Our Best Eats - Vietnam

I was introduced to Vietnamese food a few months before setting out on this trip by one of my best friends, who took me to a great restaurant called Song Que on Kingsland Road in east London. I had no idea what to expect, but the food was amazing – lots of really fresh flavours, and DIY dishes where you put together elements of your meal based on how sweet/savoury/spicy/tangy/herby you prefer. I dragged Karl there a few weeks later and, as you can imagine, we soon became very excited about the prospect of eating our way through Vietnam on our trip.

Well, we've now had a chance to sample a month's worth of food in Vietnam, so without further ado here's a round up of our favourite dishes:


Noodle soup – there's a huge variety of noodle soups in Vietnam, and all the ones we tried were fantastic. One of our favourites was in Dalat. I have no idea what it was called, but it had thin slices of pork, little crunchy pieces of pork crackling, pork wonton dumplings, vegetables and noodles. Mmm pork pork pork. Hey, who you calling porky?

Pho – possibly one of Vietnam's most well known dishes, Pho is another noodle soup, this time made with a meaty broth, thin slices of pork, beef or chicken and rice noodles. It often comes with a plate of bean sprouts, chillis, lime and herbs (coriander, Vietnamese basil etc) which can all be added to taste, along with fish sauce if you fancy it.

Pho!

DIY BBQ – Basically, you choose from a selection of meat and seafood, which comes marinated in spices along with a miniature barbeque on which you cook your own dinner! Whatever you choose comes with a portion of lightly salted and spiced okra, which is really good when slightly barbequed. Some people might not be in favour of cooking your own dinner when you're supposed to be eating out, but it was fun and tasty so I have no complaints!

Me looking rather shiny faced with our DIY BBQ

Bahn Xeo – they say it's a pancake but essentially it's a really thin omelette filled with pork, seafood and beansprouts. It's delicious eaten on its own with the small accompanying salad of fresh herbs and a sweet & spicy dipping sauce, but it sometimes also comes with little rice pancakes so that you construct your own wraps which is equally nice.

Baguettes – we had a lot of baguettes in Vietnam. No matter where you are, you're probably not far from a baguette vendor. They can be made with anything from pork meat or omelette to Laughing Cow cheese, and they usually come with cucumber, herbs and chilli sauce. They make a good, cheap breakfast or lunch, but by far the best baguette we had was on the way home after a night out in Can Tho. It had pate, pork meat, chillies, herbs, cucumber, soy sauce and chilli sauce and it was mmmm mmmmm tasty.

Baguette ingredients

Vietnamese iced coffee – unfortunately we didn't discover this treat until the last week of our stay, but I think Vietnam does one of the best iced coffees we've ever had, and like no other iced coffee I've ever had. It's a really strong shot of Vietnamese coffee, mixed well with about an inch of condensed milk and loads of crushed ice. The condensed milk makes it taste almost chocolatey, while the ice makes it quite refreshing to drink - it's actually very moreish. Karl loved them and managed two or three a day, so as an early birthday present I got him a little Vietnamese drip coffee device. I think we'll definitely be having a go at recreating these once we're back home!

Vietnamese coffee - it's even darker than me!

Pork and rice – this is a pretty simple dish that we had in various different forms, whether the pork was grilled, barbequed or braised. I don't know what flavourings or spices they use, but the pork is always absolutely delicious. The dish often comes with some kind of fish sauce to pour over the rice, some fresh cucumber and a little bowl of clear chicken broth. The best versions we had were usually at food stops on long bus journeys.

Pork and rice at a market in Saigon

Grilled chicken and rice – this is a meal we had at a food stop on a bus journey from Hoi An to Nha Trang. It was 10pm, I hadn't eaten anything since lunch and I'd spent the past hour of the journey too hungry to sleep, day dreaming about my favourite foods. The chicken had been marinated in chilli, tumeric and garlic before being grilled, and it was served with some stir fried greens and a little bowl of soup. It was like the best thing I'd ever eaten.

Strawberry shake – Fruit shakes are pretty common throughout south east Asia, especially in tourist hotspots. Dalat is well known for growing strawberries so it only made sense to try out a strawberry shake when we visited the market. It was essentially fresh strawberries blended up with crushed ice, but it was easily the best shake we've had on this trip so far.

Strawberry wine – another one from Dalat. It tastes more like some sort of liqueur than wine. If you've ever had plum wine, it's similar in taste but, well, strawberry flavoured. I like.

Artichoke tea – the last in my list of Dalat drinks! Dalat's also a big producer of artichokes, and this apparently is a popular drink in the area. It's blended with sweet herbs (I don't know what exactly) so it has a slight caramel aftertaste. We had it after a cable car ride through the hills, and it's pretty good.

Drinking artichoke tea in the hills. Yes yes, I'm short, he's tall, get over it...

Mangosteen and Rambutan – two fruits we've tasted for the first time. Mangosteen has a deep purple, soft outer shell that you break open to reveal segments of white fruit inside, which have a sweet and slightly citrus taste. It's delicious and unlike any other fruit I've ever eaten. Rambutan is a red fruit with soft green spikes and looks potentially poisonous, or like some kind of alien plant life. This again is a soft shell. The fruit inside looks and tastes quite similar to lychees.

Mangosteen (left) and Rambutan (right)

I'm sure there's loads of other food that we didn't get to try, but there's always next time! Meanwhile, I'd definitely recommend seeking out a Vietnamese restaurant wherever you are. As I mentioned at the start of the post, Kingsland Road is a good place to start. I've only been to Song Que, which has good reviews on Time Out etc, but I've heard from London-based Vietnamese friends that a lot of the others in the area are worth checking out, even if they don't seem quite as busy or well publicised.

