We begin our last day in Ho Chi Minh City with a fantastic bowl of pho tai from Pho Hoa (260C Pasteur Street, Ho Chi Minh City).

I have a pretty important rule when it comes to pho: if it’s really good, you have to show that pho some goddamn respect and finish the whole thing, no matter how full you are. It’s a rule that keeps me in size 34 jeans each year. 

The pho tai at Pho Hoa is a great way to start the day. The broth is a little sweet, not salty, and they are generous with the slices of raw beef. I showed the bowl of pho some respect and smashed it.

Phull of pho, we walk back to our hotel and pass a cage full of puppies.

As I pat them I hope they are puppies with a future as pets, not as main course somewhere that evening. We haven’t seen dogs on the menu yet and I hope it stays that way!

Dogs don’t feature on the menu at Quan An Ngon (what a segue!) but it features pretty much every other popular Vietnamese street food, cooked by street eat chefs who line the walls of this massive restaurant. It’s an easy way to eat as many specialties as possible without venturing through the city looking for every specific food cart. It’s also a good way to kill a few hours before our flight in the afternoon, so Bianca and I begin a mini degustation with matched drinks!

First up: bbq’d cuttlefish! With beer!

Next were these snails with pork and lemongrass (Ốc nhồi lá gừng). The snails were diced, combined with minced pork and glass noodles, stuffed back into the shell with the lemongrass stem and steamed. You pull on the lemongrass and the little snaily parcel pops out! These were enjoyed with beer.

I don’t remember the name of this porky dumpling thing but I do remember that we ate it with some beer on the side.

Bò Nướng Lá Lốt – beef wrapped in betel leaves and grilled. You wrap these meaty little parcels in the rice paper with some noodles and greens rolled in there too. Also you eat them while drinking beer.

Pigs ear spring roll! I think we mixed it up at this point and had a soda and fresh lime.

Finally we knocked it up a notch with this bad boy:

Filet mignon with fried egg, french fries and baguette with dipping sauce!

Since I was with none other than THE SANDWICHFACE, she quickly started stuffing these ingredients in the baguette and boom! Cholesterol roll!

We crammed the french inspired heart attack down into our already full stomachs and bid farewell to Ho Chi Minh City, grateful for it’s accommodation for the last 4 days. 

4 days was not enough time to scrape the top of the manic barrel that is Ho Chi Minh City. I can’t stress enough how big the city felt. Bigger than LA, New York, Tokyo. Weird right? And it was getting bigger – every street was in a constant state of construction, day and night. People didn’t seem to sleep! Maybe it was the iced coffee they sell on every corner keeping them up. Make sure you drink a gallon of that brown gold too, on ice with condensed milk. The vendors pour it from empty pepsi bottles. The dodgier the coffee looks the better it is, and we wouldn’t see the proper roadside stuff anywhere besides Ho Chi Minh City! Drink as much as you can!

On our second morning in Ho Chi Minh we headed straight to the rooftop of The Rex Hotel for cocktails. I have been surprising myself with how early we’ve started drinking each day, and by surprising I mean congratulating.

The Rex Hotel is real nice. At night they light the place up something crazy. This spot was important for American soldiers during the war but that has nothing to do with B and I eating mad shit so we’ll move on to lunch.

We hit up Ben Thanh Market for a bowl of grilled everything on noodles. It’s tasty and provides a good distraction from the chaos surrounding us in the markets as shop owners repeat the 10 words of English they know over and over at potential customers.

So lunch was good but you know what’s even better? Second lunch, this time from a street vendor hawking banh mi’s. Their carts are easily identifiable from the image of the laughing cow cheese logo stuck to the front.

We get a banh mi deluxe – a fried egg, some cured meats, herbs, vegies and some spicy as fuck bits of chili, stuffed into a baguette and wrapped in newspaper. 

A few hours pass and we don’t eat anything but I’m sure we do some cool shit, I can’t remember. What I can remember is maybe the best meal we’ve had so far at Quan 94.

Confusingly, there are two Quan 94s. The original one was at 94 Dinh Tien Hoang Street, then they moved to 84 Dinh Tien Hoang Street, keeping the Quan 94 name. But then some shady impostors moved in at 94 and opened a restaurant called Quan 94 serving exactly the same shit! So when you go hunting for this place, and you definitely should, make sure you go to number 84 Dinh Tien Hoang Street. You’ll be greeted by the sad stares of your future dinner:

Quan 94 serves a lot of stuff, but you really only wanna come here for the crab. And they serve those crabs up in a lot of ways. The best way they do them is cua lot – deep fried. 

Deep fried soft shelled crabs are the new KFC: Kentucky Fried Crab!! If the banh mi photo above didn’t fulfil your ‘Levins stuffing food in his mouth’ quota, maybe this will:

We also ordered some mien xao cua – crab with vermicelli noodle – which was great with fish sauce:

And now my awful attempt at remembering Vietnamese almost got us into trouble. I heard the crab spring rolls here were top notch so I tried to order them from the text only menu and we ended up with a bowl of crab soup:

It looked daunting but tasted pretty great, the broth was real peppery with nice big chunks of fresh crab. 

