In an expensive place like Hanoi, it is easy for visitors of food walking tour to find restaurants, cafes, shopping centers, hotels with affordable price and high quality. However, there are still popular places that serve all kinds of people in society, from the poor to the rich, and even much more attractive than the expensive places. It is quan coc.
Quan coc means pavement cafés, small and modest cafés on the sidewalk, found in most streets. There are places where makeshift shops arranged on the whole street, selling all kinds of drinks from lemon tea, apricots Siro to juice and smoothie with affordable price, there are also places where people only arrange a few cups, chairs, a table with tea and candy. They also are called pavement cafes.
Simple café
Depending on capital to open the cafe, but sellers usually simply base on the quantity and demand of the guests, then gradually change a bit, add more dishes, more chairs. Strangely, simple and makeshift but pavement cafe is not in shortage of guests ever. Chairs are used as tables. If the cafe is in lack of chairs, the guests will put arbitrarily their cups of tea somewhere convenient to drink.
Main dishes in pavement cafes are green tea and cigarettes. There are elders or poor who do not have any capital, only sell water and tobacco, pipe tobacco. A couple of water mains to carry boiling water, a teapot and some cups, a few packets of tobacco, a few seats for guests. Affordable, modest but if the sellers have luck, every day they also earn a few hundred thousand dong. More “luxury”, sellers can arrange some can of soft drink, beer, wine and cake, candy, roasted peanuts. If the land is wide, without the police, there are more some tables. But in general, the cafes have a tendency to be lightweight and easy to “run” when the functional forces patrol. Perhaps due to the livelihoods of these sellers, they have the distinctiveness to “sniff” the police. When the police appear in the distance, they quickly clear the stalls. When the police go, the cafe is arranged as nothing happened.
Simple pleasures
The guests do not usually come here to drink. Some people take a meeting but enter the pavement cafe to wait for others, parents taking their children to school will sit in a pavement cafe near there for half an hour later to wait for their children. There are some people sitting here for nothing purpose, they only make a glass of tea, take a cigar and chat everything with the sellers.
Seemingly, pavement cafés are indispensable in the capital Hanoi and the highlight in Hanoi street food walking tour. On the big streets where there are many shops and restaurants, a small pavement café is essential for people suddenly “surplus time”. If there are no pavement cafes, office workers have to return companies after lunch without spending a lot of money in an expensive café, the motorbike taxi will be alone, and people who come from other provinces will not have places to rest, ask for direction.
The sellers seem to know the “biological clock” of all people in the area they sell. That they live near here is a reason, but the other is that they only sell there for few months, they will know all things about each person, even work habit or exercise habit of all people.
If you go with night food tour Hanoi, besides enjoying good food, visit the corner of the city, try the feeling of sitting in the small cafe, hear some funny stories from the seller, hear the laugh of his guests sitting here, … or especially the night, hear lisp of the broomstick of her laborers in Hanoi night. Will not be lũuty, but surely you will have the enjoyable experience when coming to the monumental and bustling Hanoi capital.
Other programs for reference: Hanoi traditional food, Vietnam food tours, Vietnam cooking class