Food of Ho Chi Minh City - A Guide for Experts and First-Timers!
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Ho Chi Minh city, is usually the first or last place you'll visit when coming to Vietnam. The city’s chaotic streets are a food lovers paradise, with seemingly every centimetre of the city offering a different delicious plate. The streets are lined with restaurants, street food stalls, push carts and vendors, when you can get anything and everything often for very little money.
Many travellers will stick to the well worn streets of District One, with Vietnam's Khao San equivalent of Bui Vien and the handy English translations on the street side menus. But for those willing to venture further, and leave the comfort blanket of easy translation behind, this city is an absolute treasure chest of delicious delights!
Read on for some of the must try dishes and our top recommendations for dining beyond district one - okay there is a couple of recommendations from District One but as you'll see these are special cases! Make sure you read onto the end for our recommendations if you’re nervous about new foods or going off piste and exploring the big city.
From our two week stay in Ho Chi Minh city, these are our top food choices:
Cơm Tấm - Broken Rice
Cơm Tấm, literally broken rice, is a ubiquitous dish throughout Ho Chi Minh. Originally a peasant farmers dish made from the rice that was unable to be sold, this dish is now rightly an urban favourite.
There are infinite varieties of Cơm Tấm, however our favourite and most commonly found, is broken rice topped with sweet marinated barbequed pork, spring onion oil (scallion oil for our American friends), topped with fried egg and served with pickled vegetables and fresh tomato and cucumber. This is a hearty breakfast which will keep you full all through the morning and ready for a late lunch.
The unique texture of the broken rice grains is amazing with the sweet pork. Soft but with body and cut through by the spring onion oil and pickles, Cơm Tấm, like so much Vietnamese food, is a perfect blend of sweet, sour and salty. This is especially true when paired, and this is essential, with fish sauce and freshly minced chilli.
We are from England and have the mighty Full English Breakfast as our traditional start to the day, but Cơm Tấm is right up there with it. We can also report that it may even be better at curing hangovers!
Cơm Tấm is available literally everywhere. We ate repeatedly at the excellent store (no google presence) near our Airbnb. One plate of Cơm Tấm cost 50,000 VND (£1.65 or $2.05).
In the morning time just look out for the sweet smoke of street side barbecuing pork and you'll be in for a treat.
Pho - Noodle Soup
It should come as no surprise that we indulged ourselves with several bowls of Pho during our time in Ho Chi Minh. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Pho is possibly Vietnam’s most famous dish.
A bowl of rice noodles is served in a delicate yet rich and fragrant broth which is then topped with beef or chicken in various forms.
With Pho, the broth is the star of the show. Made of bones, fire roasted shallots and other aromats, the broth is boiled and intensified over a lengthy cooking (usually overnight) process. Beef Pho (Phở Bò) and Chicken Pho (Phở Gà) broths are cooked separately, with their stocks being made from the bones from the respective animals. Either way, the result is a clear, light broth with an unbelievably complex, intense and harmonious flavour. This wonderous broth is then poured over flat rice noodles. The broth's flavour will be different at every stall or restaurant, with every chef, grandma and street hawker having their own secret recipes.
After the broth comes the meat. If you’ve gone traditional and are dining at a beef joint (Phở Bò) the toppings start with sliced boiled beef. Depending how much you’ve paid and where you’ve ordered from, thinly sliced raw beef can be added to the bowl and cooked with the heat of the broth, braised beef, tendons and fatty cuts may also be added. The contrast in textures between the different cuts of meat and the richness of beef fat melting into the snap of the tendons, make for a unique and delicious mouthful.
For those who’ve gone for chicken (Phở Gà) it's a similar, but more poultry story. Strips of white and dark meat from poached chicken are added to the bowl, making for an even lighter taste than the beef, but with no less impact.
Whether you went for beef or chicken, your bowl will be topped with spring onions and a few herbs and served alongside a basket of greenery. This bouquet of leaves is one of our favourite things about Vietnamese cuisine. Many of the items in this article come with a tray full of herbs, green leaves, lettuce and beansprouts, all allowing you to tweak and customise your bowl according to your own tastes. Our favourite leaves were sawtooth coriander, Vietnamese basil and mint but honestly half the fun is trying out different combinations of mysterious green leaves.
Watch out though, in every bundle there is fish mint - Fish mint is delicious but not for everybody. Also there is another herb, we never did found out the name, which fills your mouth with a bitter chalky taste.
