What to eat in Vietnam, city by city

Vietnam is one of the few countries where the best meal of your trip costs about 40,000 dong, near two US dollars. You eat it on a plastic stool. The mistake travellers make is not where they eat. It is ordering the same three dishes in every city, in places where those dishes are somebody else's speciality.

What to eat in Vietnam has a different answer in each city, and the answers are worth knowing before you sit down.

How far apart are these kitchens?

About 1,150 km between Hanoi and Saigon, with Hue and Hoi An in the middle. That distance is why the food changes: the north is cooler and cooks plainer, the centre inherited an imperial court cuisine, and the south is warmer, sweeter and closer to the delta's produce.

A dish that travels the full length usually changes its name somewhere along it.

Why does the same dish taste different in Hanoi and Saigon?

Vietnamese cooking shifts as you move south: restrained in the north, spicy through the centre, sweet in the south. The gradient is consistent enough to predict. Northern kitchens aim for a clear broth and precise seasoning. Central kitchens use chilli as a main ingredient rather than a garnish. Southern kitchens reach for sugar and coconut milk.

A bowl of pho shows the whole thing in miniature. In Hanoi it arrives close to finished, and adding much to it is beside the point. In Ho Chi Minh City the same bowl comes with a plate of herbs, bean sprouts, lime and chilli. Hoisin and sriracha sit on the table. The southern bowl is assembled by you rather than handed to you.

The split has a date. Vietnam was partitioned in 1954 after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and close to a million northerners moved south of the 17th parallel. Pho went with them and picked up the herbs and sauces of the south along the way.

The northern bowl and the southern bowl are equally authentic pho. The northern one is the dish at home and the southern one is the dish after it emigrated.

What should you eat in Hanoi?

Bun cha, cha ca and pho, in that order of local pride. Hanoi is the home of pho, which makes it the one city where ordering the famous dish is also ordering the local one.

Bun cha is the meal to prioritise: grilled pork patties in a bowl of sweet-sour fish sauce broth. Cold rice noodles and a pile of herbs come alongside, to dip. Most bun cha places trade roughly between 11am and 2pm and then close, so it is a lunch plan rather than a dinner one. It is also the best introduction to grilled food, which is half of what a Vietnamese evening smells of.

Cha ca is turmeric-marinated fish fried at your table with dill and spring onion, and it is a sit-down dish rather than a street one. Our things to do in Hanoi guide covers where the old quarter's food streets sit relative to everything else.

What should you eat in Hue and Hoi An?

Bun bo Hue in Hue, and cao lau in Hoi An — neither travels well. Central Vietnam is where the cooking gets serious about chilli, and both dishes are tied closely to the city they come from.

Bun bo Hue is a beef and pork noodle soup built on lemongrass and chilli. Hue was Vietnam's imperial capital from 1802 to 1945 and cooked accordingly. Compared with pho the bowl is louder in every direction.

Cao lau is genuinely local to a single town. Thick chewy noodles, slices of pork, fresh greens, and only a few spoonfuls of broth at the bottom. Tradition ties the noodles to water drawn from the Ba Le well in Hoi An, which is why the dish rarely appears elsewhere.

Mi Quang, from the surrounding Quang Nam province, is its close relative: turmeric-yellow noodles, barely any broth, peanuts and a sesame rice cracker on top.

What should you eat in Ho Chi Minh City?

The one thing sold in every city on this list is banh mi, and the bread rather than the filling is what makes it Vietnamese.

Com tam and banh mi. Southern food is the sweetest of the three regions and the most generous with herbs. Ho Chi Minh City is where the country's street food is at its most varied, and where both of these dishes are at home. The city's late-night bowls, hu tieu and banh canh, fill the hours the breakfast kitchens do not.

Com tam is the city's own dish, built on broken rice: grains fractured during milling, once sold cheap because they were the leftovers. It leads a whole family of Vietnamese rice dishes that feed more of the country daily than the noodle soups do. A grilled pork chop goes on top, with pickles, a fried egg and a small bowl of fish sauce. Lunch food, eaten fast, sold everywhere.

