We schedule our street food tours in the mornings, afternoons and evenings. The food landscape shifts across the course of the day and night. Vendors are opening with fresh ingredients and closing when they're gone, all over Hanoi. It's an ongoing tag-team of predominantly women, feeding this city out of tight, sometimes mobile, environments - in alleys, on loud busy thoroughfares choked with traffic, on their doorstep or in the front room of the house.
In summer, with temperatures and humidity inducing sweat at the simplest body movement during the day, we encourage our clients to avoid the afternoons and see and eat the city in the evenings. Sweat is still inevitable but the dark at least creates the illusion of cool. And Hanoi's character changes in the dark; the locals come out of their hibernation from the sun, there's promenading around the lakes and squares, kids everywhere, and it seems every scooter owner in the city is out catching a breeze.
Visually, it remains eye catching. Dusk turns to dark in the amount of time it takes to eat a banh my. Fluorescent lights are flicked on but there's a lot of soft yellow light emanating from bulbs hanging from awnings or trees, to shed light for eating and drinking. Or displaying produce or goods. The Vietnamese are masters of the hastily erected money-making stall, whether it be for sale of second hand shoes, a selection of cut fruit coated in chilli salt or dried squid grilled gutter-side.
And, Hanoi is also delicious at night. Market activity may not be as lively as the mornings but you'll see the locals bargaining for end of day meat, mobile fruit and flower vendors trying to offload before they lay their weary bodies to rest. Street food eating opportunities still abound. Pavement grilling and enthusiastic beer drinking hit their peaks when the sun goes down.
And the little plastic stools beckon.
