A Foodie’s Guide to Hanoi, Vietnam. 

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Vietnam has become one of my favorite countries to visit in recent years and that is for one reason: the food. I think the Vietnamese cuisine is the best in Southeast Asia (sorry, Thailand and Malaysia!). I love that it is mainly rice flour based, full of fresh herbs, with THE best pork, and some seriously good bread and pastries thanks to their history with the French. 

Which is the best city in Vietnam to eat? Some will argue for Ho Chi Minh while others say the food in Hanoi is the yummiest. Maybe both can be true? Personally, I prefer the food in Hanoi if only because of the best Vietnamese dish ever: Bun Cha Hanoi. 

Read more:

Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh – A Vietnam City Trip

Where to eat in Hanoi? Well, you will be spoiled for choice. While Hanoi street food reigns supreme, the smaller the stool the better the food, there are plenty of great authentic restaurants too. Even with regular sized chairs. In this post, I will share my favorite Hanoi street food tours with you and the restaurants that I love. 

Food in Hanoi – the best tours & great restaurants

Recommendations for a street food tour Hanoi 

Are you nervous about street food? Don’t be! Street food in Hanoi is incredible! But don’t just take my word for it instead book a street food tour with an expert that will show you to the best food spots and markets in Hanoi. 

Doing a Vietnamese street food tour will show you a curated selection of stalls and small restaurants. Your guide will also explain more about the culture and history of the different dishes, explain dining etiquette, and of course, translate. This way, you can be sure to eat some truly authentic dishes and won’t have to worry about hygiene and what the food will do to your belly (except fill it nicely). 

Street food tours are also a great option when you are traveling alone. This way you will avoid the dreaded dinner for one and maybe even make some new friends. 

Read more:

How to avoid getting sick when traveling (and eating) 

A Chef’s Tour

Who would know better where to find the best Hanoi food than a Hanoi chef, right? If you are looking for a truly unique food tour in Hanoi, you have to book with A Chef’s Tour. What is so special about it? Well for starters you will leave at 4 am. Yes, you read this correctly. Because between the middle of the night and in the early morning is when the magic happens at the Hanoi markets. 

Chef Duyên is a city legend and has already shown Gordon Ramsey where to find the best food in Hanoi. Together you will head to some of the most interesting markets in Hanoi like the Long BienMarket, a huge wholesale market. The wee hours are as busy as it gets and it is the perfect time to try the first snacks and of course, a good Vietnamese coffee to wake up. Make sure to wear solid shoes as things can get … gooey for lack of a better word. 

From one market you will head to the next and hopefully find the lady with the omelet cart for a first breakfast. Then it is time for a rice snack eaten from a paper newspaper and up next finally pho. Of course, there is also bun cha, eaten at a little local spot where the owner is grilling tender pork meatballs on the fire at the side of the road. The tour concludes with what Chef Duyên considers the best banh mi in town and of course, more coffee. 

While you head from one market to the next, she will explain the ingredients, famous dishes, and the history of the markets and culinary scene in Hanoi. If you consider yourself a true foodie, this tour is for you – chances are, you won’t see another tourist during your morning at all. Vendors even asked Chef Duyên why she took me to the market instead of taking me to a nice mall… 

I absolutely loved the tour and getting up early was so very worth it. However, this tour is not for the faint-hearted. While the food you will try is not exotic, you will see some things you may not have seen before at a market. For example, you will start your trip at the “beef market” which is quite graphic. As are the other markets with their buckets of crabs and eels, frogs, and yes, dogs (luckily, I saw only one). The produce at these markets is as fresh as it gets but that goes for the meat as well. And chances are you will also see a few animals that you might not be used to seeing as an ingredient. 

Don’t worry – this dog is not meant to be eaten, it is the very spoilt corgi at the pho restaurant we went to!

With that said, this Hanoi food tour is not for vegetarians or vegans or if you are very squeamish. For everyone else, pack your camera – a feast for the senses and your stomach awaits! 

Book A Chef’s Tour Hanoi here

Guided Street Food Tour with Train Street Experience

After my early morning chef’s tour, I decided that I wanted another tour to find out where to eat in Hanoi’s Old Quarter and also see the infamous Train Street. So I spontaneously booked a “Guided Street Food Tour with Train Street Experience” that had gotten really good reviews and was quite inexpensive. 

It was just me and another couple with our wonderful guide Jelly. While I was a bit concerned that I would get the typical must-try food in Hanoi – bun cha & co – I was pleasantly surprised that we basically ate all new to me dishes. At our first stop, I got a lesson in Vietnamese noodles and learned that pho actually doesn’t refer to the soup but rather the noodles in the soup. This means you can have pho without the broth and it comes in many other dishes too (this was a revelation to me as I usually find broth-based dishes a bit boring). We tried “Phở trộn”, which is dry mixed pho and so much better than the brothy version. 

After we moved on to eat “Bánh xèo”, the only dish I actually knew. Crispy pancakes are cut into slices and rolled into rice paper. Then we headed to the famous “Bánh cuốn” lady. She makes steamed rice rolls with mushrooms and crispy shallots on top. Those were my favorite and the lady while slightly intimidating looking even complimented my chopstick skills as I ate the fried shallots one by one. 

At this point, I was getting full but there was more: sticky rice with toppings, egg coffee or salted coffee as well as coconut ice cream with sticky rice. Depending on your guide, the route and dishes may change but you will definitely get to eat some of the best food in Hanoi. 

