Bia Hoi- Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

Where in the world can you get a glass of cold, freshly brewed beer for less than 20 cents? In Hanoi apparently, and Jung and I didn’t get to try it till our very last day. Had we discovered this any earlier though, I might have had to peel Jung off from the little blue table every night so maybe it was a good thing. =)

Jung, the resident beer guru, told me that Vietnamese fresh beer was introduced by the French in the late 19th century and was quite expensive so not many Vietnamese people were able to drink it. However, after the French left, the Vietnamese people took over the brewery and ended up producing instant draught beer, known as bia hoi (fresh beer) and made it pretty cheap. It's now enjoyed by locals and visitors alike.

Bia hoi is made daily and distributed by kegs to thousands of bia hoi establishments in Hanoi, like the one we went to above. You will see the kegs stacked up inside in the picture of the bia hoi store. It doesn't have any added preservatives in it so it’s best to drink it when it's fresh, which means early in the day. We didn’t get to it until night time, but it was still very light, frothy and quite refreshing. We were on the look out for bia hoi’s during the whole trip, but most places served only bottled beer. We came across this bia hoi while roaming around the northern part of the Old Quarter on our very last night. The intersection of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen Streets in the bustling Old Quarter is supposed to be known for its “bia hoi corner,” but the one we ended up going to was more up north, near Nguyen Sieu and Dao Duy Tu Street.

Drinking bia hoi is the quintessential Hanoi experience. Time almost seems to stand still when you are sitting outside, watching a sea of motorcycles whiz by you. I’m glad we finally got to experience it before we left and it was a perfect nightcap to our awesome trip. Jung - we gotta do it again sometime.

Banh Cuon Gia Truyen - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

Eating banh cuon (thin rice crepes filled with ground pork and woodear mushrooms) for breakfast is quite popular in Vietnam. We didn't get to this place till quite late in the day, but we were glad to see that they were still open and serving up these tasty treats.

Here's a good recipe for one if you are interested in trying this task at home. A screen of cloth that is used to mold the rice crepes is fitted over the opening of a pot of boiling water. The blue round thing in the picture is the screen where the batter is poured. The crepe batter is lightly spread on the screen and covered with a lid. After a few minutes, a bamboo stick is used to strip the thin crepe off the screen. I was amazed by how fast she was able to make these crepes. I tried to take a picture, but she was too quick.

The crepe is very thin, light and a bit sticky. While it's hot, it's stuffed with chopped up pieces of pork and mushrooms, rolled up and sprinkled with fried shallots and cilantro. You use the fish sauce as dipping sauce. It's a wonderfully light meal, perfect for breakfast, or in our case, a late night snack.

Banh Cuon Gia Truyen

14 Hang Ga Street

Xoi Yen - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

Xoi Yen on Nguyen Huu Huan Street is easy to spot amid the numerous xoi eateries on the same street because it's the one on the corner with all the people sitting out in front. While the place itself has a steady stream of customers who sit down to enjoy this meal, we saw several people stop by to take their orders to go.

Xoi Xeo is yellow sticky rice served with slivers of mung bean paste, fried shallots and your choice of meat. The lady sits on a chair, where she has easy access to the sticky rice in a woven basket next to her, choice of meats laid out on a table and a bowl full of what looked like peeled mangoes.

The yellow mango look-a-like is actually mung bean paste. One of the ladies shaves the mung bean paste with her knife like it's a block of cheese. In your bowl, it ends up looking like thin slivers of Parmesan cheese.

To this you add your topping of chicken (thit ga), sausage (gio), chopped meat in spicy sauce (pate), whole egg (trung), fried over hard egg (op la) or chunks of slow-cooked pork (thit kho tau), among other options. There is no menu per se, so we tried to ask the guy which one was the best and he said to try the chicken and pork together. Here is a blurry picture of the masterpiece.

We ordered one to share. It came with a small bowl of spicy cucumber salad.

We liked the pork way more than the chicken. The chicken was alright, but the pork was really well flavored and it went well with the more mellow flavors of the sticky rice and mung bean paste. Vinegary cucumbers were the perfect crunchy condiment to eat this with. This turned out to be one of my favorite dishes in Hanoi.

