Look at those beauties. They are basically like unsweetened doughnuts, which might sound like an unlikely candidate for dipping in soup, but when they get soaked with broth they are SO good!

I was amazed when the food we ordered came on ceramic plates with real silverware instead of in cardboard tubs with plastic utensils.

The portion sizes were actually reasonable!  The coleslaw, mashed potatoes, gravy, and chicken tasted just like at home (which I guess isn’t that surprising).

The best part of the meal was definitely the ice cream cone with sprinkles for dessert!

Mike and I decided to try and spend an entire month in Vietnam without touching a Lonely Planet. We can use the Internet and maps, but we wanted to get by without purchasing a guide book. There is a sudden freedom that comes with not having to stick to a map, looking for one particular café. It opens you up to discovering new places you might otherwise miss. Like DoCo!

Oddly located on an old-fashioned street filled with silk shops and galleries, this coffee and doughnut shop sticks out like a sore thumb with its bright orange façade.

We weren’t particularly impressed with the doughnut selection at first, until we saw this: the mystery-filled doughnut.

We decided to give it a try. The filling, it turned out, was blueberry. Pretty tasty!

Awhile later our wandering led us to one of Hanoi’s many corner beer shops. For less than 20 cents, you can get a glass of pale, malty beer. Not the greatest I’ve ever had, it still does the job quite nicely, and you can’t argue with the price! Plus, the people-watching at these places is excellent.

We spotted a small open store front, filled with low tables and plastic stools, absolutely packed with locals eating noodles. The sign indicated that the restaurant served only one thing: bun cha. We ordered two bowls (for 18,000 dong each – that’s just over a dollar), and this is what appeared before us:

A pile of cooked noodles, and a large bowl of shiso leaves and butter lettuce. AND…

A bowl of faintly sweet broth filled with little charcoal-grilled ground meat patties.
Basically the theory is you dip the lettuce and noodles into the broth with chopsticks, eating them with little bites of meat.

A little while later, we found ourselves in a different neighborhood, with different noodles.

I thought we were getting traditional pho, but this slightly red broth was more sour/salty, and had noodles, green onions, and a big pile of cooked meat on top. Like the bun cha, it was served with a pile of fresh greens.

Another noodle soup we recently sampled came with a big slab of liver on top; large, thin slices of heart of palm, and some chunks of meat with the skin still on. It looked a little like chicken meat, but tasted gamier, and I have no idea what it was.
I know what the liver’s function in the body is, and I know this makes it a less than ideal choice for consumption, but when I saw the little boy sitting next to us dipping the liver into a small bowl of chilis, garlic, and fish sauce, I wanted to give it a try. It was fantastic! I love the smooth texture of liver a lot more than the flavor, and the sauce made it nice and salty-hot.

Our first meal, obtained from a cart down the street from our hotel, was a kebab sandwich with shredded cabbage, cucumber, onions, and tomato.  These are available all over the city for a little less than a dollar, and they are delicious as well as filling.

Bread is one of my favorite foods, and something I really missed during our time in Thailand.  However, baguettes are cheap and plentiful here! This sandwich features fried eggs with onion and herbs, on a nice crusty roll.  With a cup of strong Vietnamese coffee, it was an amazing breakfast.

I spent a lot of time in Thailand craving cupcakes, but fortunately they are readily available from the bakeries here.  This one was incredibly cute, but the flavor left a little to be desired…