Every Vietnamese region has a unique characteristic that distinguishes its cuisine. Vietnam's food is rich and diverse since each region's residents have distinct tastes and cooking methods.
1. Northern Cuisine
Compared to other areas, Northern cuisine is frequently less spicy, fatty, and sweet. It mostly employs shrimp paste and diluted fish sauce. More vegetable dishes and easily accessible fresh seafood—such as shrimp, crabs, fish, clams, mussels, etc.—are used by Northerners. Northern cuisine used to have few well-liked meals with meat and fish as the primary ingredients due to the region's poor agricultural conditions. With dishes like Pho (Vietnamese rice noodles), bun thang (vermicelli and chicken soup), bun cha (noodles and grilled meat), Vong green rice flakes, banh cuon Thanh Tri (Thanh Tri steamed rolled rice pancake), and special spices like belostomatidae oil, basil, etc., Hanoi cuisine is highly valued by many. These are some of the finest traditional Vietnamese dishes that travelers should experience at least once during their visit to Northern Vietnam.
Hanoi's sticky rice with coconut
2. Central Cuisine
Central food with all its unique characteristics reflected in distinct flavor, with more spicy and salty dishes than the food in the North and the South. The dishes’ colors are blended brilliantly, especially with natural red and brown colors. Some Central provinces, such as Hue, Da Nang, Binh Dinh are famous for sour shrimp sauce and many other types of shrimp sauce. In particular, nowadays Hue cuisine was mostly affected by Hue royal cuisine, so it requires high levels of food processing and decorating techniques. On the other hand, locals in the past could not produce a lot of special food while royal cuisine required a large amount of materials, so every kind of material are processed diversely, resulted in many different dishes.
Bún Bò Huế (Hue-styled Beef Noodles)
3. Southern Cuisine
