Hanoi, Michelin Guide Food Tour

Food tours are a great way to get acquainted with the cuisine of a new destination and lately, we’ve been taking a few Michelin Guide food tours. In 2025 we took a Michelin Guide food tour in Hanoi Vietnam. It was worth doing, we found some hidden gems that we would never have found alone, and it was fun. In this post, I’m going to show you what these Michelin Guide food tours are all about, and show you the foods and restaurants we sampled. Plus a few more guidelines on food, and coffee, one of the backbones of Vietnamese culinary culture, in Hanoi.

We had a lot of fun on this tour and that was down to our excellent female guide and our fellow tour member, a backpacker from Germany. Thanks guys. This is the tour we booked in Hanoi and we recommend it highly. While we’re on the subject of cool tours to learn more about Vietnamese food culture, my son took a coffee class in Hoi An, and gave it a great review, a similar coffee workshop is available in Hanoi, here.

Michelin Guide Food Tour in Hanoi

I’m not going to tell you where most of these Michelin Guide food outlets are in Hanoi, because that may be doing this tour operator out of a job. But obviously, you can access the Michelin Guide Hanoi online and use Google Maps to find these, and other places.

I will tell you where the egg coffee shop was, plus tell you about a few others, good and bad. With lots of photos, of course!

The cost of all of these dishes was somewhere around 30,000 to 60,000 Dong. That’s a dollar or two US.

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Michelin Guide Dry Chicken Pho

Pho is one of my favourite things to eat in Vietnam, north or south, but always beef pho, phở bò, and almost always for breakfast.

This was my first time trying both chicken pho and dry pho.

You’ll see a lot of chicken pho (Phở Gà) in Hanoi, it’s not something we’ve seen so much of when we were living in Hoi An, Central Vietnam. This is, possibly, because chicken pho is thought to have originated in the north.

For the record, pho is pronounced fer.

Pho in the north was originally similar to Chinese noodle soups, but then the French came along and added to the mix.

Northern pho, pho Bac, differs from southern pho, pho Nam. The two are very similar but we think the southern pho is a bit richer, with more spice and slightly different herbs and vegetables.

But dry chicken pho, phở khô gà, was new to us. If you want to read up on the history, origins, and variations of this dish, here’s an authoritative Vietnamese source (rather than the AI garbage you’ll see in the search results today.)

Michelin Guide Noodle Soup With Eel

I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t like this. The stock/soup/broth was absolutely delicious but I don’t dig deep-fried things in soup. It leads to greasy soup and soggy batter (as we discovered with food in Japan), but my son loved it. He said it was “like fish and chips.”

To each their own.

That’s one of the great things about a food tour like this, you get to try things you wouldn’t normally try, and sometimes you discover new favourites.

Michelin Guide Bun Cha

We have eaten bun cha before, but not often. I think bun cha is in our guide to food in Hoi An. After trying this bun cha Hanoi, it became one of my child’s favourite things to order during our time in Vietnam.

Bun Cha (Bún chả) is another dish that is thought to have originated in Hanoi. Bun means noodles, in this case, fine rice noodles, which are served cold, alongside a bowl of hot broth, and pork prepared in different ways.

The third part of the dish is the usual serving of leaves and herbs that you can add to your own taste.

The Michelin Guide bun cha we ate in Hanoi had pork 3 ways, simple grilled slices of pork, minced pork meatballs, and minced pork wrapped in leaves.

The broth is sweet, much sweeter than in say, pho, and very flavourful.

To eat bun cha simply add noodles and leaves to your bowl along with the pork and broth.

It was delicious! But very sweet, so it wasn’t a dish I’d order often. My child loved it, of course. There was a lot more meat in this dish than in a typical pho, so if you’re craving protein this could be the dish for you.

We’re used to seeing mint, coriander, and salad greens in these Vietnamese salads, but in Hanoi, we saw perilla for the first time. It’s a large leaf, purple on one side, green on the other. It’s really good! I’ll be growing this member of the mint family when I get back to our farm.

Hanoi Egg Coffee

Our guide on this food tour took us to one of the best places for egg coffee in Hanoi. Cafe Pho Co is hidden away at the back of an Ao Dai (traditional Vietnamese dress for women) shop. You pass through a stunning old building’s courtyard and climb to the 4 th floor for a rooftop seating area.

From here you can see the northern end of Hoàn Kiếm Lake the “Lake of the Returned Sword.” If you’re planning to stay in Hanoi, you probably should stay around the lake, it’s the centre of tourist things to see and do and the roads around the lake are pedestrianised on weekends. Read more about Hanoi in our post on Hanoi, and onward travel to Hoi An.

Here are some hotels to consider in Hanoi, Pilgrim Hotel was the hotel we tried, it was a budget option near the cathedral and we prefered it over the more expensive hotel we booked in Hanoi. It had family rooms. For a more luxury stay, in the same area, with family rooms, try The Oriental Jade.

Our expert guide didn’t think much of the egg coffee at the Note coffee shop, a popular Instagram posing spot on the lake. We went, we agreed, it was the only egg coffee my son didn’t like in Vietnam.

Add Train Street To The Food Tour

You can choose to include Hanoi’s Train Street on this food tour if you don’t have time to go there independently. We didn’t, we went the next day, and the day after, it was fun. It was an easy walk from any accommodation around Hoàn Kiếm Lake, and you can find it on Google Maps.

You could also add Hole In The Wall, Hanoi to this food tour. Hole In The Wall is a cocktail bar, I think, I’m not sure, I should ask. We didn’t go.

So all up, yes, we really enjoyed this tour, we think you would too. We paid for it ourselves, this is not a bought promotion, because that’s how our travel blog works. You can book it here or look for other Hanoi foodie activities.

You’ll notice our Vietnam travel tips post in the related post section, below, that post is freshly updated for 2025 with a few new things from this most recent trip. Enjoy Vietnam and please leave us a comment or question, we love comments. Thanks!

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