If the green bouquet wasn’t enough customisation for you, the table will almost certainly be laden with yet more options. Fresh chillies, lime wedges and fish sauce are staples, but you’ll also see bottles and jars of sweet soy sauce, chilli oils, garlic vinegar and the ubiquitous nuclear orange sweet chilli sauce. Again: experiment, customise and enjoy!
Ho Chi Minh’s Pho scene is fantastic and differs from northern Vietnam. Southern Pho broths tend to be more in ‘your face’ with more intense flavours and sometimes a little more sweetness than their calmer, cleaner northern brethren. We’re not going to open the can of worms and try and tell you which is better, just know they are different and therefore you have an excuse to try multiple bowls up and down the country.
There is no shortage of Pho restaurants, mobile street stalls and market place hawkers selling both beef and chicken Pho, we even saw some vegetarian Pho on sale just look for Pho Chay on the signs.
We thoroughly enjoyed our bowls at Phở 76 with its classic flavours as well as a delicious bowl full of beef tendon and offcuts from Phở Lề Đường. Our final recommendation is for Phở Hiền which sold beef Pho with an amazing variety of cuts for toppings. We went for the braised beef and were not disappointed.
A bowl of Pho can range in price but it’ll typically set you back around 50,000 VND (£1.65 or $2.05) or a little more with more toppings.
Banh Mi - Vietnamese Sandwich
Again, you don't need us to tell you this is good. Often voted the “best sandwich in the world”, an accolade we can certainly get behind (although being British, the humble bacon sarnie puts up a good fight), Banh Mi is nearly as famous as Pho.
There are endless varieties of Banh Mi but the basics are universal. Stage one is the bread. One of the few nice things the French left behind in Vietnam was the baguette. This crispy, crunchy white bread roll is split in half and becomes the perfect vessel for yummy fillings.
Smothered in pate and mayonnaise the baguette is then filled with pretty much anything you can think of. The traditional filling is various cuts of pork, Vietnamese sausage along with chilli, chilli sauce and pickled vegetables. The mix of meaty pork, pepper laden sausage, hot chilli, sharp pickles and rich pate is divine. A true symphony of sweet, salt and savoury goodness.
You can find endless varieties of Banh Mi on pretty much any street. Bakeries are an especially good place to grab a Banh Mi, as are butchers for obvious reasons. Banh Mi also makes a great pre-drink stomach liner as well as a lovely brunch!
A Banh Mi is very inexpensive and should cost you around 20,000 VND (£0.66 or $0.82).
For those feeling lazy there are many excellent choices of Banh Mi available for Grab / GoJek delivery. We recommend ordering a couple alongside a Vietnamese milk coffee, speaking of which…
Cà Phê Sữa - Vietnamese Iced Milk Coffee
For those who haven’t tried Vietnamese Iced Milk Coffee or Cà Phê Sữa you’re in for an absolute treat. This rocket fuel disguised as coffee is sweet, rich and delicious and makes for a fantastic caffeine pick me up whatever time of day!
The beans used are a medium to dark roast giving off a luxurious buttery, almost dark chocolate taste with unmistakable underlying bitter coffee notes. Cà Phê Sữa is served either hot or cold (but we prefer the iced version in hot and humid Ho Chi Minh city), with a generous dollop of thick sweet condensed milk sitting at the bottom of the cup. Mix away and recharge with this sweet, caffeinated thunderbolt of a coffee.
Cà Phê Sữa is available literally everywhere from morning to night and we never had a bad one. Our favourite is a hard choice but if we had to pick we would have to say Hoas The Coffee (great name we know) takes 1st place. It is a lovely courtyard coffee shop hidden away from the main street and made delicious Cà Phê Sữa and iced teas.
Just a note: in a lot of the cafes coffee is often served along with a small glass of unsweetened iced tea. This serves as a welcome relief from the sweet coffee and is part of the package and does not cost extra.
One iced Cà Phê Sữa should set you back around 25,000 VND (£0.83 or $1.03) for a posh one in a seated cafe. For a cheap takeaway market stall you are looking at around 15,000 VND (£0.50 or $0.62).
Bò Lá Lốt - Grilled Beef and Betel Leaves
Bò Lá Lốt translates to beef and betel leaves, it doesn't sound like much, but trust us it is fantastic! Throughout the city you can see small charcoal grills lined with little green tubes. This is Bò Lá Lốt. Juicy beef is wrapped in the irony betel leaf and expertly grilled before being sprinkled in roasted peanuts and brought to the table. The beef arrives at your table accompanied by a dizzying array of condiments, accompaniments and wrappers. Colourful pickles, chillies, rice paper, rice noodles and a tray of fresh green leafs, vegetables and herbs crowd the table. Lastly small bowls full of potent fish sauce, chilli and garlic are laid down.
