Last updated September 3, 2026 · Editorial policy
Quick verdict: Vietnamese cuisine balances fresh herbs + fish sauce + sweet + sour + spicy + crunchy. Possibly the best food country on Earth at $30-55/day. This guide ranks 15 essential Vietnamese dishes.
More: When to visit Vietnam · Vietnam travel guide
The 15 best foods to eat in Vietnam
Pho
The broth is the whole dish: beef bones simmered for hours with charred ginger and onion, star anise, cassia and cloves, then poured boiling over flat rice noodles and raw sliced beef that cooks in the bowl. The north and south serve it differently. Hanoi keeps it austere — clear broth, spring onion, maybe a wedge of lime. Saigon sweetens the broth and brings a side plate of bean sprouts, Thai basil, hoisin and sriracha to build yourself. It is a breakfast food, and the best stalls sell out by mid-morning.
Banh Mi
The baguette is the French inheritance, but the Vietnamese version is its own bread: rice flour in the dough makes it lighter, with a thin crust that shatters instead of tearing at your gums. Inside is the balancing act — pâté and mayonnaise for fat, grilled pork or cold cuts for salt, then do chua (pickled carrot and daikon), cucumber, coriander and raw chilli to cut through it. Hoi An built its reputation on the sandwich, but the version from an unmarked cart outside a market is usually just as good for a dollar less.
Bun Cha
A Hanoi lunch, and unlike pho it arrives disassembled. You get a bowl of warm, diluted fish sauce holding grilled pork patties and fatty belly slices with slivers of pickled kohlrabi and green papaya, a plate of cold rice vermicelli, and a basket of herbs. You dip the noodles and herbs into the bowl a few strands at a time rather than combining everything. The smoke matters: the pork is grilled over charcoal on the pavement, which is why the good places announce themselves by smell before you see them.
Cao Lau
Hoi An’s dish and, by tradition, only Hoi An’s — the thick, chewy noodles are said to require water drawn from the town’s Ba Le well and lye ash from Cham Island, which is why versions elsewhere never taste quite right. It is barely a soup. A few spoonfuls of intensely savoury pork broth sit at the bottom, topped with slices of char siu-style pork, bean sprouts, fresh greens and crisp square croutons cut from the same dough as the noodles. Eat it in the old town for a couple of dollars.
Banh Xeo
Named for the sizzle it makes hitting the pan. A rice-flour batter turned yellow with turmeric and loosened with coconut milk is fried until the edges go lacy and brittle, then folded over pork, shrimp and bean sprouts. It arrives whole and you are meant to tear it apart, wrap each piece in mustard leaf or lettuce with a fistful of herbs, and dunk it in nuoc cham. Southern versions are large and shareable; in central Vietnam they are made small, several to a plate.
Bun Bo Hue
The imperial city’s answer to pho, and considerably louder. Beef and pork bones are simmered with lemongrass and fermented shrimp paste, then finished with chilli oil that leaves an orange slick on the surface. The noodles are thick and round rather than flat, and a proper bowl includes cubes of congealed pork blood and a section of pork knuckle alongside the beef shank. If pho is a quiet breakfast, this is a dish that wakes you up — more sour, more savoury and genuinely spicy.
Goi Cuon
Fresh, not fried — the fried ones are cha gio in the south and nem ran in the north, and confusing the two is the most common ordering mistake visitors make. Softened rice paper is rolled around poached shrimp and pork, rice vermicelli, lettuce and whole herbs, so the finished roll is translucent enough to see the pink shrimp through it. Dipped in a thick peanut-hoisin sauce in the south, or plain nuoc cham in the north. Light enough to order alongside something heavier.
Egg Coffee
Invented at Café Giang in Hanoi in 1946, when fresh milk was scarce and an egg yolk had to do the job instead. The yolk is whipped with condensed milk into a thick, warm meringue and floated on strong Vietnamese coffee, so the first sip is dessert and the last is bitter espresso. It is usually served in a small glass sitting in a bowl of hot water to stop the foam collapsing. The original café still operates down a narrow alley off Nguyen Huu Huan.
Banh Cuon
Breakfast, and worth getting up for. A thin rice batter is spread over a cloth stretched above a steaming pot, cooked in seconds, then lifted with a stick and rolled around minced pork and wood ear mushroom. The finished rolls are slippery and almost translucent, scattered with crisp fried shallots and served with nuoc cham and slices of cha lua pork sausage. Watching it made is half the appeal — the cook works fast enough that a full plate takes about two minutes.
Com Tam
Saigon’s signature plate, built on rice that was once considered a defect. Broken grains — fractured during milling and formerly sold cheap — turn out to hold sauce better than whole rice. The standard plate carries a lemongrass-marinated grilled pork chop, shredded pork skin tossed with toasted rice powder, and a steamed pork-and-egg loaf, with pickles, scallion oil and a small jug of nuoc cham to pour over everything. Add a fried egg. It is the most filling meal on this list for the money.
Bun Thit Nuong
A room-temperature noodle bowl and the right order on a hot afternoon, when soup is unappealing. Cold rice vermicelli goes in first, then lemongrass-marinated pork grilled over charcoal, cucumber, pickled vegetables, herbs and crushed roasted peanuts, often with a fried spring roll cut into lengths across the top. You pour the nuoc cham over the whole bowl and toss it yourself, which is the step visitors most often skip — undressed, it tastes flat.
Pho Cuon
A Hanoi invention from the Truc Bach lake area, and a good illustration of how the city reuses its own ingredients. Instead of cutting the fresh pho sheets into noodles, they are left whole and wrapped around stir-fried beef, lettuce and herbs, then served cold with a dipping sauce. The texture is the point — soft and slightly elastic, closer to a fresh spring roll than to anything in a soup bowl. It works as a starter or a light dinner in the streets around the lake.
Hu Tieu
A southern noodle soup with Chinese-Cambodian roots, and the most customisable dish here. The broth is clear pork bone rather than the spiced beef of pho, and you choose the noodle: chewy tapioca strands, egg noodles, or plain rice noodles. Toppings run to sliced pork, shrimp, quail eggs and offal. Order it kho and it arrives dry, the noodles dressed in sauce with the broth alongside in its own bowl — which is how most locals in Saigon take it.
Mi Quang
Central Vietnam’s regional dish, from Da Nang and the surrounding Quang Nam province, and it breaks the rule that Vietnamese noodles come in soup. Wide rice noodles stained yellow with turmeric sit in just enough intensely flavoured broth to coat them — a few spoonfuls, not a bowlful. Pork, shrimp or chicken go on top with peanuts and fresh herbs, and a round sesame rice cracker is snapped over the whole thing at the table. Eat it in Da Nang or Hoi An.
Vietnamese Iced Coffee
Vietnam is the world’s largest producer of robusta, and that is the whole explanation for how this tastes: robusta carries roughly twice the caffeine of arabica and a heavier, more bitter body. Coarse grounds go into a small metal phin filter set over a glass already holding condensed milk, and the coffee drips through slowly — four or five minutes, which is the intended pace. Stir it, pour it over ice, and expect something closer to iced dessert than to filter coffee.
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Updated 2026. Some links on Packzup are affiliate links.
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Written by
John Morrison is the founder and lead travel writer at Packzup. Over the past decade he has explored destinations across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania — always self-funded, never on a press trip.
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