Vietnamese food and why we love it

I think it’s fair to say that Vietnamese people are proud of many things when it comes to their country – the beauty of its landscapes, the diverse cultures and traditions, and its long history of looking at foreign invaders and telling them, “You know, we’ve been talking, and we’re going to kick you out.” But, at least when it comes to welcoming visitors, there is one thing that stands above all else: the food.

If you’re a foreigner living in Vietnam, you’ve inevitably had the same experience. When getting to know a Vietnamese person, one of the first questions will be, “What’s your favorite Vietnamese food?” And in turn, every foreigner has a clear answer to that question (we’ll discuss later why that answer is often Bun Cha).

In many countries, the Vietnamese diaspora has built a large scene of restaurants that adapt the classic dishes of their homeland to Western tastes. This is especially true in the US and Australia, from where many “Tay” visitors in Vietnam come. And the interesting thing is that they don’t even have to be adapted that much, since the flavors of Vietnamese food are appealing to people of all kinds of cultures. The same isn’t true for some food from other Asian countries, such as China. Chinese food in Europe or America has basically nothing in common with food that is actually served in China – it’s just what the people there think Chinese food should look and taste like.

Personally, I didn’t have much experience with Vietnamese food before I came to Vietnam in 2017. In fact, my hometown had only one Vietnamese restaurant, and it closed after only a few months. However, I did have the opportunity to eat a very nice bowl of Pho Bo there, cooked by a lady born in Vietnam. It was good, but as I would later find out, it was very pricy (the equivalent of around 400.000VND) and took forever to prepare.

In my head, before I came here, I still expected Vietnamese food to be more like Thai food, with which I had much more experience. Oh, how wrong I (luckily) was.

I’ve written before about how that first bowl of Pho after arriving in Hanoi affected me. But it was other kinds of dishes that really hammered home how much variety Vietnam’s cuisine offers. Here are some of the things that have left a lasting impression on my taste buds.

Very early on in my stay in Vietnam, a friend explained to me the secret of a good bowl of Pho. Obviously, you need fresh ingredients and meat, but the most important part, he stressed, is the broth. And he was right. To this day, whenever I eat a bowl of Pho, I first take a spoon of just broth and enjoy the smell, color, and taste, appreciating the hard work that went into making it.

Like bakers, Pho cooks have to begin their days very early, starting to cook the broth long before the sun is even up. And even though Pho is far from my favorite Vietnamese food, the effort is absolutely worth it. It’s an incredibly distinctive aroma and flavor that contains many staples of Vietnamese cuisine – beef, noodles, herbs and spices. That makes it a perfect introduction to Vietnamese food.

If you ask foreigners living in Hanoi what their favorite food is, the answer, more often than not, is Bun Cha. Now, why is Bun Cha so popular with “Tays”? The answer is simple. Bun Cha is perfect.

I may have shown my hand a bit here. Yes, Bun Cha is my favorite dish too. From the very first time I tried it, I’ve been under its spell. At one point, I ate it almost daily, in a little shop situated in a garage close to my first home in Hanoi in Hao Nam street. Like a barbarian, I used to drain my bowl after I was finished because I loved the sweet fish sauce so much. People would look at me with a bit of confusion, but also a bit of pride, as in, “Look at the Tay making a fool of himself because he loves our food so much.”

The grilled meat straight from the fire, the fresh Bun noodles, the herbs, the sauce – it’s a wonderful combination that is unlike anything I had tasted before then, and yet perfectly suited to Western taste buds.

We’re staying in noodle territory, but switching from meat to fish. Bun Ca is a dish that made me feel right at home, since the soup with dill reminds me a lot of the food in my mother’s home of Sweden. At first, I was a bit confused by the prospect of eating crunchy fried fish with a noodle soup, but the combination absolutely works. It’s a wonderful contrast between crunchy and soft as well as sweet and savory.

What can I say? I like Bun. In fact, the sheer variety of noodles available in Vietnam was a shock to me when I first arrived here. This kind of bun is different from the one used in Bun Cha or Bun Ca, and very different again from Pho noodles. And don’t even get me started on Mien and My. As someone who grew up with exactly ONE kind of noodles, namely spaghetti, this was a real revelation.

And this dish with beef and a soup that is so different from Pho broth is one of the best variations of a Bun dish. Just don’t expect me to eat it with the weird pork knuckle thingy they often put in it.

I have to admit that I haven’t had many bowls of Bun Bo in actual Hue (only one), but it’s always good, wherever I eat it. Though if you’re looking for a recommendation, seek out a little Bun Bo Hue shop in Hang Ca in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. You won’t be disappointed.