For the full Bò Lá Lốt experience: dampen a circle of rice paper and layer it up with lettuce, your choice of herbs, pickles, as much chilli as your bravery/sanity permits and a clump of rice noodles. On top of this place you cigar of freshly grillet beef and betel. Now the more difficult part. Unless you had a misspent youth you will now have the difficult task of attempting to roll all of the above into a tube. Honestly it doesn't really matter how clumsy the attempted roll is as long as you get some kind of portable parcel.
Fish sauce is a Vietnamese staple, although It is hard to describe without being off putting. It is deeply savoury and brings a sledgehammer of umami to anything it is used in. In Bò Lá Lốt you take your wrapped roll (or bodged mess in our cases) and dip it in a fish sauce / sugar / chilli dip. The contrasting iron leaf, juicy beef and salty, spicy sweet dip is incredible. The bite with all its vegetables, pickles and wrapping layers is an explosion of texture and taste. Bò Lá Lốt is an essential Vietnamese dish, like nothing we had tried in South East Asia or anywhere else before.
As with every food on this list, Bò Lá Lốt is available throughout the city, just look for the smoking grills. We can highly recommend Bò Lá Lốt 18 Lam Sơn , not just as it was near our AirBnB but because the lovely lady running it was hilarious and helpful to two clueless Brits and grilled us up some delicious beef. We came here three times in two weeks, in a city with so many amazing eating opportunities this is high praise!
We paid 67,000 VND per portion plus a can of beer (£2.21 or $2.75).
Bún Riêu - Crab and Tomato Noodle Soup
Although not as famous or well known outside of Vietnam, Bún Riêu was one of our favourite noodle dishes we ate in the city.
The Bún of Bún Riêu refers to bun noodles. Small, spaghetti like rice noodles, with a satisfying chew and snap. Bun is found in many noodle soup and Vietnamese dishes, it feels almost more of a staple than the flat pho noodles of the country's most famous culinary export.
The bun noodles of Bún Riêu are served in a steaming broth of decadent crab and umami rich tomato. Like so much of Vietnamese food, the broth of Bún Riêu manages to pack a serious flavour punch, whilst somehow remaining light and delicate on the tongue. On top of the noodles and soup, all manner of delicious things are added.
In the incredible bowls we ate at Bún Riêu Tôm Lan the toppings included giant prawns, minced pork and crab cakes, Vietnamese pork sausage, blood cake and chewy, snappy swirls of pig skin. Chewy pig skin might not sound that appetising, but trust us they were delicious, the restaurant even has won awards for them.
The sweet yet acidic tomato and crab broth of Bún Riêu is a perfect partner to the sweet prawns and rich blood cake toppings. There’s so much going on in a bowl of Bún Riêu, every bite is a different adventure of textures and flavour.
At Bún Riêu Tôm Lan, make sure you order the special Bún Riêu (Bún Riêu Dac Biet) which comes with all the toppings listed above, as well as limes, chilli, bitter green leaves and crunchy banana blossom to add to the top. For those with an adventurous palette, Bún Riêu Tôm Lan has jars of the infamous Mam Tom.
Mam Tom is a fermented shrimp paste and smells exactly as that sounds. If you can get past the smell, it has a unique flavour that excels in drawing out the tastes of other ingredients. For Bún Riêu (we’re not sure if this is how you’re meant to do it), we mixed Mam Tom, lime juice and chilli together in a dipping bowl until it started to foam and dipped various of the bowls toppings into this pungent condiment. It’s not for everyone, but once you learn to like it, there’s no going back!
A bowl of Bún Riêu and iced tea will set you back 47,000 VND (£1.55 or $1.93).
Bún Nước Tôm Bò Trứng
Bún Nước Tôm Bò Trứng is a hearty noodle soup full of beef, noodles, sliced spring onions and topped with a still runny poached egg. In fact it’s name literally translates to all its ingredients, with Bún meaning noodle, Nước meaning soup, Tôm meaning shrimp, Bò meaning beef and Trứng meaning egg.
The broth is completely different to the more delicate pho broths with a massive punch of pepper and a sweetness from the prawn ball. As soon as the bowl hits your little table, make sure to break the egg and mix the runny yolk in with the broth to make a creamy, peppery, rich soup.
We stumbled upon these two bowls, down a small alleyway off a busy thoroughfare in the heart of Ho Chi Minh. Busy with locals, school children and university students, this was a cheap (45,000k a bowl) delicious and filling start to the day. If you’re the adventurous sort we’d recommend tracking down a bowl from Bún Nước Cô Dung. The bowls are so good we’ve been back multiple times!
