The best way to explore Vietnam is one incredible meal at time

I've been eating too much, too often, at Viet Grill on east London's "Saigon strip" at the southern end of Kingsland Road since it opened around 15 years ago. It has tempted me to visit Vietnam on each occasion.

I didn't want to travel there to exoticise Asia, marvelling at how ker-azy the traffic is while sitting in a doorway on a plastic stool slurping pho. I just wanted to eat a lot of beef that had been turned into bo luc lac, drink coffee roasted with butter and vanilla, and go from north to south playing "taste the difference".

And then InsideAsia, one of the UK's most skilled Asia-focused tour operators, launched a "Gastronomic Trails of Vietnam" tour. At last, I thought, a way to streamline my gourmand safari. I'm as preoccupied with "authenticity" as the next traveller cliché, but I don't speak Vietnamese and I'm happy to have a guide take me to the best bun rieu cua in Hanoi for breakfast and show me how to eat it. Which is what the extraordinary Mr Vinh did.

I peaked early with Mr Vinh, my guide, who drove me half mad, but whom I grew to love. He repeated the most elementary things three times and literally spelt out many of his explanations, but he was a fascinating northerner - a student of horticulture, an accomplished jazz singer and an enthusiast about Ho Chi Minh's communism.

Nothing would top that bowl of crab and vermicelli noodle soup we shared on our first morning, with its parcel of shiny pork, at Bun Rieu Cua Hang Bac. It was pure, light and sparkling clean, elevated with a spoonful of chilli paste and a carton of fresh herbs.

Over the coming days, Mr Vinh took me for R35 bowls of bun cha - with grilled pork and noodles - and to numerous hole-in-the-wall joints, in each of which one woman made one dish, repeatedly and rapidly, extraordinarily well.

EATING IN A CHURCH 

We cycled through the paddy fields in rural Ky Son, where I stayed at the tranquil Moon Garden Homestay and learned how to make my favourite dish: bo la lot - seasoned beef patties cooked in a betel leaf cocoon. I ate them in a church repurposed as a dining room, listening to farmers belt out karaoke across the lake.

Back in Hanoi, I toured the market around Vinh Phuc with Chef Ai. This was more rewarding for me than any temple tour. We watched tofu being made and shaped into pliable white girders, ready to be cooked with tomato sauce.

There were stalls heaving with tiny clams; baskets of colourful chillies and limes; delicious and sweet jackfruit (best fried in flour with coconut milk); plumes of banana flower; sacks of lotus seeds to make puddings, and giant live catfish that periodically made a bid for freedom from their giant bowls.

One vendor specialised in a favourite breakfast takeaway - sticky rice seasoned numerous ways: with soy, peanut, mung bean, coconut, sesame or red fruit, served with dried pork, sesame and salt. Her entire stock was layered and compartmentalised in a single covered basket.

The arrangements in the market were painterly: silvered fish heads on tin platters, framed in their own blood. We retreated to Chef Ai's kitchen, where she made another of my favourite dishes: baked aubergine with minced pork, and cha ca - fish with turmeric and dill.

She cooked with rice oil from Japan, and instead of black pepper used delicate mac khen, a dried flower with a numbing quality like Szechuan pepper. I realised, watching Ai, that one reason I love Vietnamese food is how much sugar goes into it. MSG works magic too.

A WEIRD, HIGH HOTEL

Some food discoveries were neither sweet nor savoury. I stayed at the new InterContinental at the top of Landmark72, Hanoi. The weirdness of this, the highest hotel in the country, appealed immensely. The lobby, on floor 62, is a glorious, glamorous atrium of bars, restaurants and banquettes; the rest of the tower is full of corporate, Korean-run businesses.

I wandered into a Chinese restaurant and ended up eating scampi in deep-fried almond crumb covered in blueberry smoothie. Outside, there were a couple of sizeable and very dead birds by the pool, victims of I'm not sure what, overshadowed by the humongous glass tower, while an ongoing industrial elegy played from motorway traffic. Here, I thought, was somewhere to survive a zombie apocalypse in style.

By contrast, I also stayed at the InterContinental Danang Sun Peninsula Resort on Monkey Mountain near Hoi An. Trump and Putin stayed there last November for the Apec forum. I wondered if they enjoyed the cartloads of adorable yellow-masked doucs in residence as much as I did. Those colourful monkeys are all the fun.

SURREAL RESTAURANT

I visited purely as a sidestep to eat at my favourite French chef Pierre Gagnaire's restaurant, La Maison 1888. It was as I'd hoped - gloriously playful without being pretentious. Wonderful stuff. Much like the Bill Bensley-designed Danang Sun Peninsula resort itself, which is my new favourite hotel in Asia, with cliffside "floating" booths at its Citron restaurant, a funicular railway and a loooooong row of suspended basket chairs by the prosaically named Long Bar, with weird mechanised screens fanning them from above, beside the beach.

The old trading port of Hoi An itself is beautiful but sodden with tourists, most of them obsessed with floating candlelit lanterns into the river from rowboats.

It has the prettiest market I saw in Vietnam, with giant baskets of freshly cut, firm yellow noodles sitting by the river, and battalions of chrysanthemum sellers. I ate cao lau - barbecued pork with crackling, the aforementioned local noodles, stock and greens - in the covered market at a counter next to extravagantly arranged mountains of white rose dumplings.