Goodbye Vietnam!

We would happily have spent a couple more days in Dalat, but with only a week and a half left in Vietnam before our visas ran out, it was time to move on to Hoi An. Our vehicle of choice for this overnight journey was a sleeper bus, which in theory sounds fantastic - it's basically a bus with beds, blankets and pillows. In reality, with 14 hours of potholed, twisty roads to navigate, sleeping on this bus was like lying in a narrow cot on the floor of a boat during rough seas. Never again. Within three hours of leaving, I missed Dalat already and hoped Hoi An would be worth the journey.

Thankfully it turned out to be a really nice little town to spend a few days, despite the heat and an overwhelming number of tourists. The Old Town area, which runs along the riverside, is full of little lanes with pretty French style villas painted yellow and draped with climbing plants. In the evenings, all the restaurants are lit up with colourful lanterns, which created the perfect setting for dinner and a few beers by the riverside.


Every other shop in Hoi An is a tailor, so I took the opportunity to have a colourful summer dress made. Then, because I liked it so much, I bought two more. In total, the three specially made dresses came to about 20pounds. Even though it's not really within our budget, I've decided I want to try and be more colourful (in terms of clothing) when I return home, and this seemed like the perfect way to start.


You'd think we'd be bored of beaches by now, but we found out that there were a couple nearby and it seemed silly not to check at least one of them out. An Bang beach turned out to be gorgeous – kind of what I'd hoped to find in Mui Ne. White sand, cool sea, mountains in the distance and loads of these cool round fishing boats. You're probably all getting tired of the usual beach pictures by now, so instead here's one of me posing with the fishing boats in my new sunhat:


As nice as it looked, the sand turned out to be almost too hot to walk on so after dumping our stuff on a sun lounger we literally hot footed it over to the sea, which was so cold that it made Karl's nipples hurt!

We also arranged to meet a friend in Bangkok in a couple of weeks time, and the easiest way to get there seemed to be a flight from Saigon, so after a relaxing two days we headed down south to Nha Trang. Unfortunately, my vow to never board a sleeper bus again was broken as there didn't seem to be any other feasible way to get there. This time, however, I was prepared! A couple of travel sickness pills from my trusty medical kit did the trick, and we actually managed to get some sleep and arrive in Nha Trang feeling fairly well rested. To everyone who laughed at me for packing my bag over a month before our trip, it pays to be organised!

Now, Nha Trang is known as being a bit of a party town for travellers, with plenty of bars offering happy hours for practically half the day. I fully expected it to be fun but very touristy, and was really pleased to find that (as well as being both of these things) it also has a very local scene. The backpackers generally seem to stick to a few streets lined with bars, restaurants, coffee shops and budget guesthouses, and surprisingly few tourists can actually be found on the beach during the day compared to the numbers that emerge after dark. This was quite nice as it meant that the beach was generally peaceful in the daytime.

However, at around 4pm everyday, Nha Trang's inhabitants start to flock to the beach in droves on foot, motorbike or bicycle. By 5pm it's absolutely packed with families picnicking on the sand, playing in the sea and flying kites. I sat for two hours by the beach and didn't see a single white person in the sea! The atmosphere is fun and friendly, and one evening I happily sat on the beach for two hours just people-watching – kids making up silly games in the sand, teenage boys competing to do the best somersaults in the sea, men doing laps between buoys and the shore, women doing a leisurely breaststroke just like at home!


Meanwhile, the sky had darkened (another daily occurrence at the moment) and it had begun to lightly drizzle. It didn't last long, and just as the skies were beginning to clear, a haze of rainbow started to appear. Before long it was a full arch, with a second bow forming just beside it. Everything combined – the happy atmosphere, the clearing sky, the rainbow, islands in the distance – was actually quite breathtaking in a way that I hadn't really expected.

I tried taking a few photos but my camera couldn't really capture it all the way I'd hoped. I don't mind too much though, because even though nothing really happened, I think that was one of my most vivid and memorable experiences so far.


The whole time I'd been wishing Karl was there to see it with me – I'd left him in a cafe with the laptop for a couple of hours. It turned out he hadn't stayed there long and had gone for a walk along the beach instead, so he'd seen it all too. Plus, he'd bought me an awesome belated birthday present – a kite! It was dark by the time we met each other, but we had a go with the kite on the beach anyway:


It wasn't too successful, so we tried again the following afternoon and jeez that thing went high! It pretty much unwound most of the string from the reel and flew itself, I had to grip on quite tightly so as not to lose it!

Unfortunately the kite was too big to fit into either of our backpacks, so we gave it away to a family with a young daughter at breakfast the next morning.

The good thing about Nha Trang being so touristy is that it makes it a great place for meeting other travellers and, well, getting drunk. So this is exactly what we did with a couple we met – Catherine and Kym - at a great bar called Crazy Kim's, where we played Jenga, Connect 4 and pool, while downing too many shots (including tequila, unwisely) in celebration of Catherine's birthday. Needless to say, the following day was spent feeling hungover.

A couple of days later we boarded a flight from Saigon to Bangkok. I was a bit sad to leave Vietnam - we had a great time and there's so much we didn't get a chance to see, like the whole north of the country! We're back in Bangkok now and I'm quite looking forward to getting to know a new country.

Watch this space for one more post on Vietnam though – the food!!