Hanoi Street Food: What to Eat, and Why a Guide Changes It

Hanoi's food is more specialised than Saigon's. A stall usually makes one dish, has made it for decades, and stops when the pot is empty. That is why a place can be famous and shut at two in the afternoon.

The consequence for a visitor is that wandering and hoping does not work well. You arrive at the wrong hour, or at the version aimed at you rather than the one the neighbourhood eats.

This is the one city where a food walk genuinely earns its price, not because the food is hard to find but because the timing is. A guide takes you to four places in the window each is good in, which is close to impossible to arrange yourself on a short stay.

Pho is breakfast. A Hanoi pho is clearer and plainer than the southern version, with far fewer herbs added at the table, and that restraint is the point rather than an omission.

Bun cha is lunch and effectively only lunch. Grilled pork patties in a bowl of sweet-sour broth, with noodles and herbs to dip. Almost every bun cha place stops serving in the early afternoon.

Banh cuon, steamed rice sheets, is a morning dish. Cha ca, turmeric fish cooked at the table with dill, is dinner and is the one sit-down meal worth booking.

Egg coffee is any time and is more like a dessert than a drink: whipped yolk and condensed milk over hot coffee, invented here when milk was scarce.

The stalls with a queue of locals turn their stock over fastest, which is the single most useful rule and better than any judgment about how the place looks.

Eat where the cooking happens in front of you. Be more careful with cut fruit and with ice in places without a visible ice supplier, and much less careful about plastic stools and a shared table, which are not a hygiene signal at all.

If you have a serious allergy, have it written in Vietnamese before you go. Fish sauce is in almost everything savoury, including dishes that look vegetarian, and peanuts appear as a garnish more often than menus say.