Xoi Yen

35b Nguyen Huu Huan Street

Cha Ca Thang Long - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

All the guidebooks will lead you to Cha Ca La Vong for cha ca (grilled fish), but some bloggers vouch for Cha Ca Thang Long for this Hanoi favorite. I tend to think bloggers have more up-to-date info, so we opted for Cha Ca Thang Long.

It's a bit expensive compared to all the other types of street food we had, this was in an actual sit down restaurant and for one order, it was 80,000 dong. I forgot to mention this to Jung so when he got the bill, he was shocked himself. He was probably thinking, what! it's not the usual $2 or less for our meal?

Cha ca involves hearty chunks of boneless white fish marinated in turmeric that is cooked table side, with lots of dill and green onions. Once the pan with the fish and oil gets hot, the waitress dumps the huge plate of dill and green onions into the pot.

She swirls it around for the greens to wilt a bit in the fish and oil and then you are free to dig in.

It is served with a plate of cooked bun (rice noodles), roasted peanuts, sliced chili peppers, slivered green onions, fresh herbs and fish sauce.

In your spare bowl, you add some bun and greens. Next, you scoop out the fish and wilted greens into your bowl of noodles and let the bun absorb the juices from the cha ca. Sprinkle on some roasted peanuts and add some more fish sauce. Mix together and eat.

I was a bit weary of the whole thing at first because I'm not a huge fan of dill, but again the flavors and herbs and greens in this dish work. Honestly, the fish itself was not as tasty as the grilled pork or chicken that we would get from the streets, but you can't go wrong with fresh herbs, greens and fish sauce. It's a flavor explosion in your mouth. It was good, and it was something new and different. We ordered one order here as well. Unlike some of the other eateries, they do not have large portions. The serving of fish was quite minuscule, but you do get a lot of bun and greens to make up for it. I think it suited us perfectly fine to just share one order to get a taste of it, and save our appetite for other good eats nearby.

Cha Ca Thang Long

31 Pho D Thanh

Bun Cha Dac Kim - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

We actually tried coming here for dinner one night but they were closed. We made sure that we didn't miss eating bun cha (rice vermicelli with grilled meats) on our last day, so we came here for lunch the following day.

This store has several floors but on the main level is where the action takes place. One lady is in charge of frying the nem cua be (fried crab and pork spring rolls). We found space on a table on the first floor, so we squished together next to our neighbors and placed our order.

We were warned that the portions here were quite large and that two people could share an order of bun cha and an order of spring rolls so that's what we did. It ended up being a lot of food.

A bowl of grilled marinated pork and grilled ground pork meatballs in broth arrived. I loved that there were different types of grilled meats in this dish. The pork meatballs were juicy and delicious and the grilled, marinated pork was really tender as well. I couldn't quite tell what the broth was, it looked like it was the fish sauce dipping sauce we also received, but it looked darker, perhaps from the juices from the meat.

We also got an order of nem cua be, fried spring rolls. While the grilled pork provided a soft, tender texture to the dish, these spring rolls provided the crunch and crispiness. They were flaky and hot when they arrived and were packed with crab and pork pieces. I usually am not a big fan of spring rolls because it tends to be quite oily, but this was light and crispy and didn't taste fried at all. Plus, the airy filling inside made it all the more tasty.

Jung and I were amazed by the plate of fresh lettuce and herbs that we were served. We both remarked that buying herbs in the states can be so expensive, yet here they are so abundant and so cheap. They just refill the plates of veggies and herbs for you. We probably would have paid $10 for a tiny salad of these herbs in the states. So as you can imagine, we went crazy with the lettuce and herbs.

Along with the veggies, we were served nuoc mam pha, a mild fish sauce based dipping sauce with slices of a pale hard vegetable. I could not for the life of me, figure out what it was. It wasn't quite as hard as daikon, so maybe a green papaya?

To the nuoc mam pha, we added spoonfuls of the minced garlic and sliced chilies. Jung accidentally ate a chili and suffered dearly, so we quickly learned, it was better to put the chilies in the fish sauce, let it build up some heat and use the flavored fish sauce as the garnish. That way, you don't run into any problems of accidentally eating a raw chili.

You layer all the different ingredients together in this dish. You start with some bun (cooked vermicelli), spoon on some grilled meats or the spring roll, add some herbs and lettuce and douse on some of the flavored fish sauce with the papaya. Let the bun soak up the juices and dig in. Jung and I really enjoyed this dish. Even though we ordered one order of each, it was a feast. There was so much flavor and texture combinations from the soft meatballs to the pillowy and crispy spring rolls to the fresh flavors of the herbs. Now, if I could only find a place like this in LA somewhere ...

