Vietnamese street food: a ramble round Hoi An
To sample some of Vietnam’s best street food, follow the locals rather than the tourists.
Named for Vietnam’s ubiquitous dish of water spinach and garlic, Morning Glory in Hoi An’s ancient town regularly packs them in. One of local restaurateur Trinh Diem Vy’s four local eateries (Ms Vy, as she is known, also runs Melbourne’s House of Hoi An) the place churns out street food-style dishes in the hundreds for the never-ebbing flow of Western tourists that, tipped off by TripAdvisor or Lonely Planet, find their way here each day.
It’s good food, too, lovingly prepared, served in a setting of nice tablecloths and fine glassware unlikely to take anyone too far outside their comfort zone.
But this evening we’re after something a little grittier, comfort food, if you like, without the comfort: the sort of street food that you actually eat on the street, whether on the plastic kindergarten stools that are everywhere in Vietnam, or perhaps on foot, on your way to the next place. While most visitors to Hoi An, a wonderfully preserved 16th-century trading port on the banks of the Thu Bon river, flock to the genteel, lantern-lit streets of the old port, with its tailor shops and leather outlets, and ceaseless muzak from the public address system, we’re sticking to the periphery instead, in search of local favourites.
In the case of our first stop, White Rose Restaurant, it’s more than a favourite: it’s an institution. The banh bao, or white rose dumplings, that this place produces — at a rate of 6000 a day — are made here and only here, according to a century-old family recipe, and are then dispatched every morning to countless restaurants around town, including Ms Vy’s.
We arrive to find a gaggle of women sitting around large balls of rice flour dough, sourced from the Mekong Delta in the south, and even larger bowls of shrimp paste, smoothing out chunks of the former with their fingertips before applying a dollop of the latter and doing the whole thing up to resemble the flower that gives the dumplings their name. The results are then steamed, sprinkled with shallots and served with a dipping sauce that varies between resellers. It goes without saying that they’re better here than anywhere else I’ve had them.
Falling roughly halfway between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Hoi An is the perfect city to experience the full range of Vietnamese cuisine and its influences. This is where the Chinese flavours of the north (Tran Tuan Ngai, the custodian of the White Rose, is of Chinese descent) meet the Cambodian of the south. The French colonial influence on both regions is also readily apparent, most notably in the form of banh mi, the famous baguette, made in a neat and necessary local twist, not with wheat flour but with rice flour.
Our movable feast continues with a bit of comparative gastronomy: two banh mi places, more or less back to back.
The first — which I prefer as much for its story as for its sandwiches — belongs to the “banh mi queen of Hoi An”, Madam Khan, the nom de guerre of Nguyen Thi Loc, an octogenarian master of the form who, even after 30 years at her present address and more than 50 selling street food, still oversees every sandwich going out over the counter to her customers. There’s no menu here and no need for one. Her single offering — banh mi stuffed with barbecued pork, pate, sausage, fried egg, pickles, papaya, carrots, parsley, chilli sauce, soy sauce and her own secret sauce — is widely considered the best in the country.
The second place, Tiem Banh Mi Phuong, has something of the fast-food production line about it — not to mention a certain mystery quality to the meat in its sandwiches — and to my mind lacks the magic and history of Madam Khan’s. I’m in a minority here, though: Anthony Bourdain once featured the place on No Reservations and described its most elaborate offering as “a symphony in a sandwich”. (Don’t be surprised to find a branch of the stall at his upcoming vast Manhattan food market.
In between these two places, on the cusp of sunset, we stop at a peppering of plastic chairs in the middle of the footpath where a killer mi quang is sometimes available. I say sometimes because, when the large metal pots of turmeric-tinted noodles and broth run out, when there’s no more pork and shrimp and only the hundreds of optional condiments seemingly remain, the place disappears into the ether for the night. A lot of the best street food is available only at such places, which back home we’d describe as pop-up restaurants but which here are par for the course.
By the time we get to our last stop, our enthusiasm hasn’t really waned but our appetites have been more than sated. We’ve tucked into Com Ga Ba Buoi’s variations on theme of chicken rice — probably the least interesting offering of the evening — and Ba Le Well Restaurant’s set menu. The latter really could have sufficed as a food tour: river shrimp, pork skewers and spring rolls — which we wrap in rice paper and down in satay sauce-slathered mouthfuls — as well as banh xeo, or rice-batter pancakes, stuffed with pork, shrimp and bean sprouts, keep coming until we have to plead for it to stop. The amount of food we leave uneaten here is more than a little guilt-inducing.
By now the thought of another bowl of noodles is a bit much, even if the cau lau our unofficial tour guide has planned for us is one of her favourite dishes. There can be too much of a good thing, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what’s available here.
There are countless food tours on offer in Hoi An, offered by hostels, guesthouses and restaurants, and hundreds of cooking classes. Ms Vy herself offers a kind of one-stop, sit-down tour in the guise of her Marketplace Restaurant, across the river from Morning Glory, where her signature dish of squid stuffed with pork mince is one of many local dishes on offer.
But you don’t have to travel to Vietnam to try that one — only as far as the Melbourne branch of Ms Vy’s empire, where (the food editor says) the pork-stuffed squid is the best dish on the generally fabulous menu.
Yet an unofficial tour such as this evening’s — organised by Raechel Temily, ostensibly our PR minder on this tour, though also a street food tragic with countless articles about footpath dining to her name — is arguably preferable.
In any case, it is easily replicated. Follow the locals rather than the tourists. Get off the well-lit streets of the Ancient Town and explore dingier alleyways. Learn to stop worrying and love the unknown. And observe but modify that age-old rule of the restaurant: never fill up too early on banh mi.
In Hoi An Matthew Clayfield was a guest of Intercontinental Da Nang
AN UNOFFICIAL HOI AN STREET FOOD TOUR
White Rose Restaurant
533 Hai Ba Trung Street
Signature dish: Banh bao (white rose dumplings)
Madam Khan, The Banh Mi Queen
115 Tran Cao Van Street
Signature dish: Banh mi
Tiem Banh Mi Phuong
2B Phan Chau Trinh Street
Signature dish: Banh mi
Com Ga Ba Buoi
22 Phan Chu Trinh Street
Signature dish: Chicken rice
Quan Tuan
Somewhere on Nguyen Hue Street
Signature dish: Mi quang (noodles)
Ba Le Well Restaurant
45/51 Tran Hung Dao (turn right at the first set of lights after Le Loi and go down the alley)
Fixed menu
Ty Cau Lau
Corner of a lane off Phan
Chu Trinh St, one block west
of Le Loi
Signature dish: Cau lau (noodles)