to Danang and needed a quick dinner.  We had no idea what it was at the time or how to eat it but the stall was busy and the food smelled good so we pointed and smiled and ended up with a delicious meal.  That banh xeo didn’t come with rice paper, just a big pile of rice paper to wrap it in, making it pretty messy  and difficult to eat from a 12 inch stool on the sidewalk.

Next we continued down the street to get some sticky rice or xoi.  Xoi in Hanoi is not just a bowl of sticky rice; it is a full meal served with your choice of a variety of meat and egg toppings. We had had a couple of servings of xoi already (Dan LOVES rice) but we were not prepared for the deliciousness we were about to experience.

We ducked in to a little restaurant called Xoi Cat Lam. This sticky rice was topped with a rich, sticky yellow substance, similar in texture to refried beans, and crispy fried shallots.  Our guide explained that the topping was cooked mung beans.  I always laugh at Dan for his ability to eat so much rice but this I could have eaten all day.  Even writing this now and seeing the pictures, weeks later, makes me crave it.  The rice was the perfect mix of textures and saltiness, and that was before adding the grilled pork which was awesome in it’s own right.

From there we moved on to get some banh cuon.  For those of you following along on Instagram you might remember that banh cuon was the first thing Dan and I ate in Vietnam when we were hungry and jet lagged and had no idea what we were ordering.

Here you can see the rice flour pancakes being made.  Batter is scooped from the tub of white liquid and smoothed onto the big round skillets to cook until the pancake is scooped up and stuffed with pork and mushrooms.

The tour ended with egg coffees at Cafe Giang, the place that invented this iconic Hanoi treat.  When people hear the term ‘egg coffee’ they often look a little dubious but it isn’t as if they just drop a raw, or even a cooked, egg in your coffee.  Instead it is coffee topped with a thick, creamy, sweet egg custard which you stir in, basically creating a richer latte.  We had already been the Cafe Giang for morning coffees so we opted to get the version with rum for our evening food tour.  Both were fantastic.

The next day was our last in Hanoi and there were a few things we still needed to try.  One was a bun cha restaurant that Rocky had recommended to us the night before, Bun Cha 74.  Bun cha is a rice noodle soup with meatballs and grilled pork.  The restaurant we were looking for was down a narrow alley, about wide enough for a motorbike to ride down.  No, down an alley isn’t quite right, it was in the alley.  As in, they were cooking the food on the side of the alley and a little further down was a line of little tables where they were serving it up.

Despite (or maybe partly because of?) the gritty surroundings the food itself was out of this world good.  The meat is served in salty, slightly sour broth which you then dip noodles and vegetables in as you eat it.

Our entire trip to Vietnam was a wonderful culinary adventure.  I have never traveled anywhere else where I have gotten to consistently try and love foods that I never even knew existed.  Back in the States my knowledge of Vietnamese food pretty much began and ended with pho and banh mi sandwiches. I would never have listed Vietnamese as one of my favorite cuisines.

But in Vietnam there are so many amazing dishes that I have never seen on an American menu, not even in San Francisco.  Dan and I have talked a lot about the special moment when you eat something new and amazing for the first time and how you can never really recreate it, even if you order the same thing again.  I feel so lucky to have gotten to have moments like this constantly as we moved through Vietnam.  I miss the food there already but I’m excited to look harder for some of these dishes when we get home.