Bun Cha Dac Kim

1 Hang Manh Street

Pho Bo Duc Khoi - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

Jung and I wholeheartedly loved the pho at Pho Gia Thuyen and had we stayed longer, we would have probably eaten there every day. We were tempted to go back, but I had also written down several other recommendations for pho, so we thought we'd try another place just for comparison sake.

We wanted to stick to traditional northern style pho, which is more beefy and simpler in terms of garnishes than the pho we get in the states. We walked along Phung Hung Street until we found Pho Bo Duc Khoi.

There is a husband-wife team that mans the kitchen at the front of the store. We went inside and sat down at an empty table. We ordered two bowls of pho bo.

This had a clearer broth than Pho Gia Thuyen, but still had a strong beefy flavor. This had thinner slices of beef and had chopped green onion and cilantro as garnish. Again, no siracha or hoisin sauce, which I learned is reserved for southern style pho.

A splash of lime was all that it needed. This had a hefty serving of wide rice noodles and Jung and I were stuffed after finishing it. This was a perfectly good bowl of pho bo, but if I had to chose between this one or the pho at Pho Gia Thuyen, I'd pick the latter.

Pho Bo Duc Khoi

77 Phung Hung Street

Dong Thinh - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

Mien Xao Luon was one of Gastronomy's Top 10 foods in Hanoi to try, so even though we were uncomfortably full, we had to try it. It was the last meal of the day after a nonstop biking/eating extravaganza. No matter how good you are, you just don't get the same treatment as a dish that is consumed earlier in the day and also in hunger.

So Jung and I came here even though we were so full, because it happened to be nearby and we figured, we might as well try it now or else we might not get a chance to eat it. We had hoped that this would be pretty far from where the crab noodle soup place was so we could walk off our prior meal, but it ended up being only a few minutes away.

This is the front of the store, where those crispy eels were being fried.

The Mien Xao Luon was 30,000, about $1.50 a plate.

We were both so full and tired from roaming around the city all day. I think we both assumed we'd each have a bite or two, be satisfied that we tried it and just go back to the hotel. That plan got tossed out of the window once the dish arrived. Jung and I ended up finishing it. We squished away every ounce of self control and drowned out all sensory cues telling us to stop eating. What can we say, it was surprisingly really good.

It kind of reminded me of Korean japchae because of the glass noodles, but the similarities stop there. This dish had bean sprouts, egg, strips of fried eel, fried shallots, fresh cucumber, cilantro and purple perilla leaves. If I recall, I think you pour on some fish sauce and mix it together.

There is something so tasty about the different textures and flavors in this dish. Crispy eel and crunchy cucumbers with soft glass noodles and eggs. The fresh perilla leaves, cilantro and fried shallots were a great compliment to the dish as well. It also came with a small bowl of hot, clear soup. It's definitely something you should try in Hanoi.

Dong Thinh

87 Hang Dieu Street

Trung Gia - Hanoi, Vietnam (Old Quarter)

Next on our list was to try bun rieu nam bo, which is a Hanoi crab noodle soup. It’s usually served with tomatoes, cilantro, vermicelli noodles and fried pieces of tofu. We walked around Old Quarter at night for dinner and decided to try the intersection of Hang Bong and Phu Doan for a bowl of bun rieu nam bo. I had written down that we would find a vendor on the southwest corner of Hang Bong and Phu Doan, but there were no giant pots of reddish crab soup anywhere in sight. We looked across the street and saw Trung Gia.

He ushered us to sit down and gave us a plate of lettuce and bean sprouts and also some fried dough.

Jung and I really liked the flavor of the soup. It had a nice tang from the tomato and strong seafoody taste from the crab paste. The noodles, however, were a bit too overcooked for our liking. We really enjoyed eating the pieces of fried tofu, vegetables and fish cakes and eating it with the soup. I think I would have liked this dish a lot had I not been so full and had I tried it a couple more times. Since it was my first time ever trying this dish, I thought it was interesting, but it didn’t blow me away, like some of the other dishes we had.

