Flavors of Hanoi specializes in private walking food tours in Hanoi. Our food tours not only feature tailored typical street food tastings, but also expose the profound history of the city and the welcoming spirit of the Vietnamese hospitality.
To give our guests a view of how a food tour with us may look like, this blog post provides a brief of what we do, eat, drink our guests during the tour.
Brief of the food tour
We meet and greet our guests at their hotel (if in the city center), introduce ourself and brief the tour, get to know about their restrictions and preferences, suggest the typical dishes that Hanoi is famous for.
Base on the dishes our guests are going to sample, we walk them on a loop to try the dishes and get to know about the neighborhood. To get a sense of the city, we also invite them to visit a local home for a tea and to get to know about the local daily life.
Following is the a brief information related to Vietnamese food we share with our guests:
Background of the Vietnamese Cuisine
A brief of the Vietnamese cuisine is that Vietnam has 54 ethnic groups, all growing rice living in a diverse geography with various climatic conditions. They’ve their own cooking traditions while sharing historical influences from the Chinese, the Khmer, and the French.
That background formed the variety and diversity of the Vietnamese cuisine, which is characterized with fresh ingredients, balanced flavors, and a reliance on rice and rice noodles.
We eat rice 3 times a day, and each meal we’re encouraged to eat 3 bowls of rice. To flavor the rice, we often cook up to 6 dishes; mostly pork, chicken, beef, fishes, and vegetables. Fish sauce, fresh herbs, and condiments are always used to enhance the pleasures of the flavors.
Phở
The common saying that “chán cơm, thèm phở’ (bored with rice, crave for phở) is referred to food, and also a married guy who fancies other women. Since everyone is eating rice at home, on the street, we eat anything but rice.
The most popular street dish in Hanoi is phở, the word phở is a coruption of the French “feu”, as the dish is our adaptation of the French dish – pot au feu. A traditional Phở is a large bowl of hotbeef stock with sliced beef and rice noodle, called beef phở. Chicken was later introduced and became the other version of phở, called chicken phở.
Beef used to be available in the morning only, so we could only eat phở at breakfast, but we’renow eating phở anytime of the day. To offer original flavors, family-run eateries in the city serve one dish only. They named their business starting with the dish specialized, end with the name of the owner to differ themselves from others.
Bún
In Vietnam, not all noodle soups are Pho. As recorded by World Record Union, Vietnam has 164 dishes featuring noodles and broth. Most of those noodle dishes are using bún, or rice vermicelli noodle, which is our third most popular food after rice and phở noodle.
Unlike Pho noodle – which is only found in either beef or chicken noodle soups, bun is variable with endless combinations.
Miến
Another popular noodle in Hanoi is miến, or glass noodles, sometimes called cellophane noodles, it’s the transparent vermicelli made from canna lily’s starch. They are sold in dried form, then soaked into boiling water to reconstitute to use in soups, stir-fried, or mixed dishes.
Bánh mì
Bánh mì was developed from the French baguette, which was brought to Vietnam after 1858. The French was eating the baguette with pâté, cheese, and butter. Due to the high price of imported wheat at the time, baguette was too luxurious for most native people.
After the French’s defeat, Vietnamese developed the baguette by adding in the local ingredients; like chili sauce, chicken egg, pickled vegetables, thereby reducing the price and making it the king of Vietnamese street food.
The Bánh mì today first got its shape in 1958, when a family in Saigon sold the baguette filled with Vietnamese pork sausage, pate, and fresh herbs. From the 1960s, Hanoians began eating the baguette with chicken eggs, meats, and cilantro.
Bánh cuốn
Bánh cuốn, or steamed rolled pancakes, is known as a traditional north Vietnam dish. In a poem in 1291, our king said that making bánh cuốn to dedicate to ancestors is a beautiful tradition.
The dish is made from rice batter, which is first spread thinly on a cloth and steamed for a minute. Once cooked, it’s rolled with minced pork cooked with wood ear mushroom. The steamed rolled pancakes are then topped with fried shallots, fresh herbs, and served with dipping sauce. It’s often sided with Vietnamese pork sausage.
Egg coffee
The current owner of Café Giảng revealed that his father, who worked at the Sofitel Metropole Hotel as a bartender, opened his café in 1946. He relied on sweeten condensed milk to balance out the bitterness of the robusta coffee, but soon he faced the shortage of milk due to the war.
What did he do? His clever hack whisking chicken egg yolk with sugar became a perfect substitute for milk, and surprisingly created a thick creamy cup of egg coffee, resembling a liquefied tiramisu! It’s now known as Hanoi’s signature drink.
We finish the tour at the hotel, air drop the photos taken on the way, drawn the route we made on a city map for our guests to keep, and share our WhatsApp number so that our guests can reach us when there’s anything we can help them with.
