It’s our first day waking up in Hanoi. We only have one activity scheduled for today – a foodie tour focusing on Hanoi street food. I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while. I’m ready!
It’s So Good…
Vietnamese food is so good. Most people are familiar with the beef noodle soup called “pho.” (In vietnamese it’s spelled “phở”, and pronounced “fuh.” Rhymes with “duh”). Spring rolls, too. Pork and shrimp mixed with vermicelli, lettuce, and mint, wrapped in rice paper so thin you can see though it. Dip them in peanut sauce. Yum yum.
Let’s not forget about the banh-mi sandwich. They’re made with cured ham or some other kind of meat stuffed inside a baguette, along with shredded pickled carrot and daikon, cilantro, and special sauce. Mmmm. Everyone makes their banh-mi a little differently. No two are alike, but they’re always delicious.
And don’t even get me started talking about noodles. Did someone say “garlic noodles”? How about if we throw some grilled shrimp into those garlic noodles? Oh, man.
Bún Gà Nướng
But my favorite noodle dish is called “bún gà nướng.” The “bún” are the noodles. The “gà nướng” is bar-b-qued chicken. (If you say something that sounds like “boon gah noong,” when you order, they’ll know what you mean).
Bún gà nướng comes in a big bowl, like pho. But instead of soup, you’ll find chopped lettuce, cucumber, cilantro, mint leaves, bean sprouts, chopped peanuts, and of course, bar-b-qued chicken. The noodles are in there, too, hidden down in the bottom of the bowl.
Bún gà nướng comes with a small bowl of fish sauce. The fish sauce is light and delicate. (Not the dark stuff that you cook with). It will be home-made. Everyone has their own recipe for fish sauce. Like banh-mi sandwiches — no two alike, but always delicious.
When your bún gà nướng arrives, mix everything up in the bowl, pour some fish sauce over the top, then dig in. Oh, man. So good.
Hanoi “Street Food”
When we go out for Vietnamese food at home, we go to restaurants where everything mentioned above and a lot more is on the menu. As far as Vietnamese food goes, there are a lot of options.
It’s different in Hanoi, at least as far as “street food” goes. Each place has it’s own specialty. Each vendor will make just one dish, (along with some variations), but they’ll make it extra good. If their food isn’t top-notch, people can go somewhere else to get that particular dish, and that’d be the end of that.
By the way, “street food” is a bit of a misnomer. The term makes it sound like it’s food purchased from someone with a cart, where you buy something and eat standing up. That’s probably how it used to be, and in many cases still is, I’m sure, but most “street food” places in Hanoi now have some type of room with tables and chairs like a regular restaurant.
Well, not like a regular restaurant back home. The room is probably going to be tiny, and part of it might open out onto the sidewalk. The chairs are going to be tiny, too. And plastic. Most likely, red or blue plastic. They’ll be about a foot high.
It’s a funny thing about the “chairs” in these places. It’s a fact that people in Vietnam are generally of smaller stature than westerners, but these chairs are small, even for them. But they’re used to ’em, so they plop right down and are as comfortable as can be. Watching us over-sized, not-used-to-bending-our-knees gringos trying to adapt themselves to these little blue chairs must be a source of amusement for locals.
Time for a Foodie Tour!
We’ve signed up for a street food tour where someone is going to take four of us to some of these places and show us the ropes. The tour will take place in the Old Quarter. To get there, we grabbed a taxi at the hotel. It was dark when we arrived last night, so this is our first real chance to see our surroundings.
The first thing we all noticed was how nice it was here. Big trees were everywhere, and even though we were “downtown,” we were next to a fairly big lake. The whole area was peaceful and serene, as if we were in a park.
Swarming Traffic! Yikes!
We turned onto a large boulevard and the next thing we knew, we were surrounded by motorcycles. I’m not talking about five or ten motorcycles. I’m talking about HUNDREDS of motorcylces. It was like being in the middle of a swarm of bees!
We’ve traveled to a few places where the motorcycle traffic was pretty wild. In Rome, they lined up between cars at traffic lights and took off en masse when the light changed, (or more likely before the light changed). The motorcycle and tuk-tuk traffic in Bangkok was pretty wild. But we’d never seen anything like this. We were in a sea of motorcycles, packed in, muffler to muffler. Wow.
The funny thing is, after a while we realized everyone actually moved along in a fairly orderly way. No one was trying to go fast or cut anyone off. Everyone seemed to be respecting everyone else. Everything just kind of flowed along like water in a big, lazy river. They still sounded like a swarm of bees, though.
To be continued…
