Search for the best Vietnam food in New York and the results will mostly be southern Vietnamese cooking, because that is what emigration patterns delivered to the United States. Van Da, in the East Village, works largely from northern traditions instead — subtler, less sweet, herb-forward rather than chilli-forward — and once you can hear the difference, the whole category of Vietnamese food in America becomes considerably more legible.
Regional distinctions are the difference between ordering well and ordering at random at any Vietnamese restaurant. Ask Karpo which regional style the kitchen near you actually cooks before you order.
North, centre and south
Vietnam's three regions cook differently and the differences are consistent enough to be useful. Northern cooking, centred on Hanoi, is the most restrained: less sugar, less chilli, a lot of herbs, black pepper and lime, and broths that are clear and delicate. It is the oldest of the three traditions and the closest to Chinese influence.
Central Vietnamese food, from Hue and the old imperial court, is the spiciest and the most elaborate — small, intricate dishes, fermented shrimp paste, and a great deal more chilli. Southern cooking, from around Saigon and the Mekong delta, is the sweetest and the most abundant: coconut, sugar, tropical fruit and herbs in enormous quantity.
Most Vietnamese restaurants in the United States cook southern food because most Vietnamese emigration to America came from the south after 1975. That is a historical fact rather than a culinary judgement, and it is why northern cooking reads as unfamiliar even to people who eat Vietnamese food regularly.
What to order to hear the difference
Bun cha is the clearest illustration: grilled pork patties and slices in a warm, diluted, sweet-sour fish sauce broth, with a plate of rice noodles and a mountain of herbs to be dipped into it. It is a Hanoi dish, it is assembled at the table rather than served composed, and it tastes almost nothing like a southern grilled pork vermicelli bowl.
Cha ca, turmeric-marinated fish cooked at the table with enormous quantities of dill and spring onion, is the other northern signature. Dill is not an herb most people associate with Southeast Asian cooking and its presence here is a direct marker of the region.
Order the herbs seriously. Northern cooking uses them as a component rather than a garnish, and a plate of mixed herbs is meant to be eaten in quantity, torn into the bowl throughout the meal rather than placed decoratively on top at the start.
What a modern Vietnamese kitchen is doing
There is a distinct wave of American Vietnamese restaurants that are neither the family-run place with a laminated forty-item menu nor a fusion project. They cook regional Vietnamese food with restaurant technique and better sourcing, with a shorter menu and a wine list, and they are aimed at people who already know what pho is.
The interesting consequence is menu editing. A traditional Vietnamese restaurant menu is long because it serves a community that wants everything available; a room like this picks a dozen dishes and does them properly. That is a genuine gain and a genuine loss, and it is why both types of restaurant should exist.
Prices sit above the neighbourhood Vietnamese restaurant and below a comparable European room, which is roughly correct for the sourcing and the labour. Anyone who objects on principle to paying restaurant prices for Vietnamese food while paying them happily for Italian should probably examine that.
The East Village around it
This part of Manhattan has one of the densest concentrations of small Asian restaurants in the country, and the useful thing about it is variety rather than any single room. Within a few blocks there are Japanese, Korean, Thai, Malaysian and several distinct Chinese regional kitchens, mostly in rooms seating under forty.
That makes it the best neighbourhood in the city for eating comparatively — two or three small stops in an evening rather than one large meal, which is also considerably cheaper. The area runs late and almost nothing requires a booking.
It is well connected and entirely walkable, and the residential blocks between the avenues are pleasant to walk between stops, which is not true of every dense restaurant district.
Fish sauce, and why it matters
Nuoc mam is the backbone of the whole cuisine and the single ingredient most worth understanding. It is anchovies and salt, layered in barrels and left to ferment for a year or more, with the first pressing — the equivalent of extra virgin — being the most prized and the subsequent extractions progressively thinner.
A good fish sauce is amber and clear and smells savoury rather than aggressive; a cheap one is dark, murky and made with added water, sugar and hydrolysed protein. The difference is immediately obvious in a dipping sauce, which is mostly fish sauce, lime, sugar, water and chilli, and where there is nowhere for a poor product to hide.
The dipping sauce is therefore the fastest way to judge a Vietnamese kitchen. If the nuoc cham on the table tastes balanced, bright and clean rather than flatly salty, the rest of the food is being made with the same care. It costs nothing to taste it on its own before the food arrives.
Practical notes
Van Da in Manhattan's East Village cooks largely northern Vietnamese food, which is less sweet and less chilli-driven than the southern cooking most American Vietnamese restaurants serve. Order bun cha to hear the regional difference most clearly, and cha ca for the turmeric-and-dill signature. Eat the herbs in quantity rather than treating them as garnish. Expect a short edited menu and prices above a neighbourhood Vietnamese restaurant. The surrounding blocks hold the densest cluster of small Asian kitchens in the city, so plan two or three stops in an evening rather than one.
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Ask Karpo first
Nearly every national cuisine is several regional ones sharing a name. Ask Karpo which region the kitchen near you cooks from, which dish shows it most clearly, and what else within a few blocks is worth a second stop.
