We had just landed in Hanoi, Vietnam with Silk Bistro’s chefs, Freddie Salim and Kartika Chandra, for what was supposed to be a food research trip. Keyword: supposed. Because somewhere between our third bowl of pho, random sidewalk snacks, and aggressively crossing streets like it was an extreme sport, the trip slowly became about more than food. Although, to be fair, there was A LOT of food. Pho here, banh mi there, bun rieu after lunch, banh cuon before dinner. We genuinely don’t remember a single moment of hunger during the entire trip. Hanoi simply doesn’t allow it.
Food is everywhere in Hanoi. Not in a curated, aesthetic way, but in a deeply everyday way. Plastic stools spill onto sidewalks. Tiny kitchens appear between storefronts. Entire meals seem to materialize from carts no larger than a coffee table. At one point, we passed a grocery stall that somehow also functioned as a butcher shop at the exact same time. We still don’t fully understand how that worked. The city feels like one giant communal dining room where everybody is either preparing food, selling food, talking about food, or eating food. Naturally, we spent most of our days doing exactly the same.
Watching Freddie and Chef Tika during meals quickly became one of our favorite parts of the trip. Most people simply eat. They investigate. Freddie would suddenly stop chewing mid-bite. “Tik, this texture is interesting. What do you think they used?” Chef Tika would stare at the dish for a few seconds before responding with something absurdly specific. Different starch. Different leaf. Different cooking time. And somehow, she was usually right.
Later during the trip, we asked Chef Tika why she became a chef in the first place. Whether she had always loved cooking. “Not really,” she laughed. “I just really like eating.” Apparently, her family treats every meal like a discussion table. Her mother would constantly analyze ingredients whenever they ate outside. Naturally, she became that person too. It's like the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.
Then there was Chef Freddie, who turned out to be the kind of traveler with absolutely zero fear of awkward interactions. You know how sometimes when you're abroad and nobody speaks English, you suddenly become weirdly shy? Pointing at menu feels embarrassing. Buying fruit feels stressful. Not Freddie. That man will willingly enter the most broken conversation imaginable just to ask what fruit he’s holding. Sometimes nobody understands anybody. Sometimes everybody does. Either way, he keeps talking.
As it turns out, good food wasn't the only thing worth discovering in Hanoi.
By the third and fourth day, something had shifted. The schedule stayed the same. We still spent our days moving between markets, cafés, restaurants, and random food stalls. But somewhere along the way, the trip stopped feeling like an assignment. The conversations became longer. The jokes became recurring. The silences became comfortable. We found ourselves laughing about things that weren’t even funny anymore, simply because we had all been there when they happened.
Around that time, Chef Freddie arranged a meet-up with a fellow chef friend who runs a bistro in Hanoi. Looking back, we're really glad he did. Beyond observing the city, we got to understand it through someone who actually calls it home. "Saigon is younger. Faster. More modern," he told us. "Hanoi is slower. Older." Somehow, that made perfect sense. He also explained why many locals rarely cook at home. Traditional Vietnamese dishes often take hours to prepare, making it more practical for smaller households to eat out instead. Which honestly explains a lot. Hanoi doesn't feel like a city where people go out to eat. It feels like a city built around eating together.
Very fitting, really. It's like we're meant to be there.
On our final day, we found ourselves doing something we hadn't planned at the beginning of the trip: looking for souvenirs. Not for ourselves, but for the guests who would later join us at Silk Bistro's Vietnam menu launch. We spent the afternoon wandering through shops, discussing what felt representative of the city we had just spent the last four days getting to know. Not necessarily the most expensive things, or even the most practical. Just small pieces of Hanoi that felt worth sharing.
Five days isn’t a long time. Yet somehow it was enough to collect dozens of stories that still come up in conversation months later. Because somewhere between the endless bowls of noodles, chaotic street crossings, morning coffees, and conversations with locals, Hanoi had given us more than a collection of dishes to study. Looking back, what we remember most isn't necessarily a specific restaurant, market, or meal. It's the feeling of experiencing it all together. The stories that somehow became inside jokes. The moments that still come up in conversation months later.
The realization that somewhere along the trip, we had stopped feeling like colleagues on an assignment and started feeling like friends sharing the same adventure.
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Big thanks to Roche Mazet, Bags City and LOJEL for supporting this trip. Some stories are made along the way, but they wouldn't have happened without the people and partners who help make the journey possible. Cheers from Hanoi!