Locals claim it can only be made by using water pulled from a nearby well, making it entirely region-specific.

I also went to Banh Mi Phuong for its celebrated baguette with pork, pâté, chilli and herbs. Everyone goes. Everyone raves. I thought it was fine, but more Les Delices de France than life-changing. Vietnam does, of course, have an involved history of French colonialism - hence the fixation with coffee, bread and pâté.

We drove to Hue, the charming central Vietnam university town, of which I was enamoured instantly. I spent the day being ferried around on a cyclo - essentially a bath chair on the front of a bike - stopping at lovely little garden houses with cafés. The best was Olé, where I made and ate banh nam - parcels of shrimp and pork in tapioca and rice flour, steamed in a banana leaf.

THE DECORATOR DAY-DRINKS

In Ho Chi Minh City - still called Saigon by everyone in conversation - I had an off-piste lunch: dim sum at The Royal Pavilion in the Reverie Hotel, with its hallucinatory cornucopia of hugely expensive Italian-made kitsch.

The Reverie is a Liberace-themed ocean liner, on a passage to the Middle East, furnished in Milan by someone who day-drinks. It's more bonkers than eclectic, with cascades of LED-lit crystal, green malachite grand pianos and Louis XIV flourishes. The dim sum, though, is serious business - lush, luxurious, with perfect structure, served in an elegant dining room. A+.

By contrast, my next foodie experience involved hurtling around Saigon on the back of a Vespa, from one baldly lit local restaurant to another. There are 7.4 million motorbikes in the city and being on one, moving at pace, is to enter a video game wondering why everyone hasn't lost all their lives already.

Vespa Adventures's "Saigon After Dark" tour takes four hours and incorporates seafood, pancakes and live music - which is where I bailed out. I'll risk death on the back of a Vespa, but I won't go near jazz.

CRUISES AND COCONUTS

My tour ended with a Mekong river cruise, taking a pretty little boat with sunloungers, flowers and a picnic table of fruit, through the mangroves. It felt like we were off for an uncharacteristically jolly lunch with Colonel Kurtz.

We alighted to cycle around local farms and small factories, drank fermented coconut wine, and finished at a waterside restaurant where we ate prawns in coconut and chunks of baked mackerel wrapped in rice paper with herbs, salad and vermicelli noodles.

I reflected on my fortnight over a couple of pina coladas, which felt apposite after the trip to a small family-run coconut-processing plant an hour before. The food in the north had been fresher tasting, the south saltier and with more seasoning. But the flavour profiles were similar. Vietnam was entirely delicious.

The next day, while dealing with the comic ineptitude of Ho Chi Minh airport, I realised something: I'd spent two weeks eating in Vietnam and hadn't had any pho.

But it's not like I'd missed out. I could just get the bus down Kingsland Road in London at the weekend and be transported back for a bowl. Vietnam is a movable feast. - The Daily Telegraph

5 FAQS ABOUT EATING OUT IN VIETNAM

1. How do you pronounce 'pho'? 

Pho is the national noodle soup of Vietnam. It was most likely a derivative of pot au feu, that hearty beef stew which the French occupiers brought to Vietnam in the 19th century. Hence the name. Say "fur" and you'll be fine.

2. How do you navigate the street food?

Street-food vendors will focus on their speciality such as pho or springrolls. Find out who does the best of each dish you want to try - either by asking (see point 3) or watching what everybody else does - and eat accordingly.

3. Should you worry about eating dog?

Dog meat is still regarded as a delicacy - with certain medicinal powers - by some people. It is also expensive, I am told, and you are thus unlikely to eat it unless you actively go looking for it.

4. How do you behave in a restaurant?

Say you've ordered bánh xèo, the traditional pancake, and the waitress has brought you a huge bowl of fresh herbs, sheets of rice paper, sauce in a dish and pancakes ... what to do? Ask the staff to show you how to eat it all.

5. What's the drink you have to try?

Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer after Brazil. You'll find it served hot or cold, usually with lashings of condensed milk. For a sweet treat, have a glass of "egg coffee" (ca phe trung) - a dark coffee topped with egg yolk combined with condensed milk and beaten into a froth. - Paul Ash

PLAN YOUR TRIP

THE TOUR

InsideAsia offers a "Gastronomic Trails of Vietnam" tour from around R52,800 (£2,995) per person sharing for 13 nights, including all (internal) flights, accommodation, tours and transfers.

GETTING THERE

There are no direct flights between SA and Vietnam so you will have to fly via one of the Gulf or Asian hubs. Emirates has return fares from Joburg to Ho Chi Minh City from R9,372, Qatar from R9,977 and Singapore Airlines from R12,370.

STAYING THERE

• InterContinental Hanoi Landmark72 has doubles from R1,273 ($94) per night.

• InterContinental Danang Sun Peninsula Resort is from R5,716 ($422) per night.

MOTORBIKING THERE

Vespa Adventures runs a "Saigon After Dark" tour for R1,300 ($96) per person.

VISAS

South Africans need a visa for Vietnam. Fill out the application at vietnam.co.za, then make an appointment for an interview at the embassy. Allow at least five days for processing. You may also submit your documents by courier - but do allow for a longer turnaround time.