Xôi: the best two-dollar breakfast in Hanoi

At six in the morning, on residential streets all over Hanoi, women sit behind flat baskets covered in cloth. Under the cloth is steamed glutinous rice, still hot. You point, they pull off a piece of banana leaf, pile rice onto it, scatter things over the top, fold it into a parcel, and hand it to you.

It costs between twenty and fifty thousand đồng. It is the best cheap breakfast in the city and it is usually sold out by nine.

The varieties, in order of usefulness

Xôi xéo. The Hanoi default and the one to start with. Turmeric-yellow rice, topped with mung bean paste shaved off a compressed block with a knife so it falls in thin curls, then fried shallots and a spoon of the shallot oil. Faintly sweet, deeply savoury, one texture the whole way through. If you order one xôi in your life, this is it.

Xôi gấc. Bright orange-red, coloured and perfumed by gấc fruit. Slightly sweet, traditionally a celebration rice — you see it at weddings and Tết. Milder than it looks.

Xôi lạc / xôi đỗ đen. Peanut or black bean studded through plain rice. Plain, nutty, the everyday version. Usually the cheapest thing in the basket.

Xôi ngô. With soft-cooked corn kernels. Sweeter, popular with children.

Xôi mặn / xôi thập cẩm. The loaded savoury version: rice plus Chinese sausage, pork floss, shredded chicken, a fried egg, pickles, sometimes pâté. This is a full meal rather than a snack, and it is what the sit-down shops sell rather than the basket vendors.

Xôi xôi gà / xôi thịt kho. Rice with braised chicken or caramelised pork, served on a plate. Lunch food.

The bit that matters: fried shallots

Xôi xéo without a proper amount of hành phi is a different and worse dish.

The shallots are sliced thin, fried slowly in oil until brittle and mahogany, and the oil they were fried in gets spooned over the rice with them. That oil is most of the flavour. Vendors vary enormously in how generous they are.

So the single most useful phrase here is:

“Cho nhiều hành” — plenty of fried shallots.

Say it. It costs nothing and it roughly doubles the dish.

Ordering from a basket

There is no menu and often no English. The transaction is:

1. Point at the rice you want, or say the name.
2. “Mười lăm nghìn” / “hai mươi nghìn” — fifteen thousand, twenty thousand. You are specifying how much you want, not haggling. Twenty is a decent breakfast for one; thirty is generous.
3. “Cho nhiều hành”.
4. Pay in small notes. Basket vendors rarely have change for a 500,000.

You will be handed a banana-leaf parcel or, increasingly, a plastic bag with a wooden stick in it. Eat it standing up, or take it and eat on a bench. There is no seating; that is not what this is.

Sit-down xôi shops

A few Old Quarter shops sell xôi from a counter with stools and stay open all day. These do the loaded savoury versions — sausage, chicken, egg, pâté — plated rather than wrapped.

They are good, they are convenient, they are two to three times the price, and they are a slightly different dish. Worth doing once for xôi thập cẩm, which is genuinely excellent and far too much food.

Where to look

The honest answer: on your own street, at dawn. Xôi is the most evenly distributed food in Hanoi. Almost every residential block has a vendor, and the one nearest your accommodation is probably fine.

If you want to be more deliberate:

Ba Đình and Hai Bà Trưng residential streets — the densest concentration of basket vendors, because these are neighbourhoods where people leave for work at seven.

The Old Quarter, near the market entrances — vendors set up beside markets from about 5:30am.

Around school gates at 6:30am — a reliable indicator. Where there are children there is xôi.

When

Dawn until the basket is empty. Realistically 5:30 to 9am. A vendor with rice left at ten has had a bad morning and you are getting the bottom of the basket.

Savoury sit-down shops run all day and often into the evening.

What it costs

15,000–25,000 VND for a basket parcel of xôi xéo — well under a dollar. 30,000–50,000 VND for a generous portion or a loaded savoury version from a shop.

There is essentially nothing cheaper in Hanoi that is also this good.

A note on the rice itself

Gạo nếp — glutinous rice — is soaked overnight and steamed rather than boiled, in a tall pot with a perforated insert. That is why it holds its shape and why each grain stays separate rather than collapsing.

It is also dense. A twenty-thousand-đồng parcel is more food than it looks, and xôi sits heavier than phở. If you are planning a morning of walking, that is a feature.

If you only do one thing

Get up at six-thirty, walk out of your hotel, and look for a woman sitting behind a cloth-covered basket within three blocks. Point at the yellow rice. Say “hai mươi nghìn, cho nhiều hành”.

Eat it walking, out of the banana leaf, before it cools. It is under a dollar and it is one of the small perfect things about this city.

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Next: bánh gối and the Old Quarter fryer corner.