After we tried to explain to the waiter what we wanted, he grabbed an English menu from a nearby table of non-English speakers. Where was this menu when we needed it!

Finally, we ordered cha gio cua – spring rolls with crab.

It was a crunchy way to end our meal, but sadly it wasn’t the way I ended my night. I foolishly started the day by not thinking and smashing a huge glass of Ho Chi Minh City tap water. This later came back to haunt me and I had the pleasure of seeing our meal at Quan 94 again as I threw up in our hotel bathroom.

Until next time!

We woke up to this view of the river every morning from our hotel, Renaissance Riverside. It’s a nice hotel but the city is much nicer. Why not start the day off with a nice bowl of pho from this babe:

There are a tonne of great restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City but the best food is just a couple of bucks from the street vendors all over town. This pho was pretty serious business, with a smattering of beef tendon, lotus root and crunchy pork crackling. It cost us 10,000VND, which works out at just over fifty cents.

With breakfast out of the way we started our ascent to the north of District 1, where we would find our second breakfast for the day…

I eat a lot of Vietnamese food in Sydney and after seeing an episode of No Reservations, where Anthony Bourdain and his old boss chomp their way through Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An, I knew I had to come here. Sometimes I feel like No Reservations can be a little wanky (I hate it when Bourdain focuses on the spiritual side of a city he’s visiting and forces the viewers to ten straight minutes of him sitting in a temple NOT EATING ANYTHING, complete with awful free copyright production music playing in the background – panpipes and harps!) but this episode was free from wank and instead full of incredible food that I absolutely had to eat. And now that we were in the same country as this food, we had no excuse but to find all the dope spots Bourdain and his old French mate ate at.

Our first dish: Banh Xeo, at 46A Dinh Cong Trang

Banh Xeo is a Vietnamese pancake filled with prawns, pork and beansprouts, fried on one side and folded in half. It’s served with a plate full of different herbs and a dipping sauce.

You tear off a bit of the pancake, wrap in herbs and dip it in the sauce, just like B is doing below:

The place also dished some boss spring rolls that were crispy on the outside and dense with pork and spice on the inside. Real good.

We’d not even wiped the oil from our lips and it was time for our next breakfast, our third for the day. Maybe we should call this one lunch, even though it was still in the AM when we ate it. 

After scaling one end of Hoang Sa to the other, walking along the brown river and stopping for morning beers (the best kind of beers!) along the way, we finally found who we were looking for: The Lunch Lady.

The Lunch Lady is a street vendor who simmers a wild new pot of soup every day, spooning it into the bowls of lucky bowl holders who rock up from 11am till when she runs out of her holy elixer. Gastronomy Blog has done a very thorough post that lists what kind of soup she cooks each day, as well as the best map of how to find her.

We were psyched to be here on a Friday because Fridays are when The Lunch Lady makes Bun Bo Hue, the beefiest soup there is! And holy moly would you look at this motherfucker:

I SAID LOOK AT THIS MOTHERFUCKER!!

Words can’t do this bowl of soup justice. It had it all. Slices of beef, pork sausage, pig’s blood, thick noodles, herbs and oh man, that spicy, beefy broth. 

B was so in love with her soup she demanded I take her picture with it:

But I decided to one-up her and had my picture taken with The Lunch Lady herself:

What a babe! Oh and The Lunch Lady is in this photo too.

Friends and family of The Lunch Lady run the stalls that surround her soup stand, selling rice paper rolls, drinks and chế, a sweet dessert that comes in a Pikachu bag!

On the long, hot walk back to our hotel we were deep in thought. Would our life be the same after eating The Lunch Lady’s delicious soup? Is ‘Lady’ The Lunch Lady’s maiden name, or did she take it on after marriage? Would various Pokemon adorn the rest of our beverages in Vietnam? And most importantly, what would we have for dinner?

Cha Ca La Vong is a restaurant that serves just one dish: Hanoi style fried catfish with tumeric and dill. Even though we were headed to Hanoi in just over a week, we’d heard that this Ho Chi Minh City restaurant does the dish better than anywhere else in Vietnam. And it was pretty damn good!

After our fourth and (unfortunately) final meal of the day, we lay in bed with our hands clutching our engorged tummies, content with the food we’d eaten and making an oath to each other not to blog about any other activity we partake in while we stay in this beautiful city.

We landed in Ho Chi Minh City pretty late and even though Singapore Airlines had ensured our bellies were full of slightly above average plane food, we needed to go out and hunt. Eating mad shit was the reason for our Vietnam trip, after all.

After a few blocks of walking we came across this bro perched on a plastic stool surrounded by exactly what we were hunting for: MAD SHIT. He was circled by an array of cured meats, herbs and vegetables; the makings of an amazing banh mi. And hoo boy was it amazing.

The baguette alone was perfection. They use rice flour when making bread in Vietnam, and after breaking through the awesome crack of the crust, it gave way to a soft, airy middle. 

It was a good way to end our night / start our holiday.