If you said that all I do is eat all day, I think you wouldn’t be far from the truth!
This will be the last blog post about my trip to HCMC so I thought I’d talk about the food we enjoyed during our stay.
I don’t know a lot about Vietnamese food; all I know is that I love eating it here in Sydney, but I have no idea about what is authentic and what isn’t. I was really interested to see how the food over there was different to the food over here.
So my conclusion is, unlike others (like Italian and Chinese), the Vietnamese food in Sydney is a very good representation of what they have over in Vietnam (anyone is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, cos I’m no Vietnamese food expert
).
I’ve taken some pictures of some of the food places we ate at.
First up is PHO 2000 next to the corner of Ben Thanh Markets in District 1…. If its good enough for Bill Clinton, its good enough for me! They proudly hang the picture on the wall of Bill Clinton at PHO 2000. For me, this was the best Pho (beef noodle soup) we had in Vietnam. The broth is what makes or breaks a bowl of Pho, and this really was the best broth I have tasted anywhere. I’ve found that in general, the broth is sweeter in Vietnam than here in Sydney; the Pho 2000 broth was sweet, rich, and complex. It was very very tasty. I also rated the prawn spring rolls there very highly… makes my mouth water typing about it right now! PHO 2000 was so good we had to pay it one last visit before jumping on the plane back to Sydney.
The picture of the dried fish isn’t something I tried, but I saw it at the markets and thought it would make an interesting picture.
We stumbled across a little French Patisserie on the streets near our hotel. It was run by a French couple and they served Fanny ice cream and a variety of cakes. We ate here a few times just to get out of the heat and have some ice cream; my favourite was the coffee and rice. The cake in the picture is an Opera cake… it literally lasted 10 seconds with us all digging into it… a very yummy cake
Next up is a chain restaurant called Pho 24… Apparently 24 versions of Pho on their menu (I forgot to count)… its a chain with stores scattered all over the place… good, but not quite as good as Pho 2000.
Nha Hang Ngon was our favourite restaurant in HCMC… it was so good, we dined here multiple times! The restaurant was clean, the food was tasty, the price was very reasonable. Its hard to find a bad spring roll in Vietnam, and these didn’t dissapoint.. I rate the spring rolls as highly as the ones from Pho 2000; different, but just as good. Others in our group rated these spring rolls better than Pho 2000′s. At one meal, the 7 of us stuffed ourselves silly, and the bill came to $40USD… that’s right… under $6USD per person!
The last restaurant featured in this gallery is a place called Lemongrass. We found this place on a travel website and it rated really highly… the food definately was very very good, but I enjoyed Nha Hang Ngon more…. alright.. I enjoyed Nha Hang Ngon much more!
Lemongrass seemed to me like a tourist restaurant, it was busy all night but none of the diners looked to be local. The food was great, the service too was very good. The price, while still very cheap by Australian standards was expensive by Vietnam standards. We were all very amused that we had just dined on our first meal that cost almost 2 MILLION!I took a picture of the bill to celebrate. All up it cost around $14USD per person.
One thing that I forgot to take a picture of was the Banh Mi Thit (Vietnamese Pork Roll) that I had; it was so tasty I was too busy eating! I’ve always loved the Pork rolls from Cabramatta here in Sydney, but the Pork rolls in Vietnam were again better! They are much smaller than the ones we have here but the bread is unbelievable! So crunchy yet so soft, so tasty, the perfect snack…
Another thing I’ll mention is that I didn’t eat much street food… Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t want to eat something my stomach couldn’t handle and be stuck in the toilet for the duration of the trip. Everyday walking along the street I could smell all these different aromas floating out from the various street stalls, it was very tempting indeed, but I didn’t want to risk it… especially as the food (meat also) was not refrigerated and was left in the sun all day…
So thats about all I have to write about my recent trip to Vietnam; I really miss the place… and I think I’m suffering Vietnamese Spring roll withdrawal symptoms
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