Ho Chi Minh City’s answer to Pho, Com Tam is often the traditional meal of choice down south. I have only visited the southern parts of Vietnam, so I can mostly only speak from experience garnered in the north.

I love the combination of rice and grilled meat with eggs, and the fish sauce gives it that nice tangy flavor the dish is known for. It’s real comfort food and will leave you with a nice, warm feeling in your tummy.

I’m from Central Europe, so there’s one thing you need to know about me: I love bread.

In my home, bread has the same status that rice has in Vietnam. We eat it absolutely every day, sometimes more than once. In fact, my family eats bread for breakfast and dinner, with two important differences: In the morning, we eat it sweet, with jams or honey, and in the evening, we eat it savory, with cold cuts and cheese. So you can probably imagine the veritable mountains of bread my family had to buy every day when me and my siblings still lived at home.

Living in Vietnam, my bread consumption has decreased dramatically, but I probably still eat more than the average local. And much of it comes in the form of Banh Mi with various fillings. I like the Hoi An style best, but as long as it has some delicious pâté, I’m sold. The only downside for me? I would appreciate a larger variety of sauces instead of just that sweet chili sauce that seems to be everywhere.

Now, I know that hotpots are not uniquely Vietnamese, but hear me out: I never had hotpot before I came here, so for me, it’s forever linked to Vietnam. And it’s true that Vietnamese people love to eat hotpot, especially when there’s something to celebrate. Thai hotpots, beef hotpots, mushroom hotpots, spicy Chinese hotpots, milky white hotpots, fish hotpots, crab egg hotpot – you name it, people will eat hotpot of it. And they’re all delicious.

I love the social aspect of eating hotpot, where everyone sits around the same table and shares food, cooks meat and vegetables for each other in the soup and maybe has a drink or ten while doing it.

The closest equivalent we have in my home is a fondue – and I don’t mean the cheese dish. In a fondue, a pot of oil or soup is put on a little burner on the table and people cook meat in it – either frying it in the oil or cooking it in the soup. The big difference is that it’s a much slower affair. People use specially made fondue forks to spear a small piece of meat and put it in the pot, with the fork’s handle standing up, allowing people to take out the meat.

With people usually only using one or two of these forks, it can take a while to cook enough meat to be full, so unsurprisingly, it’s often eaten with lots of side dishes like salads, potato salad, and, of course, bread. Every time my family eats fondue, my mother tells the story of an uncle who got a bit disgruntled by the slow pace and said, “This isn’t a meal, it’s a boardgame.”

Oc, or clams and snails, are one of my favorite foods to use when I want to scare my family and friends at home. Eating snails is very much not a thing in my home, and they’re usually just seen as disgusting pests. So of course, I hadn’t eaten any before I came to Vietnam either.

Clams are a bit less unusual, but we’re a landlocked country, so seafood is generally not a very prominent part of our diet. We import the occasional cozze from Italy, but that’s about it.

Trying snails for the first time was definitely a challenge, but after finally doing it, I realized that I was just being stupid because of my own preconceptions of what food should and shouldn’t be. By now, I absolutely love eating all kinds of oc, but I’m still not sure if I will be able to convince any visiting friends or family to try them. At least my father has signaled some willingness to try, since he used to live in France for a while, where eating snails is more common. But my mother gave a clear “no, thank you”.

Now of course, this was not a complete list of food I like in Vietnam. An exhaustive list would probably take about a year to write and would bore you as well as me. But if you’re wondering what I think of a specific Vietnamese dish, feel free to ask in the comments.

But to round it off, let’s take a look at a few things in Vietnamese cuisine I can’t eat:

Mam Tom: I have trouble eating things that smell terrible, and that definitely describes this fermented shrimp sauce. I have tried it and will not try it again. Life’s too short.

Durian: Same as above. And before you say, “Just ignore the smell, it tastes much better”, let me tell you this: I don’t like the taste either.

Offal: Anything made from intestines or other internal organs of animals. We do have dishes like that in my home, but they’re not very popular. The only exceptions: I do enjoy a bit of heart or liver.

This concludes my little foray into Vietnamese dishes from a “Tay” perspective, but don’t forget that tastes differ, and other foreigners will feel very differently about the food, so I can’t speak for them. Just know that you should never feel embarrassed about asking someone what their favorite Vietnamese food is. It’s something most of us love to talk about, and something of which Vietnam can be rightfully proud.