Explain Vietnamese food to someone who has never had any

>not mentioning star anise

i would say that a pho broth is cleaner but much thinner than a tonkotsu broth (and on par with an assari). a friend described it as "delicious dishwater".

Imagine you're washing dishes and you suddenly remember that you have a piece of beef in the fridge that's going to go bad if you don't put down the Communist Manifesto and cook this meat within the next 48 hours. Cook the meat in the scolding hot dishwater and throw in whatever shit you have lying around and Wala!.

fish broth? it's beef broth you turd, some fish sauce will be added but it's a fucking beef broth.

udon? da fuq is wrong with you? it's rice noodles.

Lots of other options for garnishes like tendon, tripe,beef balls, lean and fatty cuts of meat.

Lime, Bean Sprouts and Thai Basil are often provided to add to the soup, some people add chili sauce and hoison but i think that ruins what is already a great tasting broth.

pretty much this, pho is the most over rated crap ever, right up there with sushi rolls.

cinnamon and clove flavored beef water with shitty noodles and paper thin strips of beef

Eh, I like it. It's nice broth filled with all of the spices I like, with as much fresh basil and spicy condiments as I want. And then it's filled with all of my favorite parts of a cow.

It's like the whole cuisine was made with my tastes in mind. All of the rich chewy bits my parents used to be annoyed at me for eating are the star ingredients. All of the desserts are in my favorite textures and fruit flavors.

It's the best.

so vietnamese food is one dish. got it.

It's lots of dishes, but pho-specific places are common.

They also do magic with duck, spring rolls, and all of the trash cuts of animals that are full of vitamins and chewy glory.

I'd go with beef or chicken options when at a Vietnamese restaurant, unless the house special is something else. Beef is usually the tastiest with the most variety, and chicken is difficult to fuck up. Seafood option tend to be whitefish extruded in different shapes with a few shrimp and cuttlefish bits thrown in, and pork usually is a bit dry unless your place is unusually good.

Go with a hotpot or a broken rice platter if you're just trying out the restaurant for the first time and you don't want pho.

The pork skin side has an unusual texture, but it's good if you mix it with the steamed rice and some of the red vinegar they always leave on the table next to the fish sauce. The fish sauce is good on anything, but especially nice on fresh vegetables and fatty meat. The hoisin sauce is very salty. Use sparingly.

Too many soups to name, but bun bo hue beats pho by miles. Che is great and different as a dessert. Rice and noodle dishes are nice. I fucking love Viet salads, particularly green papaya ones. They make excellent dried beef, just bought some yesterday. Kind of bland, but I have a soft spot for cassava cake. They also have this cake they make for the new year, bahn Tet, weird as fuck, but tasty. And of course, the other white food approved food the asshats in this thread forgot, bahn mi. It's good, but overated. Other gook foods are pretty SEA in general, stuff like balut, jackfruit, longan, durian, etc. They take immense pride in their coffee, but that has to be some provencial shit honestly.

Yeah I live in Baltimore, I've just never seen one, or if I have I just wasn't paying attention

B E A N S P R O U T S

>fish broth
>udon
What the fuck are you smoking?

>Explain Vietnamese food to someone who has never had any.

It's Southeast Asian food with a lot of French influence.

Make a pot of noodles, throw in some rotten fish and beef bits, serve with bean sprouts.

Best option for lunch is Com Binh Dan. 30,000 Dong ( yes, that's what they call their meme money) and you can fill you plate up with as much as you can hold.

savory is only part of it. a good pho is mildly sweet and pleasantly aromatic with anise, clove, lemongrass, and blackened onion, garlic, and ginger

Fishy, more fishy than Korean

Do you like black licorice? Cause they use anise in fucking EVERYTHING.

>30000 VND is approx $1.27
I need to visit vietnam sometime holy shit

Anise is not an inherently bad spice when not used in gratuitous amounts.

tried it once and I'd say that holds up

was kinda too bland for me but still very enjoyable and overall a great meal

what kind of shitty coriander you been eating

He just has a genetic marker that makes it taste that way. It's not a willpower or aquirement deal, just how his unfortunate tongue works.

I'm so glad that cilantro tastes like herbs instead of soap to me. All of my favorite cuisines are covered in it.

I'm halfway if that's possible, some coriander seed heavy gins taste like soap but the leaves are fine

>Best option for lunch is Com Binh Dan. 30,000 Dong

Or one femanon dong.

It's like watery ramen with lime juice and fucking annoying rice noodles that always slip out from your chopsticks.

vietfoodfriends.cz/images/uvartesisami/9_foto.jpg
this stuff is just awesome

I like pho a lot more than ramen.