Once we were done feasting, Jelly took us to the famous Hanoi Train Street. Yes, the Train Street Hanoi is open for business. On the left and the right side of the tracks are plenty of bars and cafes where you can have a drink while you wait for the main act: the train coming through. The bar owners make sure that everyone is off the tracks and safe and make a bit of a show of it to keep the waiting customers entertained. There have been accidents in the past so they are quite strict when the train arrives. Still, you will be incredibly close and it is a fun experience. Make sure to put a coin on the tracks for a cool souvenir! While there is an official train schedule, it can run late. We were there around 8 pm and saw the train twice, once in each direction. 

A nice touch of this tour – your guide will send you the names of what you ate and the restaurants as well as give you recommendations on where to eat in Hanoi. 

Book Hanoi street food tour with Train Street Visit

Best places to eat in Hanoi

There are plenty of great restaurants in Hanoi for your culinary journey. How to find a good one? I like to peruse the Michelin guide online. They not only feature fine dining restaurants in Hanoi and those with an actual star rating but also smaller venues or even street food stalls that they recommend. Below you will find some places to eat in Hanoi that I recently tried and liked. 

Maison 1929

Maison 1929 is a sister restaurant of the Hanoi institution Chào Bạn. As the name implies it is located in a house from 1929 and offers two floors and a balcony seating. While they consider their cooking modern Vietnamese, Maison 1929 is probably best known for their spring rolls. Especially their crab rolls are well-liked. 

Now, I am a huge fan of Vietnamese spring rolls. While I tend to find them too oily and tasteless in most other countries, they are crispy, juicy, and just so very yummy in Vietnam. The crab spring rolls I ordered at Maison 1929 were no exception though I will say, the crab got a bit lost. That said, I ordered a banana leaf salad to start with. If you have never eaten a banana leaf salad you have missed out – it is one of the best things to eat in Hanoi! The fact that banana leaves are apparently a superfood only makes it better but seriously, try it – it is delicious: crunchy, slightly sweet, tangy, and just morish. 

Luk Lak

Madame Binh has been a legendary chef at the Hanoi Sofitel Legend for 25 years. After she started her own business first in Da Nang and in 2018 in Hanoi – Welcome to Luk Lak. 

The restaurant is located close to the Hanoi Opera and at home in a beautiful building, designed in what they call “modern Indochine” architecture. The menu offers an eclectic mix of traditional and modern Vietnamese food with a strong emphasis on seasonal flavors thanks to a special seasonal menu. 

If you wanted something a little more unusual, go for the spring rolls with snails or the braised flying fish roe in a clay pot. For carnivores they have stuffed pigeon with sticky rice, lots of pork belly dishes, and my new favorite – grilled duck and pork meatballs with herbs and rice noodles. For a city favorite, order their version of bun cha. 

While you can’t compare the prices with those of street food, they are definitely affordable and the portion sizes are generous. Perfect to order a few different dishes and share! They also have a nice selection of non-alcoholic ice teas and juices – I liked my tamarind concoction with dried sour plum. 

Pizza 4P’s

There comes a time during every traveler’s trip when they say – no more tagine! This happened on my Morocco group trip but actually, this can happen in any country and you can substitute tagine with noodles, fried rice, spring rolls, or in this case the whole amazingness that is food in Hanoi. 

You may just want something familiar and homey, not necessarily to settle your stomach but maybe your soul. This is the time when most Vietnam travelers will head to Pizza 4P. Actually, scratch this, most travelers will eventually head there because the pizza is just so damn good. They have locations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh as well as some other cities, and you can order via Grab. 

One Hanoi restaurant is in Bao Khanh northwest of the Hoan Kiem Lake, and the other is in Tràng Tiền to the southeast of the lake. There are a few more but I reckon those are the ones you may visit if you are staying around the lake or in the old quarter. 

They are known for their pizza with a whole burrata on top though my favorite was the spicy garlic shrimp and salmon miso cream pizza. You can easily order a half-and-half as well. A highlight for Osaka fans is probably the seafood okonomiyaki pizza. They also make beautiful pasta like fettuccine with shrimp, mushroom & asparagus (and you know that I am a pasta snob!) and I was amazed by their green salad. It came with extra herbs, we are still in Vietnam after all, and a creamy pesto-dressing plus even the small portion was huge. 

Their restaurants tend to be quite busy even at odd times so I recommend you make reservations if you are with a group. Alternatively, I loved to order via Grab. Even the way everything is packaged is nice when you order from Pizza 4P’s. 

Bún chả Hương Liên

Some may call it a tourist trap and I say, that this is so unfair – wouldn’t you use it if President Obama and Anthony Bourdain had eaten at your restaurant? I know I would and the fact that it is mainly known as Bun Cha Obama really isn’t the restaurant’s making. For them to put the table where the two famous foodies shared their meal in a museum-like glass cube – genius! I think it is meant a bit tongue ’n cheek but regardless, good for them to have this claim to fame. 

Either way, the bun cha is still pretty good. It was one of my first bowls ever and comes with plenty of rice noodles, loads of herbs, tender pork, and fried seafood, crab or veggie rolls. You can choose from various combinations, some even including a beer. Make sure you do get the spring roll because it is very delicious. 

Bun Cha Ta Hanoi

Bun Cha Ta Hanoi is another institution when it comes to Hanoi Old Quarter restaurants. It is unassuming, to say the least, but the bun cha is spot on. 

There are only a few spots downstairs or you head upstairs where they have some long communal tables. You will need to take off your shoes as you are basically sitting on the floor with the tables below in the ground. They also offer various combinations – make sure to read the description – I ordered my bun cha without meatballs by mistake and had to reorder. 

While some say that the bun cha at Bun Cha Ta is a bit too sweet for their liking, I think it is great. The setting is also wonderful especially if you want an authentic meal in Hanoi and aircon at the same time. 

Need more food tips for your Vietnam trip? Find my Hoi An restaurant guide here.