We went on Vietnam Food Tour 🇻🇳

Spend a day eating through Saigon with me. We're in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and honestly, if you only know Vietnamese food as pho and banh mi, you are missing out. I've been living here for almost three years now, so I'm totally not biased when I say the food seen here is so good. One of my favorite things about eating in Vietnam is that food is literally everywhere. You'll have proper restaurants, tiny family-run shops, street stores, markets, little plastic chairs on the side of the road, and sometimes you genuinely can't tell if you're walking into someone's house or about to have the best meal of your life. So today, I'm taking you guys on a food tour. We're filming a Vietnam food tour today, but Zen doesn't know that I actually booked a scooter tour. So there's going to be women riding us around Ho Chi Minh City to go to different places to eat, to sightsee. The thing is Zen's been to Vietnam multiple times, but she's never been on a scooter. I can't wait to see her face. Are you excited to eat? It's an episode full of eating! Exo Tour has actually been around since 2010, and they were the first all-female motorbike tour company in Vietnam, which I thought was pretty cool. And what I like about their food tour is that they specifically don't take you around to the typical touristy spots. The whole idea is to get you outside the typical tourist areas like D1 and try more of the dishes that locals actually eat. We've reached the meeting point. We're just waiting for our ride. Our ride is here! Where? The bike! I'm giving you the true local experience. Oh my god. I knew if I told her early, she would be like so nervous. So now you know! It's a bike tour! Like this heavy already. If you've never been on a motorbike before, don't stress like how Zen is here. Look how nervous she is. The tour guides will go through all the safety instructions like how to get on the bike, how to safely get off, all that fun jazz. Now if you don't want to get super close and personal and hug your driver, you can grab onto the back of the bike and hold on for dear life or use your thigh muscles, clamp them together to stabilize. That's what true locals do. This tour is about four and a half hours and they're going to be taking us around five different districts and apparently, we're gonna get to eat at least 10 to 12 different dishes. Lucky we prepared accordingly. I basically starved all day for this. We're starting with a soupy noodle dish and no, it's not pho. It's banh canh cua, which is a thick crab noodle soup. The noodles are thick. They're chewy. The broth is rich and almost gravy-like and it's one of those dishes that probably make you realize how many Vietnamese noodle soups there actually are. Actually, maybe we should do a video on that. Just noodle soups alone. This restaurant is pretty big. It has three floors and most importantly, there was aircon. First stop is a banh canh cua place, a crab noodle soup. We survived. Cheers! This is the secret sauce, guys. Chili, kumquat, lime. It's sugary, salty, spicy. I feel like everyone knows pho but not everyone knows banh canh cua. It's like a thick crabby noodle with tapioca noodles, which is kind of like chewy. It's like udon. It's like a thick udon. Yeah. So there's like prawns, crab cake. There's crab meat. The noodles are chewy. It's got this like bounce. The soup is a little bit on the thicker side. It's got like a little bit of sweetness in the crab meat. We're gonna try to do that jiu-jitsu food trend thing. Wait, wait. What's the count then? It'll be like one, two, three. Okay. Try again. The sauce is like slightly tangy, lemony, zesty, sweet. Am I invading your personal space? You have to do everything so close together. The broth is actually really good. It's not like fishy or like too seafood-y like other places. Like when we've ordered on Grab, sometimes it doesn't taste like super fresh. You know what I mean? Like this, it's got a subtle sort of like... It's like sweet. Yeah. It's like a sweet soup. A little bit salty, a little bit sweet. Tastes clean. You know what I mean? Like when you get like prawn noodles in Singapore, it kind of tastes like prawn meat. And the chunks of crab, they're legit. It's not like fake crab. Okay, this place definitely deserves to be in my food guide. If you guys are coming to Saigon and you want like beauty, fashion, cafes, food activities to do, check out my guide. Link is below. Shameless plug. Oh, and this tour. EXO tour is on there as well. And they have a special promo. First stop was an absolute hit, but we still have plenty of room left in our bellies. I'm ready for the next stop. Next stop, we're gonna check out a market. We're gonna walk through the market and see what's there. And then grab dessert. Problem is, it looks like it might rain. It's more fun. It's more fun when it rains. Lots of chickens here. Lots of seafood. This is like, I guess the produce area. Oh, there's fresh seafood. Okay, guys. So this is the local market. You can just see people like stop on their bikes, grab a couple of things, and then ride to the next store. So this is like the local market between district five and six, which used to be like the Chinese or Cantonese area. The tour guide was saying this is a really popular place for tourists because it's a place that a lot of the locals come for wholesale. So a lot of the trading happens here. They don't really sell like single pieces when it comes to the stores. But I mean, the market's a local market. So feel free to come and visit, get some fresh fruit, check it out. It is hustling and bustling. Like it's busy. Vietnamese avocados are like long and odd shaped compared to the husk avocados. Durian! We ended up getting some tropical fruits as