Anh Lam · Knows Vietnamese Dec 10
Consumer preference. Vietnamese culinary preferences differ significantly from those of other countries in the region.
During my travel throughout Southeast Asia, I’ve noticed this:
In Vietnam, we prefer dishes that highlight the freshness of ingredients, allowing us to savour their natural flavours.
In contrast, other parts of Southeast Asia tend to favour heavier and thicker spices, sugar, sauces, and cream.
For instance, boiled chicken is a traditional dish in Vietnam, but it’s not as popular in other countries.
Boiled chicken always appears in all our traditional celebrations, from anniversaries, new year celebrations to wedding and worshipping ancestors.
The chicken is boiled in aromatics, the broth is used to make soup. And the meat is cut up, often paired with lime zest and eaten with dipping sauce.
Our traditional food is lean, light, and focused on bringing out the natural flavour of fresh produce.
This shapes our taste buds and how we perceive food as we mature.
Traditional Vietnamese ham, for example, is made from many hours of pounding fresh pork and slow cooking to achieve the perfect texture, bounciness, and consistency.
Another dish very popular in Vietnam is thinly sliced boiled pork eaten with various dipping sauces:
As a long coastal country, Vietnam is also a seafood lover. Most of its seafood is eaten fresh with light sauces, such as clams cooked in lemongrass and coconut water.
Tamarind crab is another dish, where the crab is cooked in a tangy tamarind based sauce. Though in many coastal cities of Vietnam, freshly caught crabs are often boiled and served with salt, pepper and lemon.
Onto the desserts, most of Southeast Asia is very obsessed with sugar and prefers much sweeter food than in Vietnam.
As a Vietnamese person, I often find many Southeast Asian drinks and desserts to be too sweet for my taste bud.
An example is the Filipino fruit salad, which is a made up of canned fruits, condensed milk and cream. The triple combination of sweet, more sugary sweet, and creamy that overwhelms my Vietnamese tastebud.
Filipino fruit salad, a dessert in the Philippines
In contrast, Vietnamese desserts are much lighter. And other Southeast Asians and Westerners might even find them bland.
Now onto drinks, everyone knows we are well known for very strong, dark robusta coffee. But besides that, one extremely popular beverage is tea.
In fact, you will see tea everywhere in Vietnam, either served with ice or lemon/kumquat flavoured tea (in Hanoi for example).
Freshly made tea and coffee are the two most popular drinks in Vietnam, more than any soft drinks or canned drinks.
Drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds is the popular past time of many people. People gather in shops selling trà chanh (lemon tea) to drink tea and catch up with their friends.
Don’t be surprised to see shops full of people just drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds.
Besides tea, we also love fresh juices. You can expect many flavours of fresh fruit tea and juices to be served in all establishments.
I know by this time someone is screaming in the comment: that’s not what young Vietnamese eat! All the young Vietnamese will be just as fat with access to fast food like the rest of Southeast Asia.
Let me show you what young people eat.
They love beautiful establishments with instagrammable and TikTok trending food and drinks.
I don’t see many people in Vietnam eating fast food or going to McDonald’s just because it’s “cool”.
That’s not to say we don’t have fatty food, but it doesn’t make up the majority of people’s diet. Of course, there are fat people in Vietnam, but they are just in a lesser proportion than world’s average.
Here is one example of fatty Vietnamese food: fatty pork braised in pepper, fish sauce and chilli
Another example of fatty Vietnamese food is the below. Yes you guessed it – fried chicken, which is a very common homely Vietnamese dish.
But the difference is that we often pair them with a vegetable soup, a vegetable dish and a small bowl of rice.
A typical Vietnamese meal arrangement.
Also, this doesn’t mean we are not open to foreign food.
There are many food chains serving foreign food that became popular in Vietnam, but again mostly focused on fresh rather than processed fast food.
For example Pizza 4Ps is a chain that serves fresh wood fired pizza and Italian cuisine, and that’s a hit everywhere in Vietnam.
American donuts have become very popular in Vietnam with people lining up for hours for their turn.
The Chinese hotpot chain Haidilao is also popular with long queues on most nights.
9.1K views
View 25 upvotes
View 3 shares1 of 5 answers
7 comments from
Binh Nguyen
and more
CVD 