Fooding Around Hoi An

Around Hoi An

I still haven't got round to sorting out the hundreds of photos that I took whilst I was on holiday, but at a quick glance, I thought some of these around Hoi An came out rather nicely.


This is a shot of the old quarter from across the Thu Bon river. Most of the yellow painted shop houses now house restaurants and cafes catering for the hordes of tourists that descend upon this laid back town. It was relatively quiet when we turned up (non-peak season, perhaps?) but we did bump into a few large tour groups around.

The colourful silk lanterns are one of Hoi An's specialities (besides the tailors and cobblers ;) and they really are very pretty. I was very tempted to buy one (they do collapse down to make it easier to travel with) but I was already carrying so much more clothes ... maybe next time. The foot that you can see at the bottom of the photo belongs to the shopkeeper who was having a leisurely nap in the afternoon heat - when all the tourists flock back to their hotels to lie by the pool.

A picture of our hotel courtyard. Our room was the one next to the big umbrella. It was lovely and totally peaceful. Also, really laid back like much of Hoi An.

Breakfasts at Ha An

As the hotel offered breakfast as part of all their deals, we tucked into breakfast every morning and lovely they were too. I had heard that the choices were good when I read up on the reviews of this hotel and quite right they were. Buffet style (yay..pig out time! haha), the choices weren't as good as what you'll find in a big chain 5* hotel but I was kept happy enough. There was a variety of bread and spreads, cereals, juices, lots of fresh local fruit, an egg and pancake station, a hot food section with daily local and western specials and a dessert counter - yes, chocolate cake and creme caramel for breakfast :)


Here's one of my plates from our first morning (yes, I went for more than one round - that's the great thing about buffets!). At the top of the plate, I got salad,cold meats and cheese. The meat on the left looked and tasted very much like Spam - good thing I like Spam then ;D I think Jo was a little disgusted at it and even more so at the amount I consumed over the course of the next few days. The yellow-y pile at the bottom right of the plate was baked potatoes with onions and cheese. Trust me it was sooooo yummy. Next to it a bit of bacon and to left half a minced pork filled grilled tomato. Oh wow! It just tasted so yummy and comforting. I think it just reminded me of the soups I used to get as a child - chicken, onions, carrots, tomatoes - emmm... I think after days of non-stop Cambodian and Vietnamese food, Jo and I were very pleased to have something different.


Day 2 - the salad makes an increased appearance on my plate. As Jo and I were quite often going without lunch, I made sure I had a good breakfast - well, I was being greedy and Jo was still eating so much less because of the heat. I was really enjoying the salads with cold meats I was having. The hotel also made a lovely vinaigrette with oil, balsamic vinegar and shallots. Very yummy and it went on all my salads.

This salad made an appearance on our last morning - water spinach salad, which was so good. I would never have thought to eat this vegetable raw. In Malaysia it's either fried with garlic or belachan, shrimp paste that smells heavenly to some or the dumpster to others. I've also had it boiled, served with brown squid and a peanut sauce over it .. ergh..no, thanks! In this salad, the water spinach was mixed with thin slices of tomatoes, white onion, croutons and some other salad leaves. It was crunchy without a 'raw' taste and went well with the onions and tomatoes. I dressed mine with my usual vinaigrette and it went down a treat.

Street Food

We did grab some street food (not as much as we liked to have had) but what we did get was good and simple. There were a few times I was just too hungry to take a photograph of what I was eating. I just shoving the food down until it was too late


Cao Lau - a Hoi An specialty. What makes this dish so special is the yellow noodles used, made from well water which gives it its special flavour. Topped with cha siew (roast pork), beansprouts, bean shoots and crispy pieces of dough. Flavoured with fish sauce, soy sauce, garlic and pepper. My only complain - the serving was too small :)


We also had a serving Banh Xeo that really didn't come up to scratch. Thin crepes made with rice flour, turmeric and coconut milk/water and filled with bean sprouts, minced pork and bits of prawns. This was served with fresh herbs (in this case slightly wilted), rice paper and nuoc nam (fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water and bits of chili). The pancakes were minuscule and nowhere near crispy enough.

Bits here and there

Apologies, but here's the bits where I couldn't quite find a suitable tag for :(

We received complimentary fruit every morning from the hotel but couldn't quite get ourselves to eat it every day. On our last day I decided to try out my knife that I bought from the market :D A little knife that doubles as a peeler. My knife worked well but the fruit didn't taste quite as good. They were definitely giving us better stuff at breakfast! On the right - the black spotted fruit sitting on the gaudy pink skin is dragon fruit - yup, the stuff I can't stand on the grounds that it doesn't taste like anything much, not sweet nor sour...pointless use of calories my stepmother would say LOL The orange-yellow slices next to it are mango. I usually love mango but these weren't great. The green skin orange is the local orange which is supposedly sweet but these were so sour that both Jo and I had pinched expressions on our faces when we had a segment each. Right at the top of the plate are slices of pear. Again, a real disappointment. Neither juicy or sweet. I hate to say this but most of this went into the bin. I'm not a fan of wasting food but these was no way any of this was going to get eaten anyway.


We had our last meal in Hoi An at our hotel. I ordered some fried wantons and did wonder why they were a bit on the pricey side. And the photo tells us why! Four huge pieces of wanton came smothered in a delicious prawn, mango, tomato and mushroom topping. I didn't even recognise this dish as wantons when it arrived but I had no regrets ordering it. The filling for the wanton was minuscule beneath the "sauce" but the wrapper was crispy and hot. The prawn and mango really complimented each other and as usual, as seafood goes in this town it seems, the prawns were crunchy and totally fresh, even though it had been cut into little pieces. If I remember correctly, there was also some black fungus in there (the same type the Chinese use in their cooking) which added more crunch.


