Will be back in Hanoi for just a week to do some intensive teaching at the national maternity hospital.
I was there last year for a longer period and this was the resulting thread:
Changes this time: I’m taking my teenage son, who has just finished his high school final exams and will be acting as a gofer for the course admin team. We are staying at a mandated hotel; the teaching schedule means we will have to do the hotel breakfast buffet every morning as we need to be leaving for the hospital at 7:30am. Teaching finishes around 6pm every day but we will be part of a group of UK faculty and I think there might be some pressure to go out as a group in the evenings. The drawback to this is (in my experience), a lot of UK faculty want to eat European style food or in sit-down restaurants which are (1) boring (2) expensive. Hmmmm. Watch this space.
Can’t you use your son as an excuse for not joining the group every evening? “It’s his first time here, I want to give him a real flavor of the culture, so we will go off on our own to explore several times during our stay.” You could even add “And anyone who wants to come along for the food stall experience is welcome to join us.”
Just announce to them that you are taking your son to explore the town and ask if anyone wants to join. Who knows, maybe its not just you who are the intrepid traveler. But then again, you have to sleep and wake up early, hopefully you will both get some time to venture out.
The weather may end up literally dampening our plans. At the online briefing over Zoom yesterday we were warned to expect very changeable weather. Apparently at this time of year can swing between sunny in 104 degrees to torrential constant rain in 83 degrees! We are packing umbrellas.
Last time I worked in Hanoi was in October and the weather was perfect.
So, this time work was very hectic in Hanoi. The schedule of meetings and teaching was intense and often we were completely exhausted by the end of the working day. The UK faculty were a varied bunch and thankfully there was no pressure to always be sticking together for meals.
The organisation we work for put us all up at a very central hotel which has a decent breakfast buffet: a series of hot options in covered metal receptacles, a congee station, a small selection of cold cuts, a small selection of bakery items with one of those rolling toasters (one morning I came across a Buddhist monk in full Dalai Lama-esque robes toasting multiple croissants), cut fresh fruit, a small selection of cakes and profiteroles. The best thing is you can order as many bowls of beef or chicken pho as you like. They also cook eggs to order.
My son usually had several bowls of pho and an iced Vietnamese coffee followed by profiteroles. I usually had iced black coffee, an omelette, the hot Asian noodle or rice option, fresh fruit, a slice of the Swiss roll type vanilla or matcha cake. Nice start to the day.
Not food related, but hotels here seem to have amazing floral displays made of real flowers. In the UK, these sort of arrangements are usually fake flowers unless it’s a super upscale hotel.
Lilies that looked and smelled wonderful in a hotel near the cathedral. My son has a habit of wandering into the lobbies of posh hotels in Vietnam to play their nice pianos. Once he even got tipped!
We arrived in Hanoi on a Saturday afternoon and checked into the hotel around 4pm. It’s a Vietnamese hotel, around 3 star, very nice. It is right in the middle of the main tourist district, about a 5 min walk from Hoan Kiem Lake in the Old Quarter.
After freshening up, my son and I went for a walk to scope out eating and drinking options.
I needed a coffee to try and stay awake (I can’t sleep on planes). We decided to go to a cafe opposite the cathedral which had a mainly Vietnamese clientele. We’ve been here quite a few times now that our trip is coming to an end but I still don’t know what it is called. It’s sort of grungy. A very severe older lady presides over the place and sits near the cash register - I’ve never seen her speak or smile. People sitting on the tiny chairs outside sometimes get quite dramatic-looking head massages from itinerant masseuses.
On the way to the cathedral on our first afternoon in Hanoi we noticed a pho restaurant on a street corner that looked good, so we circled back and managed to get two seats at a shared table. It just does variations of beef pho. We got a couple of bowls and a can of Bia Hanoi, all of which seemed pricey (70k for a bowl of pho and 30k for a can of beer) for this sort of joint, we thought, we’re in the tourist district, so that might explain it.
Pho was really good - light flavorful broth that hit the spot on a hot humid day. Plenty of chillies and lime as well as pickled garlic available on the table to customise.
We noticed a queue building up as we left. Then we clocked the red plaques outside the front door which indicated their mention in the Michelin guide.
Afterwards, on a little wander of the Old Quarter, I picked up a banh mi from Bami Bread, which was previously a solid place to get a good banh mi. Sadly, not any more. This time the sandwich was insipid and sloppily made. Maybe it’s just this branch (Hang Bac in Hoan Kiem district), which is very popular with Western tourists. They have other branches across the city which might not be phoning it in like this one. I didn’t return. Life is too short for bad banh mi. Avoid this Bami Bread branch in the Old Quarter.
I am guessing you are an experience pho slurper… so what is your verdict regarding the Michelin designation? How does it rank on your personal pho scale? And do you think you are likely to get pho just as good elsewhere in Hanoi/Vietnam?
Expansion plus tourist district is often a recipe for decline. Looks like Bami Bread is a classic example.