Trung Gia

1 Phu Doan (southeast corner of Phu Doan and Hang Bong)

Banh Xeo Chinh Tham - Hanoi, Vietnam (Dong Da District)

Banh Xeo is a Southern speciality and not as common in Hanoi, but I got a good recommendation for one so, of course Jung and I went. We had a difficult time finding this place and we were about to just give up, but just when we were about to call it quits, we found it. The address I wrote down said 117 Thai Ha, but it seemed like it skipped over a chunk of numbers. We completely missed this sign tucked away next to the side of the building, pointing to the side street.

So beware, it's not quite on Thai Ha street, you have to go down the side street and you'll see it on your right hand side. If I recall, the white sign was in front of a car body shop.

We walked inside this large indoor space. We pointed to what everyone else was eating and she quickly brought over a plate of rice paper cut in half and a mound of lettuce, mint, cilantro and bean sprouts. Typically in the south, you get a mountain of mustard leaves, lettuce and herbs to wrap the banh xeo in, but here, the lettuce was chopped, so I presume the rice paper serves as the wrapping mechanism.

Soon thereafter these fried rice flour pancakes filled with bean sprouts, grilled pork and shrimp arrived.

It's crunchy and crispy on the outside and inside, it's stuffed with grilled pork, shrimp and bean sprouts. Yummy!

Here's me demonstrating the task at hand. You take a piece of rice paper, add a layer of lettuce and various herbs, then add a piece of the pancake, try your best to roll it up, dip it in the nuoc mam pha (Vietnamese fish sauce) and devour.

I'm sure eating the pancakes alone would have been good as is, but eating them with fresh lettuce and herbs makes it all the more tasty. I wish I had taken a close up of the herbs because there were so many herbs I've never seen before. Some were peppery, others minty, and together with the fish sauce, they helped balance out the slight greasiness of the pancakes. Even though we were eating fried pancakes, it didn't feel heavy at all because you end up eating a mountain of fresh lettuce and herbs with it.

I guess you are supposed to let the rice paper soak up the fish sauce and soften a bit before you eat it, although I couldn't resist eating it right away. It gets a bit messy, but it's well worth the effort ... even the getting lost part.

Banh Xeo Chinh Tham
117 Thai Ha

Cafe Mai - Hanoi, Vietnam (near Thien Quang Lake)

Jung loves his coffee, so we tried to get Vietnamese coffee as often as we could. Vietnamese coffee is supposed to be quite good, so although I'm not a big coffee drinker, I indulged here and there. We stopped here on our way back to the Old Quarter. Cafe Mai is on the Northeast corner of Thien Quang Lake where Nguyen Du Street becomes Le Van Huu Street. I think this cafe had several floors, although we got seated on the first floor so we didn't venture upstairs. To the side of the cafe, they seemed to be selling coffee by the pound. We saw a lady grind the beans and package it up for the steady stream of customers that were on hand.

I ordered a ca phe sua da or iced coffee with milk. And by milk, we mean the thick, syrupy condensed version. There is no non-fat milk to be had here. The guidebooks suggest not getting anything with ice because you shouldn't drink tap water in Hanoi, but I was hot and I justified my decision by saying I'd drink the coffee really fast. Turns out I had nothing to worry about, because it came out like this.

What is my hot cup of coffee sitting in, you ask? A bowl of ice water. It's an interesting way to solve this dilemma. I wish it actually worked, but it didn't. I ended up drinking a cup of hot coffee that kept dripping water on me. I appreciated the effort though. =)

Here's Jung's ca phe sua nong (hot coffee with milk). The metal contraption reminds me of a mini French press. It contains hot water with very fine coffee grounds and a plunger that slowly ... very slowly nudges the water through the grounds and through the tiny holes in the bottom to your coffee cup below. They take their pretty time to drip. We were in no rush, so we sat outside and admired the view that we've become quite accustomed to on this trip, watching traffic go by. It really is a great source of entertainment and fascination. I think we could have sat there for hours.

The coffee here tasted like a cafe mocha. I've ordered coffee with condensed milk multiple times at multiple places, but every cup ended up tasting chocolaty to me. I kept wanting to ask them if they added chocolate, but of course, my limited vocabulary of mot (one), cam on (thank you), xin chao (hello) and nha ve shinh o dau (where is the bathroom) did not give me the luxury to ask such complicated questions.

Jung would get coffee far more often than I did and sometimes he'd get a cup that didn't taste so chocolaty ... and I'd get jealous. So all in all, Vietnamese coffee was a hit or miss for me, but I did like the leisure and rest it provided during the day. I always looked forward to sitting down with a cup of coffee and just soaking it all in.