a little palate cleanser. I don't know what this is called in English, but in Vietnamese, it's called bong bong, which is such a fun thing to say. Bong bong. It's sweet. It's kind of like tangy. Like, oh, I like it. I like it. It's like jelly-ish. How's the tiny seed? Actually, the previous one had like a little bit of a funkier taste. Like it was like sweet, tangy. Really sweet. If you look at the bottom of the fruit, the petals represent how many, I don't know, pieces are inside. Oh, I didn't know that. Do we have a good one? Oh, me, me, me, me. The queen of fruits with the queen of chaos. It's good. It's starting to rain and everyone's rushing. Everyone's rushing to cover up their goods and bringing it in now. The rain began to pour and within minutes, everyone had their stores wrapped up and undercover. Clearly, they're experienced in this. Yours is coming. We will be blue penguins together. They came prepared. We've got matching penguin suits. Thankfully, it doesn't usually rain for that long in Saigon. We usually get spurts of rain and then it clears up. So fingers crossed. I've got my fingers crossed. Okay, it started to rain again and now rain jackets are back on. This might be the uniform for the rest of today. We're at the next location. Where are we, Zen? We are at an outdoor barbecue place. Yeah, barbecue. When in Saigon, you have to try a Saigon beer. I don't know if you guys have ever heard Vina music but there's this beat like it's like a... I hope we don't get copyrighted to this. This is the only club we'll go to. This is the mathematic move. It's like plus. Mathematic. Minus. Yeah. Divide, divide, divide, divide it. And then multiple. Multiply. It's like a how to dance like a true Vietnamese tutorial. First dish is water spinach with garlic. A staple in Vietnamese cuisine. It's got like a nice crunch to it. Refreshing and obviously we're garlic girlies. Spicy. It's got a bit of a kick to it. Very garlicky. Oh, so this is gonna be barbecued right here. We didn't even have to barbecue it ourselves. This is amazing. Next is the beans. Cooked by none other than our Michelin star chef tour guide, T. You gotta grab a piece and then you dip it with like a lemon pepper. Salt and pepper with chili. Get that zinginess. Cheers. That hits the spot. That's good. The music is just sending me like. Juicy lemongrass pork belly. Dip it in this sweet sauce. Wow, that's good. The pork has like the perfect amount of fat to like lean meat. And then the lemongrass is very fragrant. The sauce is kind of like a spicy sweet chili. Special dish wrapped in foil. They're unboxing it. Oh, it's like mixed veggies. Melt in your mouth egg tofu, okay. It's mixed veggies tofu. I feel like it's kind of buttery. It melts in your mouth. It's sweet. I thought it was salted egg but it's just like tofu egg. It's got like a skin around it. We're looking quite dewy. Local restaurants like this are usually where locals hang out with their friends after work. They eat, they drink and sometimes they even play games. Our guide taught us one. This is a game that tests your chopstick and teamwork skills. We split up into two groups. And first group to pick up 10 peanuts and pop it in the bottle wins. It sounds easy but it's a lot harder than it looks. Because the other team can sabotage you. Can you guys guess who won? Let's just say it wasn't me. But I'm totally not mad. Then we enjoyed the rest of the fruit from the market. The sun went down and we took a little cruise around the narrow streets of D4. The streets here are very tight but oh so lively. Like there's restaurants, shops and little street stalls all along the side. It was a vibe. This is our last food spot for the night. Located in District 4 which used to be known as the gangster district of Ho Chi Minh City. But since then it's cleaned up and people like coming here for their seafood and night vibes. I think it's like rated in Time Out magazine as one of the top 10 or top 11 neighborhoods. And we got crab! This is very new to me because I'm usually in bed by this time but I'm out. It's like peanutty. You've got the spring onions. You've got the fish sauce. Adds that like sweetness, spiciness. There's nothing better than freshly grilled seafood. Crab already peeled! Yes! Bit of lemon, pepper, chili. Okay cheers. It's sweet guys. It's got that sweet juice from crab meat. And it's so much better when someone else peels it for you. We are spoiled for choice today. Not only do they serve seafood. They also serve like a stir-fried rice cake with eggs. And you dip it in a special soy sauce. Like it looks like a Singaporean dish right? It looks like carrot cake. Carrot cake. It kind of does. It looks like carrot cake. There's like papaya shreds and then the thick soy sauce. Cheers. It's got a nice like crunch to it on the outside. It's got wok hei. It's a simple dish but it's a yummy one. We finished the night off with two desserts. A sweet and savory coconut sticky rice. Had a very interesting taste. And then a rich creamy cheese yogurt which is very popular in Vietnam. And that was our last stop of the night. Honestly this is one of my favorite ways to experience Saigon. You get on the back of a bike. Weave through parts of the city you probably wouldn't find on your own. You eat way too much food and somehow still make room for two desserts. So I'd say today was a success. We're full, slightly sweaty and borderline food covered. That's it to this video. Thanks for tuning in to your Kitchen Queens of Chaos. We're out the kitchen this time. We're out of the kitchen. But it's still chaotic. But it's Vietnam. If you guys want to check out more of our videos, click the video on screen and subscribe if you're new here. And we'll speak to you guys next time. Bye! Don't forget to thumb this video!