HN enters Top 20 best food tours around the world

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According to The Guardian, once you love Vietnam, you’ll love its food forever, too. 

Aussie expat Mark Lowerson has loved it for 17 years and, along with partner Vang Cong Tu, navigates plastic-stool eating around town as Hanoi Street Food Tours. 

Mark explains color and texture in Vietnamese food, talks of Chinese, French, and American influence on the country’s cuisine, and walks foodies through a wet market glistening with fish, and decodes the food offerings at temples while ambling through holy grounds. 

After banh đa ca (soup made with tea-colored noodles from Haiphong), and banh cuon (minced pork and wood-ear mushrooms in rice crepes, sprinkled with fried shallots) dipped in a sauce that balances salt, sweet, spice and sour flavors using ingredients such as chilli and kalamansi, the balance tips towards sweet. 

Take coffee in a tiny cafe where the floor is littered with pumpkin seed shells, and tuck into heavenly soft and chewy black fermented sticky rice with frozen yoghurt (sua chua nep cam).

Besides Ha Noi, other Asian destinations included Tokyo with a street-side takoyaki (fried octopus ball) stall that sells takoyaki “sandwiches”; Vientiane with aromatic khao lam (sticky rice, coconut milk, and taro stuffed in bamboo),  Bangkok with young coconut ice-cream./.  

By Kim Loan