Category Archives: Vietnam

Lunch in Hanoi has been getting boring for me recently. You’re probably looking at your soggy sambo with wilted lettuce, or oily foodcourt noodles and thinking I’m a spoilt cow, but when you get used to the exotic, it no longer is. So lunchtime for me lately has either been bun cha or rice from [...]

Vietnamese cuisine changes with latitude, and the south is a wonderland of long-forgotten specialities and new tastes for this new Hanoian. But with only a fleeting moment in Ho Chi Minh City, this trip became an extended grazing session. When I first moved to Hanoi a friend from Ho Chi Minh City gave me a [...]

When I first arrived in Hanoi I was invited along on a food crawl with a group of new friends. After about three seconds I became utterly lost, and simply followed my companions sitting where they told me to sit, eating what they told me to eat. This marathon dining session was for a magazine [...]

I may be wrong, but I think fried rice is a cross-cultural comfort food. It could be the variety from my childhood, the Australian small-town sweet-and-sour-pork Chinese restaurant kind: an oily melange of cubed carrot, ham, corn kernels and peas with the occasional tiny prawn thrown in. Bland but soothing, a meal with a couple of [...]