I thought this little ornament of an orange monkey was quite cute. He came with my drink (long forgotten what it was) and I had half a mind to nick him but in the end he stayed put :)

Brother's Café, Hoi An

Shopping can be exhausting! But doing it in 35 degree (Celsius that is) heat and humidity, it can certainly wear down the most enthusiastic of us. So after much of our second day walking around town, Jo and I agreed to have quiet dinner at either the hotel restaurant or a restaurant we pass every time we walk up to the shops - Brother's Café. We opted for the latter when we walked out to dinner and little did we know that the ever quiet cafe was deceptively hiding a very busy restaurant behind in a French colonial building. Set in wonderfully lush well tended garden, the premises went down all the way to the river. It was very pretty with the central eating area set in a side building but as dinner service was in full swing, we were offered a candle-lit table by the river. Terribly romantic and very probably lost on the both of us :D This also wasn't going to be the cheap meal we had hoped for.


First up, drinks - an iced lotus tea for me and a banana smoothie for Jo. Probably a slightly odd choice of drink to go with a meal but she fell in love with banana smoothies when we served them when we checked into our hotel in Hanoi :) My tea was nice and refreshing in the muggy weather but as I'm no tea connoisseur, I didn't think it very different from the "normal" white/green teas. The fragrance wasn't as noticeable as jasmine tea, for example. Jo's smoothie was thick with blended bananas and she was happy with it.

We decided to have a plate of noodles each and get a side of veg to share. Jo got the crispy noodles with pork, which was stuffed full of pork and veg - snow peas, bamboo shoots, carrots, Chinese leaf, tinned button mushrooms and baby corn - sitting on a pile of deep fried egg noodles. Very tasty stuff with lots of "wok hei" - the smokey flavour a good hot wok imparts, if a little oily.

Our huge side of spicy stewed aubergine with vegetables came soaking in oil but was rather good. Big, soft chunks of aubergine and a variety of veg (quite similar to what went into the noodle dishes). It would have been lovely with some steamed rice.


I had the seafood fried noodles, which looks very much like the pork noodles that Jo was had. They were very generous with the seafood. Crunchy fresh prawns, squid and slices of fish. The veg was the same as the other portion of noodles with the addition of some dried shitake mushrooms. The sauce was ultra garlicky ... emm..ultra yummy.

It's no point coming here if you want a bargain meal but the food is very good, portions are huge, the ambiance is lovely and the waiting staff is very attentive. The house specialities are supposed to be the cau lau and white rose (prawn dumplings made from a translucent white dough and shaped like a rose) but we had that at stall in town for less a US dollar, so no point spending so much more at a place like this. We may have left with our purses a little lighter than had hoped but we had a really nice meal.

Mango Room, Hoi An

Our last stop - Hoi An. And we were in love!

Unlike the hustle and bustle of Hanoi and our bad experiences that we had in Hue, Hoi An was godsend. It's SO laid back and as we didn't wander out of the old town, really very charming. Another plus point, nearly every shop were either tailors or cobblers. They can make almost anything up from scratch for fraction of the cost of what you would get them for off the rack. Ahhhh Heaven! We didn't plan to get anything made but left two extra bags filled to the brim with clothes, clothes and more clothes... and a pair of boots each. Yes, hand-made boots that fit like a glove.

Dragging ourselves away from our oasis of a hotel (Ha An, which I would definitely recommend to anyone to who's heading out that way), we made our way to some food and ended up at Mango Room. Set up by a Vietnamese-American guy, it's quite a hip little place down by the river serving up some really good fusion food (so what isn't fusion nowadays?).

As we've been pretty good throughout this trip, we decided to reward ourselves with a couple of cocktails. Here's my mango mojito with lots of mint and ice. Could have been a little stronger on the alcohol front though.

Jo's passion fruit cocktail - not sure what it was but there was lime, passion fruit and ... rum? There's seems to be a trend here... me with my mango and Jo with her passion fruit :)

To accompany our drinks, a plate of nachos with salsa, which were on the house...I think. We could have been so sloshed by the end of the evening and not have noticed it on the bill..heh.. This dish was quite good - it wasn't amazing. Home-made (made in-house rather than brought in) tortilla chips with a salsa of tomatoes, onion, black beans and mango.

Next up, our shared starter of fresh rice paper rolls with prawn and mango served with a peanut based sauce. It was OK, not fantastic. The prawns were fresh and the mango, sweet. Nice combination but the sauce was a bit lacking...and Jo isn't a peanut fan. Bummer for her :(

My main course of pan fried fish (talapia?) with a of buttery sauce of onions, tomatoes and black pepper. Yup, black pepper was definitely up there as a main ingredient, which was the downfall for a very nice dish. The fish was very fresh, the taste was great but the little black crunchy flecks of pepper made this dish really spicy and quite unpleasant. It came served with boiled beans (boring) and a prettily wrapped parcel of rice vermicelli.

Jo's main of pan fried beef and prawn rolls. A little surf & turf going on there and it was delicious! Thin slices of tender beef wrapped around whole plump prawns. I really regretted not getting this dish for myself - yes, it was that damn tasty. However, the heavy hand of pepper stuck again. You can see bits of black pepper everywhere! What a shame ... both mains could have been real winners. This was served with the same beans and rice vermicelli.

Dessert? Who needs dessert when there's cocktails :D Here we have a twist on the Spanish classic of sangria - passion fruit sangria. It was like drinking fruit juice with lots of fruity bits in it - watermelon, dragon fruit, slices of lime and passion fruit. Emm yummy!

The meal wasn't cheap at around £10-15 per person if memory serves me correctly. But they're serving to foreigners like us who'll happily send too much money on holiday and we left pretty damn happy - ahh..thank you alcohol..happy days :)