For those who are really into coffee, you should definitely try the ca phe chon aka weasel coffee. Apparently, coffee growers pick the ripest and sweetest coffee beans and feed them to weasels. The beans somehow pass through the weasel's system undigested. The coffee beans are then collected, washed, ground and brewed. This whole process somehow strips the bean of bitterness, resulting in a superior aroma and a very smooth taste once brewed.

There are a lot of shops that sell coffee beans in huge plastic jars on display (don't you love the weasel cutouts?) and we went into one to inquire about weasel coffee. The lady told us there was a range of weasel coffee, with the more purest form being about $20 for a small size pack of beans. She gave us a sample too. It did taste pretty smooth. We were tempted to buy some, but we weren't sure whether it was the real thing or not, so we passed.

Café Mai

79 Le Van Huu Street

Nam Do Bakery and Banh My Ilu - Hanoi, Vietnam

I think I discovered banh mi sandwiches pretty late in life, but I've been trying my best to make up for lost time by eating them every chance I get. I remember trying my first banh mi sandwich and being amazed by how the oddly juxtaposed ingredients and flavors could be so good. Hot and cold, sweet and acidic, crunchy and soft, cooked and raw, buttery and zesty. So many contradiction, yet it makes perfect sense when I'm eating it.

The sandwich's humble beginning stem from French colonialism, resulting in a melange of French ingredients, the baguette, pate and mayo with fresh and local Vietnamese ingredients like chili peppers, fish sauce, cilantro and mint. I personally like mine with barbecued pork and lots of pickled daikon and carrots, cilantro and jalapenos for that extra crunch and heat.

Jung and I were really excited to try banh mi in Hanoi. We already love to eat banh mi's in the states, so the banh mi's in Hanoi had to be amazing, right? What we found however was that typical banh mi (note, it's spelled banh my in Hanoi) is a fried egg or pâté sandwich with a few slices of cucumber, tomato and a light smearing of chili sauce that you get along the streets, like below.

We saw this street vendor near our hotel so we stopped by to get a sandwich and see what it was like.

We didn't get to see her make the sandwich because the stove was at the back of the store, but once Jung opened it up for me to take a picture, we noticed that it had some brownish sauce (maybe Maggi sauce), cucumbers, tomatoes and an egg omelet. The bread looked enormous at first, but it's quite airy so once you hold the sandwich down and take a bite, the insides deflate pretty quickly. It was good, but it was not what we were expecting at all. I thought it would have the crunch of a French baguette, but it was a lot more chewy, more like a roll than a baguette.

My guess is that the banh mys that we have in the states have morphed to adapt to more Western tastes, but this is the traditional way it's eaten in Hanoi. It could be totally different in other parts of Vietnam. It's probably really different in Saigon.

I thought it was weird that while I was doing my research on places to eat, I didn't see much on good eateries for banh my. But I did see banh my doner kebabs being mentioned a fair amount. It's just what the name implies, a banh my and a doner kebab that procreated. The sandwich uses doner kebab, the Turkish shaved pork, along with some other vegetables and chili and tzatziki sauce.

We read that Banh My Ilu was one such place serving up these tasty sandwiches. So Jung and I came here for our afternoon snack, part deux. The shop is painted in a cheery bubblegum pink color, it's hard to miss.

We came here after roaming around the city, so around mid-afternoon. We wanted to get two banh my doner kebabs but they ran out of bread or something so they only had enough for one sandwich. We ended up sharing a sandwich, which turned out for the best, because we didn't love it all that much.

It was interesting, but this too didn't have pickled vegetables, rather had lettuce, tomato and cucumbers, chili peppers and cilantro in it. The NYT article mentioned two other eateries for banh my doner kebabs and perhaps those might have been better picks. We didn't have time to investigate and weren't all that impressed by banh my sandwiches to divert our attention away from the other foods we wanted to try. We chose this one because it happened to be along our route for our next eatery. hehe.

Try Banh My Van (306 Ba Trieu Street) and Cafe Goethe (58 Nguyen Thai Hoc Street) for the banh my doner kebabs and let me know what you think.

Nam Do Bakery

71 Hang Bac (in Old Quarter)

Shop Ilu

178 Kim Ma Street (this is west of Old Quarter)