An authentic Vietnamese food tour

With ever-increasing globalisation and mixing of cultures all around the world, you can essentially have any dish from any part of the globe, without having to leave your city—or can you?

In most cases, this is not true at all, and what you can have easily is more or less adapted to suit the taste of locals, make use of local ingredients (as some of the authentic items cannot be obtained and need to be substituted), or made by completely untrained chefs who are just trying to make a living from the latest trend. Being half Japanese and growing up in Australia, I was there to see the rise of sushi becoming popular, along with Japanese cuisine. It was extremely sad for me to see that many of these ‘Japanese’ restaurants weren’t even run by Japanese people, and the dishes were not even trying to be authentic—just making something which resembles Japan towards Australians such that they can make some money quickly using the ‘Japanese food’ brand. This got me thinking—is it only Japanese food which got butchered through local adaptation and popularisation?

How many Vietnamese dishes can you name, apart from Phở, rice paper roll, and Bánh mì?

For a long time, I thought that those dishes were all what’s Vietnamese food was about, because outside of Vietnam, these are the only dishes which became widespread in the world today. Especially phở has been getting a lot of attention recently, and is becoming a new craze (although I am a great fan of it and it’s what got me into Vietnamese food in the first place). But these dishes really only scrape the surface of Vietnamese cuisine, and in reality, there is so much more than just these which you see on the street everyday. My girlfriend, who is a local from Ho Chi Minh City, after spending a long time abroad—missing her local food very much—once went without having phở for three months! In this blog, I aim to provide a window into the deep and fascinating world of Vietnamese food, filled with spices, vegetables, meat and magic!

But how are dishes named in Vietnam?

Have you ever wondered went to a Vietnamese restaurant and wondered what phở tái, phở đặc biệt or bánh mì actually means? Or was confused by the difference between phở tái and phở bò? Well, it’s actually quite simple! Most Vietnamese dishes are just named from a combination their main ingredients, where it originated from, or how it’s prepared. For example, phở bò just comes from phở, which is a word for a type of flat, thick rice noodle, and bò, which is the word for beef. The word after phở changes with what’s added to the noodle (soup), where tái is used for the thinly sliced raw beef, and đặc biệt literally means ‘special’ but ‘combination’ or ‘the lot’ in context.