It’s my 17 year old son who is the discerning pho slurper. He literally just finished his 19th bowl of pho on this trip just now. He’s had lot of time this trip to observe places selling pho and deciding which ones to sample. His favourite pho place is a much cheaper joint near the hospital where I was teaching - the times he went there he was the only non-Vietnamese customer. He learned to order pho bo tai (tai implies the beef slices will be added raw to the hot broth just before they bring it to you). He looks for hygiene (some places don’t store or handle the raw meat properly), whether there’s a huge vat of broth on the boil in view of customers (usually a good sign) and whether there’s a good number of Vietnamese locals dining there.
The Michelin Bib Gourmand pho place was very good indeed and has spawned numerous imitators. But you can get equally good pho elsewhere. I suppose people might not want to spend ages sampling various places and just want to try one which has an official stamp of approval. It’s a matter of personal taste and budget and fitting in with one’s schedule I suppose.
A local Vietnamese businessman hosted my organisation for dinner one night and was very amused to hear of my son’s pho obsession and shared a couple of his top tips for pho. My son duly went off to check one out (the other place was temporarily closed) and didn’t end up trying it as he said the pho cost more than twice of what we paid at the Michelin pho place. Even then it less than what we would pay in the UK, so I took him there on my day off and it was an excellent chicken pho.
So, on the evening of the first day we were tired and it was getting quite late, so shops were starting to close. We settled on a bun cha place but in hindsight, it was a rash decision and probably one of the few occasions we got ripped off. We asked for 1 order of bun cha (I wasn’t hungry) and got this:
It was way too much food and the herbs were all wet, so we avoided them as weren’t sure what sort of water they’d been washed in (it was a street stall). There was no obvious menu or price list. We couldn’t finish it all and the stallholder asked for 155k. I didn’t question it as I was quite tired and the conversion rate went out of my head. Then I realised I only had 150k on me. The stallholder took it (and was probably jumping for joy at our gullibility when we left). Later in the trip I saw much more legit bun cha places selling it at 45k per portion. Oh well, live and learn.
Second day in Hanoi: hit up the breakfast buffet, which was nice. Especially the unlimited iced black Vietnamese coffee.
We had a faculty meeting at 3pm, so I grabbed a late lunch at a tiny cafe next door to the hotel. It’s called Banh mi 28, and the address is 28 Hang Manh in Hoan Kiem district. It’s a small hole in the wall run by a man and woman we think are a couple. They are super nice and we returned several times for banh mi and drinks (they did a pretty good mango smoothie and a not too sweet lemonade) which were reasonably priced, made fresh and served with a smile.
I like the way banh mi vendors in Vietnam put the sandwich in a toaster oven for just the right amount of time to make the bread a bit crispy. The baguettes in Vietnam are also superior to any I’ve had in the UK. I think this is because they use rice flour in the mix to give the baguette a lightness that I just don’t come across in UK baguettes.
After a very long faculty meeting, I had to have a very long phone call with my sister. I sent my kid to scope out somewhere we could hang out in the evening. He found a place called Laca 24, right near the Michelin Bib Gourmand pho place. It looks sort of like a beer hall and has lots of beer on offer but also does soft drinks and food. The decor and vibe were cool. Some nice wall murals at the entrance:
It was so hot and humid I didn’t really feel like trying a grilled sparrow, so just stuck to an ice cold refreshing glass of bia hoi Ha Noi, which is draft Hanoi beer. It’s very light (3%) and very easy to drink. Especially as it is super cheap - only 40 pence per glass. The standard bia hoi glass is a bit smaller than a UK pint glass.
We returned several times to Laca 24 over the course of our visit. The staff were friendly; several spoke English well and were keen to practise their English with us. Very popular with large groups of Vietnamese celebrating special occasions.
Laca 24: 24 P. Lý Quốc Sư, Hàng Trống, Hoàn Kiếm, Hà Nội 100000
After the beer at Laca we just wandered around. We weren’t super hungry so we just grabbed a banh mi at a stall at the end of our street. We ended up sharing a table with a very enthusiastic American and his very chill Filipino girlfriend. He created quite a stir with the stallholder team by requesting avocado in his chicken banh mi. This request literally blew their minds. They kept saying they would make him an avocado smoothie. And he kept saying, no smoothie, put avocado in my banh mi. Lots of pointing and exclaiming ensued. Finally, an exasperated looking lady pitched up at the table holding a whole avocado and asked him was this what he really wanted in his sandwich. He was like “yes!” Cue lots of eye rolling from the Vietnamese lady and a demand for an extra 10k for this extraordinary request. The American happily paid it. It was quite entertaining watching all of this unfold.
For some reason, avocados in Vietnam appear to be used solely for making smoothies. I’ve never seen them in anything else. They also look very different to avocados I get in the UK, very long and thin almost like a cucumber:
I really don’t like people asking for radical changes in their food orders. I always figure I’ll order what’s offered because the restaurant is probably good at it.
I was once in line at a very traditional Jewish deli in northern California, and the guy in front of me wanted alfalfa sprouts on his bagel and lox. I will always remember the withering look that the counter person gave him.