Vietnamese Summer Rolls
You can find these everywhere in Ho Chi Minh city, from the most high class restaurants to the aunty pushing her humble street cart. These rice paper wrapped goodies are perfect, cheap street snacks.
Like Banh Mi, summer rolls can be stuffed with a wide variety of fillings but the most common is fresh vegetables and herbs, slices of pork and prawn which are then rolled in a tight wrapper of gummy rice paper. The summer rolls are then dipped in a spicy, peanut sauce and devoured.
If you see them, just buy them! They cost practically nothing and are delicious.
We brought four summer rolls from a street seller for 10,000 VND (£0.33 or $0.41).
Bún Chả - Grilled Pork and Noodles
Bún Chả holds a special place in our hearts. Seven and a bit years ago (as of writing), we visited Vietnam for the very first time. We hadn’t spent much time in South East Asia and Vietnam was blowing our minds. During a torrential downpour that flooded Bui Vien Walking Street (Bui Vien Wading Street? I’m so sorry) with ankle deep water, we waded into Bún Chả 145 . There are seminal moments when travelling and eating, and seven years ago this was one of our big ones. We come from London and have eaten many dishes from many cuisines from all over the world, but we had never tasted the sweet, savoury soup, cold noodle, grilled pork and crunchy herb combination that was Bún Chả. The second we had our first mouthful we knew we were somewhere completely different, with a culinary tradition unlike anything we had eaten before.
Okay, at this point we should back up and actually tell you what Bún Chả is.
Bún Chả is traditionally a north Vietnamese dish, but can be found throughout Ho Chi Minh city. The table starts with a familiar array of herbs and white rice noodles. This is shortly joined by small pucks of sweet grilled pork patties, diced garlic and chillies and a bowl of dipping sauce. Mixing in the diced garlic and chilli to your tastes, you then take your chopsticks and dip in the grilled pork, noodles or any of the green accompaniments and munch away.
This dipping sauce is where the magic happens. Sweet, yet garlicky, salty and spicy, this is a completely unique flavour. The sauce clings to whatever you dip in it and makes it ten times more delicious. We’re pretty sure you could dip cardboard into this sauce and it would still be yummy, so just imagine how good perfectly grilled pork patties are when dipped in this delightful sauce.
For the true expert level of enjoyment, we recommend ordering a set of fried Vietnamese Spring Rolls. These bring an extra crunch and also pair wonderfully with the dipping sauce. We thought it might be nostalgia, so on this trip we went back to Bún Chả 145 and can happily report that the restaurant is still there and still excellent. As it is located on Bui Vien Walking Street in District 1, it is more expensive than other Bún Chả outlets, but it is still well worth the money.
One plate of Bun Cha, a portion of Spring Rolls and a Beer Saigon Special set us back 128,000 VND (£4.22 or $5.25).
Ben Nghe Street Food Market - A Beginner Friendly Exploration of Vietnamese Food
Ho Chi Minh is a chaotic city and can be intimidating for a newcomer, especially if it is the first Vietnamese city you fly into. If you are not quite ready to order blindly in unnamed back alleys or just wander off into far flung districts, we do actually recommend the tourist street food market in District One. We do not normally love these tourist specific food things, but the Ben Nghe Street Food Market really is good fun. It is a great way to sample foods from across Vietnam without being overwhelmed by scooters, crowds and menus in Vietnamese. It is also, coincidentally to our enjoyment, one of the cheaper places to buy beer in the city (one bottle of Saigon Green costs 20000VND or £0.66 / $0.82)!
We are not gatekeepers for food and although we would definitely recommend moving outside of the tourist areas of District One, Ben Nghe Street Food Market allows the wary to dip their toes before taking the dive! That all being said, we have found Ho Chi Minh/Saigon to be incredibly friendly, safe and fun to explore.
Vietnamese food is famous for a reason. Cheap, delicious and with endless variety, Ho Chi Minh provides an amazing grazing playground for the culinary explorer! We ate so much more than this list can contain. From pork noodles with a poached egg floating in the broth, to steaming bowls of beef and carrot stew sat on the street as well as a very memorable night of eating frog, mouse and rabbits with the locals at a barbeque drinking restaurant. Open your mind and mouth and Ho Chi Minh city will provide!
For those short on time or those who just want to cram as much food as possible into one evening, we'd recommend taking a street food tour in the city.
Check out some of the options below:
We had an amazing time a few years ago zipping around the city on the back of a scooter enjoying some lesser known treats of Ho Chi Minh.
Thanks for reading,
John & Ellie x
#adventuresofjellie
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