Banh mi is the other one to order here rather than at home. The bread is the point. Vietnamese baguettes usually cut the wheat flour with rice flour, which gives a lighter crumb and a crust thin enough to shatter. Inside goes pate, cold cuts, pickled carrot and daikon, coriander and chilli.

Fresh rice-paper rolls are goi cuon, and they are a different dish from the fried cha gio despite sharing an English name. The spring rolls page covers which is which and which sauce belongs with each. Goi without the cuon is something else again: the shredded salads that open most shared meals.

Which dish belongs where?

Eight dishes, each at home in one city or region. Ordering the local one is the single change that most improves eating in Vietnam. The table below is the whole rule: the left column is what to say, the middle is where to say it.

Ordering off this list roughly follows the route in our ten-day itinerary, which is no coincidence. The route follows the regions, and so does the food.

Bun cha: what is in the bowl of broth?

Grilled pork — patties and belly slices — sitting in a warm bowl of diluted fish sauce with pickled kohlrabi and carrot, alongside cold rice vermicelli and a plate of herbs. You assemble each mouthful yourself.

• Order it in — Hanoi, and nowhere else does it as well. Of everything on the what-to-eat-in-Vietnam list, this is the dish people fly back for.
• When — lunch, and most of the good places close by two.
• Price — 40,000 to 70,000 dong, usually with a plate of nem to share.
• How to eat it — noodles and herbs into the broth bowl a little at a time, not all at once.

Cha ca: why is it cooked at the table?

Because it is a dish of timing. Turmeric-marinated fish arrives in a hot pan with a mound of dill and spring onion, and the point is to fry the greens down at your own table and eat it while it steams. The cha ca page covers the marinade, the fish and which address on the street is worth the money.

• Order it in — Hanoi, where a street is named after the restaurant that made it.
• What comes with it — rice noodles, peanuts, herbs and mam tom, the fermented shrimp paste.
• Price — 150,000 to 250,000 dong a person, which makes it the expensive one on this page.
• If mam tom defeats you — ask for fish sauce instead, which every kitchen expects.

Cao lau: why can it only be made in Hoi An?

Because of the water. The noodles are traditionally made with water from one set of wells in the town and ash from a specific island, which is why the dish never travelled the way pho did.

• Order it in — Hoi An, from the market or an old-town shophouse.
• What arrives — thick chewy noodles, slices of pork, greens, croutons of fried noodle, and almost no broth.
• Price — 30,000 to 60,000 dong.
• What it is not — a soup. If a bowl arrives swimming, it is not cao lau.

When does each meal happen?

Earlier than most visitors expect. Breakfast runs from about 6am and the good stalls sell out before 10; lunch is roughly 11 to 1; dinner starts around 6 and many family places close by 9. What each of those meals costs is in eating cheap in Vietnam.

A visitor eating on a European clock misses the best of all three, which is the most common reason people report Vietnamese food as merely fine.

How do you choose a stall?

Follow turnover, not decor. A stall selling one dish all day cooks it more often than any restaurant nearby. It also sells to people who work there rather than to visitors.

Three signals do most of the work. A visible queue of locals means ingredients are turning over rather than sitting. Cooking to order in front of you beats a tray of something assembled earlier. And a stall with one item on the sign usually beats a laminated menu offering thirty, because thirty dishes cannot all be fresh.

Eating this way is also the cheapest part of the trip. Food barely moves a Vietnam budget in either direction, as our guide on what a week costs sets out. Eating well here is a decision about curiosity rather than money.

What should you ask before you order?

Ask what the place is known for, because Vietnamese food stalls specialise to a degree that restaurants elsewhere do not, and the question is understood almost everywhere even without much shared language.

The other habit worth forming is che in the afternoon. Vietnamese desserts are a cold bowl of beans and coconut milk rather than a pudding, and they are what the heat is for.

The answer is usually the thing to eat, and it is usually not the thing you were about to order.

One group of dishes reaches English menus under a single misleading word. Vietnamese pancakes separates banh xeo from banh khot and banh cuon, which are three different things sold in three different regions.