How to Experience Vietnamese Cuisine Like a Local

The most important rule of eating in Vietnam is also the simplest: go where the locals go.

This sounds obvious. It is, in practice, something most visitors find surprisingly hard to do — because the places where locals eat are often unmarked, sometimes require pointing at things you can't identify, and occasionally involve sitting on a plastic stool so low your knees are at shoulder height. The tourist restaurants are easier. They have English menus, air conditioning, and staff who speak enough to reassure you.

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They are also, almost without exception, worse.

Here is how to find the real thing.

Follow the motorbikes. In any Vietnamese city or town, the best street food stalls are identifiable by the number of motorbikes parked outside. Locals don't walk to lunch — they ride. A stall with twenty motorbikes parked in a chaotic heap is serving something worth eating.

Eat breakfast out. Vietnamese breakfast culture is extraordinary and almost completely invisible to visitors who sleep in and start their day at a hotel buffet. Phở is a morning dish in Hanoi — eaten between 6am and 9am, at stalls that have been open since before dawn. Bánh mì is a breakfast food. Bún bò Huế — the spicy beef noodle soup that Hội An locals consider superior to phở — is eaten before 8am or not at all at the best stalls.

Order what you see. If you don't know what something is, point at what the person next to you is having. This is universally understood and universally appreciated. Vietnamese people are proud of their food and will be pleased you want what they're eating.

Go to the market. Every town in Vietnam has a covered wet market where local vendors sell prepared food alongside fresh produce. The prepared food section — usually at the back or on an upper floor — is where you'll find dishes that don't exist on any restaurant menu: rice porridge cooked with offal, steamed rice cakes with shrimp paste, salads assembled to order from ingredients you've never seen before.

Eat slowly. Vietnamese meals are not rushed. Order one dish, finish it, order another if you're still hungry. Watch what arrives at other tables. Ask — through gestures if necessary — what it is. This is how you discover things.

The best meal you eat in Vietnam will almost certainly cost less than three dollars. It will be served by someone who has been cooking the same dish for thirty years. It will taste like nothing you have eaten before.

That is the point.