Vietnamese street food, cart by cart

Vietnamese street food is not one trade but a dozen. A cart sells one thing, its owner has made that thing for years, and the menu board is the whole business plan. Knowing which cart sells what is most of the skill.

How does street food work in Vietnam?

Vietnamese street food is sold by specialists rather than by generalists. A cart, a cabinet or a low table sells one dish or one family of dishes, and the sign above it names that dish and nothing else — the menu words page covers what those words mean.

One stall, one dish is why a street can look like twenty identical stalls and be twenty different restaurants. The pho stall does not sell banh mi and the banh mi cart does not sell pho.

Prices sit between 20,000 and 60,000 dong for almost everything, and the transaction is usually cash, spoken, and over in two minutes.

Which carts are worth stopping at?

Stop where Vietnamese people are eating and where one dish is being made repeatedly. Turnover is the whole quality signal: a busy stall cooks and sells within minutes, and a quiet one has had the same pot open since morning.

Look for the specialist. A cart selling banh mi, pho, spring rolls and fried rice is a cart selling none of them well, and it is usually pointed at visitors.

The street food safety guide covers the stomach question in detail, and the short version is that busy is safer than clean-looking.

What do the different carts sell?

The banh mi cart is a glass cabinet on wheels with a charcoal or gas warmer, and the sandwich is built in front of you in about ninety seconds. The banh mi page covers what goes in one.

The xoi seller carries baskets on a shoulder pole or sets them on a bicycle, selling sticky rice in a banana leaf from before dawn. The xoi page explains the savoury and sweet versions.

Soup carts run a stock pot, a noodle basket and a herb tray: pho in the morning, hu tieu and bun rieu through the day, and the bowl is assembled to order.

How do you order if you speak no Vietnamese?

Point, hold up fingers for how many, and say cam on at the end. That covers ninety per cent of street food transactions and nobody minds.

Two phrases help: khong cay for not spicy and mang di for takeaway. The phrase guide has the short list worth learning.

Prices are usually on the board. Where they are not, asking bao nhieu — how much — before eating removes the only real friction in the whole business.

What does a day of street food cost?

A full day costs 150,000 to 250,000 dong, which at about 26,000 dong to the US dollar is six to ten dollars. Breakfast at 35,000, a banh mi at 25,000, a bowl of noodles at 50,000 and two iced coffees at 25,000 each.

Street food is the cheapest way to eat well in Vietnam and also the best, which is the argument the cheap eating guide makes with the full arithmetic.

Restaurants cost two to five times that for the same dishes cooked by people who learned them from the same carts.

When does each cart trade?

Street food runs to a timetable that catches visitors out. Breakfast carts open before six and are gone by ten; bun cha is lunch only; grilled stalls and seafood come out after four; che and sinh to trade all day and into the night.

The good stalls sell out rather than closing, which is why an eleven o'clock search for pho finds a restaurant instead of a kitchen. The breakfast guide sets out the morning end of that clock.

Night markets and pavement grills run past midnight in the cities, and the nightlife guide covers where. In Da Lat the evening snack is banh trang nuong, rice paper grilled with egg over charcoal.

Where is the street food best?

Ho Chi Minh City has the most variety and the longest hours, Hanoi has the strongest specialists, and Hue has the fussiest small dishes. Each city's list is different, and the city-by-city guide maps them.

Da Nang and Hoi An sit in between, with the central dishes — mi quang, cao lau, banh beo — that barely travel.

Wherever you are, the rule is the same: one cart, one dish, and a queue of people who work nearby.