Breakfast in Hanoi is best eaten on the pavement. Around five o'clock every morning, the sellers of pho (to pronounce it, say "fur" gently), Vietnam's noodle soup, trundle their stalls by bicycle or moped through the waking streets. Usually middle-aged women, they set up on corners or in front of office doors. There they unload their fresh rice noodles, bundles of garlic greens, mint and bean sprouts, mounds of finely sliced beef or chicken, and the vat of stock—the secret of a great pho—straw gold, delicate, flavoured perhaps with star anise and cinnamon and who knows what else. The stallholders' individual recipes are jealously guarded, and their customers loyal.
The Hanoiese gather round in the steam from the pho pots on tiny plastic stools, like those you'd find in a nursery. They drink a green tea only a shade paler than the soup itself. By 9am, or when the noodles are finished, most of the pho ladies pack up and bicycle away, leaving the streets clear for the day's business.
Most of east Asia eats noodle soup for breakfast. The Thai version is muscular, the deep brown stock made from beef bones, the noodles as wide as your thumb and the soup (at my favourite Bangkok stall) fortified with Mekong-brand "whisky." It's great for hangovers. But in north Vietnam the stock is much lighter and the tastes far more subtle.
Pho is north Vietnam's signature dish, and the Vietnamese are proud of it in a rather chauvinistic way. "Any other than Vietnamese can not feel all the deliciousness and quintessence of this special dish…" reads a flyer for a Hanoi pho shop chain that I picked up. So they object to the most likely explanation of the dish's name—that it derives from French colonial times. Back then, it's said, soup sellers patrolled the streets with two baskets dangling from a yoke over their shoulders, one holding the noodles and other ingredients, the other a little brazier of hot coals. "Feu" (fire) they would shout, both as warning and advertisement.
Like the other rice-dependent nations in the region, Vietnam has been stunned by the food price rises—inflation hit 25 per cent here in June. They seem all the more unjust because there is no shortage of rice in the region: Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam all produce surpluses, and the latter two are the world's first and second greatest exporters. Yet even a few months of export bans have only briefly delayed the unstoppable rise in the price of rice: noodle sellers told me recently that their raw material, rice flour, had risen 50 per cent this year, and threefold on two years ago. Meat has risen at a similar rate. A year ago a bowl cost 8,000 dong; this time it cost me 10,000 dong (about 60 US cents). But the sellers told me they couldn't pass on all of the price hikes to their customers, who themselves have less to spend.
Foreign investment floods into Vietnam, which is seen as stable and well educated compared to its neighbours. Yet the food and fuel price rises are devastating the budgets of poorer households, particularly in the cities. Vietnam's status as star pupil of the World Bank and the macroeconomic poverty reduction specialists is going to take a knock, as the gap between rich and poor, long noted for remaining pretty constant despite the country's growth, starts to widen. Vietnam is also constrained by the fact it joined the WTO in January 2007. It does seem incredible that the world's second largest exporter of rice is unable to supply its own poor. "Who do you blame for the price rises?" I asked one street seller of rice. "The WTO of course," she said brightly.
France's man in Hanoi
The rich eat pho too. Didier Corlou, probably the greatest French chef to operate here since the fall of the French empire, introduced duck pho garnished with slivers of foie gras to the customers of the Metropole Hotel, Graham Greene's old Hanoi hangout. When Corlou arrived at the Metropole 20 years ago, no Vietnamese food was served: diners got duck a l'orange and the creamy sauces of the French cuisine bourgeoise. By the time he left, he was serving fried silk worms.
Corlou is happier now in his own restaurant, La Verticale, in a narrow, tiled colonial house just north of the Hoan Kiem lake, around which the city centre revolves. Here he serves east-west fusion cuisine. In Vietnam, Corlou is a celebrity chef who regularly appears on television. When I wander the markets with him, people queue to shake his hand and congratulate him for championing their food.
The French were disastrous empire-builders, but they did leave their chunk of southeast Asia with pretty, well-laid out cities and good food. All of Corlou's ingredients but the beef and lamb are from Vietnam. He encourages farmers in the province of Dalat who still produce French vegetables: aubergines, haricots verts and artichokes. At La Verticale I ate the latter with a meaty sauce of tiny clams. There was a startling pumpkin soup flavoured with tamarind and anise, and a spiced gazpacho with scallop tartare that arrived with a crisp mosquito net made from fried rice paper. If Corlou returned to Europe, he'd be a star there too. But his Vietnamese wife, two children and a passion for the country keep him in Hanoi. He alone is worth the visit.
