Rice is the ultimate asian grain and this place, Xoi Yen has the best bowl of Xoi Xeo by far! What is Xoi Xeo you ask? Well, it’s a mixture of yellow sticky rice with mung bean shavings and fried shallots topped with some sort of meat. What are mung bean shavings you ask? Well, it’s a giant yellow ball made of mashed up mung bean paste, which they take and shave like a block of cheese over your rice. Oh the joy!
They serve the dish with a side of spicy pickled cucumbers, perfect.
Then we’ve got rice noodles, dry with a sauce, crispy spring roll and meat. You take a little bit of the rice noodle, put it in the sauce so to soften them, take some fresh herbs and add it to the bowl. You can wrap a piece of the spring roll in a lettuce leaf and dip it in the sauce. You can just eat the noodles with the sauce cause it’s that good.
Square springs rolls that come with the dry noodles.
Then you’ve got rice noodle dumplings. Comes from Chinese cooking but it’s basically one sheet of noodle rolled up with meat inside and topped with fresh cilantro, fried shallots, nuts and you have a sauce. All amazingly delicious.
Another version of the dried noodled dish is to have it with grilled meat and over veggies, so it’s like a noodle meat salad with sauce. You can walk down so many allies and find them filled with “bun”.
And of course there’s pho, rice noodle soup. This time I had the beef variety and this woman and her meat, my goodness is it tasty tasty.
All this rice, you need a beverage.
And maybe a view.
Rice
I flew into Hanoi and before I even show you any pictures or tell you any stories. This is the best food experience I have had in an extremely long time. This is the kind of food you eat and when you’re finished you are so satisfied, nothing around you matters. I was on a food high the whole time. It was just as dirty, gritty, busy, loud, traffic-filled, as any other city in Southeast Asia but the old streets filled with food stalls, tea shops, old dudes drinking coffee, young dudes drinking beer, people smoking bamboo bongs, moto bikes skimming by seemed to all mesh into an incredibly amazing space that only echoed food.
Pho. For those of you who don’t know what Pho is, I think I’ll have to shoot you. I already love the stuff you can get from NYC Chinatown and Flushing, let alone the actual seriously authentic, coming out of the old lady’s kitchen in Vietnam, Pho. I can live off of noodle soup forever. I had pho constantly, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, afternoon tea, snack time… the first bowl I had was of the chicken variety. They have tons of these chicken soup places and it’s better than any chicken soup you’ll ever have.
I saw that all these motos were waiting in line for this street stall, so I decided to follow suit. And what did I end up with? Some magically deep fried thing.
Which ended up being deep fried gluton and it was so good.
Then there were all these local dessert spots. If any of you know what sesame mochi balls are, then you know what I’m talking about. Basically rice balls stuffed with a mash of black sesame seeds but what they do here is they have coconut shavings and nuts inside as well and the seeds aren’t all in paste form, there are whole bits and smashed up bits and it came in this really nice gingery sweet liquid.
I got the dessert on it’s own but you can have shaved ice or sweet rice with a variety of toppings like red bean, grass jelly, peanut sauce, etc.
First night was an extremely satisfying one.
Connie Sun 