One of the highlights of my time in Vietnam was the food. Another great place to sample interesting dishes that don’t cost much. Here were some favourites:
Hanoi
The Devil’s dumplings, or so I named them! Doughnut-type things that I accidentally bought. The lady gave me one to try before I had realised that this is the ploy to pressgang you into buying some:
Vietnamese coffee. Very nice:
This meal (below) was from a very good restaurant in Hanoi, except the only veggie option I could find on the menu turned out to be off. I gave in and had these Hanoi special prawn things and a chicken noodle soup dish:
Tam Coc (near Ninh Binh)
Vietnamese egg coffee… ooooooh this was goooood! Sweet, with egg white fluffed into it:
Smoothie:
Delicious tofu and papaya salad dish, with a characteristic sweet chilli type sauce. Really really tasty!:
The waitress gave me a couple of little bananas, I think as an apology for having muddled up my drink earlier. These little bananas (green and yellow) were growing everywhere in Ninh Binh.
Ninh Binh
An enormous plate of shredded cabbage and carrot, with noodles and soy sauce and some other kind of flavours made a great lunch one day in a backpackers pub place opposite a beautiful lake:
Breakfast at Mai Spa Homestay – the best banh my Vietnamese sandwich I had. With pork here and omelette. Nice coffee too:
Our meal prepared with lots of teamwork at the Homestay was a real highlight of my whole trip:
And the 🥇 veggie pho I mentioned in an earlier post for breakfast on my last morning at Mai’s place was just beautiful 👌🏼😋
Having walked for an hour and a half with a big backpack from the Homestay towards the station in the centre of Ninh Binh, I found a place to stop for a cold coffee, and a custard apple smoothie and the obligatory warm green tea:
This was the hot meal they were serving on the night train if you paid extra for it. They somehow managed to wheel a trolly containing all this down the incredibly narrow corridors and dish it up right outside your carriage:
Hoi An
Claypot restaurant… Maps Me had a note on it saying “Eat here. It’s delicious” or something. It was correct! Another smoothie, with complimentary nuts:
Aubergine and tofu dish cooked in the claypot slowly. This was another contender for the 🥇 best meal I had in Vietnam. It was heavenly!
Iced coffee I think (though it looks a bit big?):
Tra Qué Vegetable Village. This whole tour was remarkable… I think qualifying as the 🥇 best tour of my trip. It ended at the restaurant, which uses the vegetables grown in what is essentially an enormous community allotment on really rich fertile soil in the area. Here are all the dishes we tried as part of the tour. They were all delicious. As you can see, we got to see one of them being prepared as well:
Best Street food experience definitely in 🥇 Hoi An – these are in a previous post too, but just to have them all in order here:
All in all, actually I reckon Vietnam comes joint first for 🥇 best place to eat out cheaply and adventurously, along with Singapore. I’m dribbling now, just remembering it all!! 😋😋😋
I don’t seem to have eaten very much while in Penang (or at least I didn’t think it worth photographing). But this vegan salad was exactly what I was after. I remember it was unusually late finding somewhere to eat after a long day of sightseeing around the island. I was grateful they stayed open for me! The drink is a fruit smoothie, and I had salted edamame beans with the salad, and vegan fruit jelly for afters 😋:
South Indian dosa pancake with potato curry inside and various dipping sauces next to it:
Young coconuts minus the shell. I frequently saw people drinking coconut milk with a straw from these:
The pink things below are dragon fruit. I’d only ever had one of those before in the UK and it was horrible! But in Singapore, they’re riper and sweeter as well as spectacular to look at. Inside they have white flesh flecked with black seeds throughout. All of which is edible and tastes slightly sweet. They were so much nicer here. I had been so disappointed with the one I had in England years ago. It was tasteless and had a texture similar to boiled potato, which was a massive let down having admired the look of it!:
There are some really artistic cakes on sale in the malls in Singapore:
Japanese style mochi (a kind of pastry filled with a delicately sweet bean curd, I think):
You do get westernised food in Singapore, too, though it’s often more expensive. This was my smashed avocado on toast with lime, chilli flakes, toasted pine nuts and poached egg. Very hipster!:
From a traditional outdoor hawker centre this was mushroom noodle soup. They sprinkled fried anchovies on top:
The best veggie curry ever. Served on what I guess is a banana leaf. Ooooh it was gooooood:
Calamansi juice. (A type of green skinned sweet lime, that tastes more like orange to me):
The following 4 pictures were all elements of the same meal…
Chicken roasted in some very tasty way. I guess it must be a marinade? (And a little bit of pork too at the top of the picture):
“Nonya style” Achar pickles (also delicious);
Chilli sauce. Shiv said if the chilli sauce was bad, it could ruin the whole dish. This one was goooood:
Then there was the rice to go with all the above, which is the classic Singaporean dish, chicken rice. The rice tastes amazing, cooked in the juices from the chicken. But it just looks like normal rice, so I didn’t bother getting a picture.
Hawker Chan’s Michelin starred chicken rice, with seasonal green veg. And the unfeasibly small bill:
Kopi a kind of coffee made with condensed milk. Which tastes surprisingly nice:
Some more western food. This was my treat following braving the high swing bridge type thing at the super tree skywalk at Gardens by The Bay:
Veggie bento box. Including soup, green beans, chilli sauce, potato curry, rice:
Veggie gyoza (dumplings):
Here are some pictures from my last day in Switzerland today. By this evening I’ll arrive in probably a wet, dark and cold UK and I reckon I’m going to find it tricky believing that only this morning I was seeing this. What an incredible time of sharing memories, philosophising and enjoying fresh mountain air and incredible views. (And also learning some better techniques for negotiating slippy slidey snow!!)
From the train ride back to Zürich. Not great photos but you get the idea. I think my ears popped about 6 times on the way up and about 4 on the way down:
Thanks to Phil for these amazing photos:
la perle 