Picking the Best Eats in Hanoi Streets

Picking the Best Eats in Hanoi Streets

The streets of Hanoi: a live, bustling area packed with tons of history, culture, religion and tempting culinary treats. The place is becoming a more and more popular destination for food lovers. In every street and corner, and even in the most tucked alleys, you will find food stalls sitting along each other, brewing something good. The air is filled with a mix of different aroma, and whatever tickles your tastebuds, you simply have to find which stall it comes from.

Pho, known as the country’s National dish, is a bowl of rice noodles in savory broth with a variety of meat and herbs. It is the signature dish of Hanoi where soup is a way of life. As you walk through its alleys, the empty bowls, crumpled napkins and squeezed limes on tiny plastic tables are symbols of a good meal and a life well lived.

Deep in the Old Quarter, a collection of 36 tightly knit streets that retain the layout and much of the architecture of early 20th century ${bigcity_Hanoi:"Hanoi"}, is a great place to stroll along while looking for a place to satisfy your cravings. Each street in the Old Quarter attracted and was named for a type of artisan or merchant, such as silk traders, jewelry makers or blacksmiths, and many of the streets retain these clusters, although commercialism and a thriving tourist trade now define much of the quaint area.

But the abundance of options makes looking for the perfect bowl of Pho a tricky one. It's a quest that will lead you through the city's back alleys, grand French-influenced boulevards and tucked-away neighborhoods. But it’s the same hunt that will acquaint you with more of Hanoi’s interesting history, religion, art and everyday life.

So how do you pick the best food in a place packed with tempting treats, and all looks as inviting as the ones cooked on the next stall? Foodies have developed some tricks in easily landing on the right stall. It’s always good to explore, but for food enthusiasts, nothing beats devouring the best of the best treats. If they want to enjoy a pho, they have to make sure they are sitting in front of the best bowl in the entire street.

Food enthusiasts have learned a few tricks. When looking for the best treats, look for the stands favored by elderly Vietnamese - they know quality when they taste it. Being around these streets for quite a while, they certainly know which pho will delight your appetite and which bun cha will never disappoint you.

In 2010, the website Sherman's Travel ranked Hanoi, Vietnam's second-largest city after ${bigcity_Ho_Chi_Minh_City:"Ho Chi Minh City"}, as the No. 2 foodie destination in the world, behind Barcelona, Spain, and ahead of Rome and Tokyo. In March of 2012, CNN Go named Hanoi as one of the top 10 Asian cities with the best street foods. IN the same report, it labeled Hanoi as one of the world's great food capitals, a street-eater's paradise.

A bowl of soup on the street in Hanoi usually sells for VND15,000-25,000 (72 cents to about US$1.20 ), how much more interesting can it get? You see, a bowl of simple and comparatively bland pho ga (with chicken) or pho bo (with beef) at the elegant French colonial Hotel Metropole would cost you about US$12.50.