HK Independent Traveller Blog

In Vietnam, there are many choices of food: street food is the most typical, small restaurants serving one food, tourist restaurants serving different kinds of food, upscale restaurants for the middle class and tourists, French or fine dining restaurants. In this post, I will share my food experience in Hoi An .  Restaurants and snack places in other cities will be shared in separate posts. Not all meals were nice. I will be very open to tell what's good and what's so so. Hoi An We followed a friend's advice to visit Pho Xua for a quick lunch.  At TripAdvisor, its rating was 4.5.  We ordered pho (beef noodle) and bun cuon (steam rice roll).  They were OK but did not 'wow'. Price was unbeatable.  2 snacks and 2 drinks for less than USD4. A cool drink is indispensable under the big heat in Hoi An in early March. We had a beer at Mango Rooms Restaurant . It is located next to the river. Nothing is better than to escape the heat both sheltered and co

Our hotel, Adamo , is located next to My Khe Beach . Naturally, dinner choice is the nearby area.  We walked around, One seafood place was packed.  It looked appealing to me.  But my friend did not like the low table and stools. I warned him not going to restaurants with Chinese characters.  They were most likely not authentic Vietnamese. But I could not stop him and we settled down at Tucana Restaurant . The steam fish was eatable. The fresh spring roll was totally rubbery. It would not be served this way in any genuine Vietnamese restaurant. We were luckier for lunch on the next day, after the Cham Museum .  We had mi quang at Quan Mi Quang Ba Mua and banh xeo at Ba Duong .  Both were very good.   Mi quang is wide rice noodle served with a broth infused with turmeric.  Often shrimp and chicken are added. Ban xeo is savory fried pancake made of rice flour, water and turmeric powder. It is stuffed with meat, shrimp, bean sprouts.  One places it on a thin rice paper t

Vietnam is the second biggest coffee producer in the world.  Local people love filtered coffee dripping on condensed milk.  It is stronger than the normal coffee.  If you don’t like sweet, just don’t stir to dissolve the condensed milk at the bottom.  Iced Vietnamese coffee is excellent. Café dots Hanoi here and there. If you are on the coffee street ( Nguyen Huu Huan ) in Hanoi, you will find a café every few steps.  Most of them serve local coffee.  Signs of egg coffee appear every few seconds. Cafe Giang Egg coffee ("cà phê trúng" ) was found in Hanoi.  It is a creamy soft, meringue-like egg white foam perching on dense Vietnamese coffee. It is said that Nguyen Van Giang invented the recipe while working as a bartender at the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hotel in 1946. At the time, there was a shortage of fresh milk in the country so whisked egg yolk was used as a substitute. All foreign and local guests in the hotel liked it. So, he decided to star