Hanoi's sweet counter: tào phớ, sữa chua nếp cẩm and Kem Tràng Tiền
Three sweet things Hanoi does better than anywhere: silken tofu scooped in curls, yoghurt over fermented black rice, and stick ice cream eaten standing on the pavement since 1958.
Vietnamese food gets described as savoury, and the sweet side gets reduced to “there is a coconut dessert”. Hanoi’s sweet counter deserves better than that.
It is not really a dessert culture — sweet things are eaten in the afternoon gap, not after dinner. But within that gap there are three items worth going out of your way for, and none of them resembles a Western pudding.
Start with chè if you want the whole glass case. This is about the three things that sit beside it.
1. Tào phớ
Silken tofu, floated in a light syrup. That description does it no favours whatsoever.
The thing to watch is the serving. A vendor keeps a tall aluminium drum of set tofu and scoops it with a flat, shallow metal spoon held almost parallel to the surface, shaving off wide, thin curls that fall into the bowl in ribbons. Done well, the bowl fills with something closer to sheets than to blocks.
Then syrup goes over it. Two versions:
Summer — jasmine-scented sugar syrup, crushed ice, sometimes a few strands of pandan jelly. Cool, floral, barely sweet.
Winter — hot ginger syrup. Completely different dish: warming, sharp, the ginger doing most of the work. One of the best cold-weather things in the city.
Modern shops add toppings — tapioca pearls, jelly, coconut, lotus seed — and these are fine but they obscure what is good about it, which is the texture of the tofu itself. Order it plain the first time.
Where: bicycle vendors with an aluminium drum, calling out as they go, mostly in the Old Quarter and the Tây Hồ residential streets. Increasingly also in sit-down shops. When: afternoon, roughly 2 to 7pm. Price: 10,000–25,000 VND. Say: “Một bát tào phớ” — one bowl. “Ít đường” — less sugar.
2. Sữa chua nếp cẩm
Yoghurt with fermented black sticky rice, and a genuinely strange, genuinely great combination.
Sữa chua in Vietnam is set with condensed milk, which makes it thicker, tarter and sweeter than European yoghurt. It arrives in a small glass jar, often frozen or half-frozen.
Nếp cẩm is black glutinous rice, cooked and lightly fermented so it turns faintly alcoholic and deeply purple. Chewy, winey, a little sour.
Together: tart against sweet, smooth against chewy, dairy against fermented grain. It should not work and it does.
Two related things at the same counter:
Sữa chua đánh đá — yoghurt blended with ice into a slushy. The hot-afternoon version. Often with fruit (mango, strawberry) blended in. Sữa chua trân châu — with chewy tapioca pearls and a caramel sauce. A newer, sweeter, very popular variant.
Where: chè shops, yoghurt specialists in the Old Quarter and the Tây Hồ lakeside streets. When: afternoon and evening. Price: 20,000–35,000 VND. Say: “Sữa chua nếp cẩm”. “Sữa chua đánh đá xoài” for the blended mango version.
3. Kem Tràng Tiền
Ice cream on a stick, from a shopfront in the French Quarter, going since 1958.
It is not artisanal ice cream and it is not trying to be. It is dense, icy, slightly chalky in the way state-enterprise ice cream is, and sold from a hatch to a permanent scrum of people who eat it standing on the pavement outside because there is nowhere to sit and never has been.
That scene is the reason to go. On a summer evening there will be several hundred people on that stretch of pavement, all holding ice cream, all standing.
Flavours worth ordering:
- Cốm — young green rice. The local one, faintly grassy and milky, and the only place most visitors will encounter cốm in ice cream form. Order this.
- Đậu xanh — mung bean. Nutty, restrained.
- Sô cô la, va ni, dừa — chocolate, vanilla, coconut. Fine.
- Ốc quế — the cone version, if you want something bigger.
Where: one address in the French Quarter, a short walk from the lake’s southern end. There are franchise outlets elsewhere; the original is the one people mean. When: all day, mobbed on summer evenings. Price: 15,000–25,000 VND a stick. Note: buy from the hatch, pay there, eat it where you stand. Do not look for seating.
A practical afternoon
The three of them sit naturally in one walk, if you are in the centre:
- Tào phớ from a vendor in the Old Quarter, around three.
- Walk south past the lake.
- Kem Tràng Tiền in the French Quarter, around four thirty. Eat it standing.
- Sữa chua nếp cẩm on the way back, around five.
That is under 100,000 VND for three things and it fills the dead part of the Hanoi day, which is the two hours after lunch when it is too hot to do anything requiring effort.
One thing to skip
Hotel and tourist-restaurant “Vietnamese dessert platters” — usually a plate of fresh fruit, a spring roll of banana, and something with coconut. They are not bad. They are also not a thing Vietnamese people eat, and they cost five times what the counter costs.
The sweet counter is a street institution. Eat it on the street.
If you only do one thing
Find a tào phớ vendor on a hot afternoon and watch the scooping before you order. In winter, ask for it hot with ginger.
Then, on a summer evening, go and stand on the pavement in the French Quarter with a cốm ice cream and several hundred Hanoians doing exactly the same thing.
Next: phở beyond the bowl — phở xào and phở trộn.