Pho tastes substantial yet very clean. It's rare to find foods that taste both clean and fresh but are hearty at the same time. It's a very herbal beef broth with rice noodles and a lot of fresh veggies thrown in that add their own kick to the dish. Can't really beat it.

The only downside to pho would be in how fast the noodles get soggy, but as long as you eat it right away it shouldn't be a problem.

If the broth is good all you need is some beansprout, basil, a little onion and a squeeze of fresh lime. If the broth isn't so good you're better off drenching it in hoison and sriracha/sambal.

>bahn mi
New Orleansfag here. The New Orleans culinary mafia has decided that because these come on baguettes, which Vietnamese definitely know how to make because they used to be a French colony, they are "Vietnamese po-boys."

Thinner, less fatty. Much more of a citrus taste. Noodles are longer, and can be rather slippery. Better choices of meats, but not much in the way toppings/addons.

Google search/map it.

There is a Vietnamese market which in fact is a Vietnamese inner city in Moscow. They have a canteen where all the local tiny Vietnamese's eat, prices are cheap as fuck and presentation is unironically solid 11 out of 10 despite this plaxe looking a bit sketchy and dirty outside, inside the market or canteen it's clean and nice.
They make lots of stuff, I've tried their Nem and it's rely gret
I'd say that they have some unusual ingridients, but the common foods like nem, pho, rice with beef and vegetables (forgot the name), etc is much more european than other asian cuisines

a merging of south-east asian and french cuisine with much sweetness and spice

Vietnamese here. I quite like our cuisine. It's not as spicy as Thai/Indo/Malay. Not as oily or as elaborate as Chinese. The flavours are well balanced, with emphasis on fresh ingredients and simple cooking.

The food my mum used to make everyday though was atrocious. Everything was fucking boiled. Not just boiled, overboiled. Boiled vegetables, boiled meat, boiled soup, boiled rice. My dad has diabetes, and they fell for the low fat and low sodium meme. Still, food at home was mostly bland overcooked shit. Going out to eat though is always nice as good food can be had for little money.

> Not mentioning cinnamon and ginger

Vietnamese bbq pork is also really good. A good bahn mi is a pretty top tier sandwich too.

>Pho is a fish broth
Wrong. Pho is a beef broth. They make it by roasting cow bones and then simmering them for hours.

Are you the guy from Arizona who moved to Vietnam and used to post on /trv/ a few years ago?

I spent a month in Vietnam and I got sick of eating dishes that are like 90% steamed/boiled vegetables pretty quickly. At my goodbye party they made some kind of hot pot and everything tasted literally the same, some featureless, insubstantial heap of vegetables in boiling water, wasn't a fan of that. Also the fact that everything tastes of garlic and something citrusy/gingery gets old really fast even though I fucking love ginger and my home cuisine also drenches a lot of stuff in garlic.
Overall though, I really appreciated the freshness and mild flavours. Pho with little fried eels is just fucking amazing and all kinds of nem rolls are genius.

Yeah, I don't get the boiled meat shit. The chicken is just nasty plain.

Fuck my sister and brother always do that and it makes me want to go sit at another table god damn just learn to use fucking chopsticks you troglodytes

Oh man I love those meat wrap thingies. It's one of those dishes that my mum actually does well.
I think most people, especially the older generation, are just ignorant and indifferent about cooking. Most of them grew up poor as fuck. Access to food, never mind good food, was probably limited. Any sort of fine dining was out of the question. Also, there was no Julia Child on tv teaching housewives how to cook.

Anyway I think the best food in Vietnam are found in cheap ass places like this . Compared to say the hawker centre mixed rice in Singapore, places like this in Vietnam are miles better. The taste is clean with very little grease and lots of vegetables. I love the abundance of greens in this picture!

Can you get it without cilantro? I see there's some on top, obviously you can ask for them not to put it, but does it go into the broth?

Really? I can handle the seeds in small amounts (a little bit of soapy flavor, but mostly fresh and citrusey) but leaves taste like straight up dish detergent.

Cry more, you can't even eat noodles with chopsticks without slurping like a retard and taking tiny bites.
If a fork's the most efficient way to eat I'll use a got dam fork

Imagine a child soldier pouring hot rain water over fish nightmares and rice strings

Try the one with beef tendon, I don't know how they do it but the texture is delectable

he doesn't know how to twist noodles up chopsticks like spaghetti on a fork

French frogs and gooks make good food

>Wala

No, i am the ethiopian/mexican boo who lived in Kazakhstan a while back. Have photos with Sabrina and used to post a fair bit with my Ethiopian flag on /int/. I'm currently living in Hanoi, but it's been a while since i was on /trv/.

>umami

fucking weeb.

I don't like it. Pho is so overrated. Never again.

>bahn mi
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