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Leaning on Hue's history, the city's traditional cuisine incorporates the art of food carving, at royal dinners fit for a king. It's customary for restaurants to serve dishes with intricately designed flowers, dragons, and fish carved from carrots and other vegetables. To maximize this cultural experience, dine at one of Hue's many restaurants that offer royal dinners, including traditional music and dance.
Neighboring the historic Imperial City, this French-Vietnamese restaurant is fashioned after a colonial villa with green shutters, arched doorways, tile floors, antiques dating back to 1915, and artwork depicting pastoral scenes. Slightly pricey by local standards, the enormous menu features green mango salad, fresh spring rolls, beef in banana leaves, and grilled sea bass with a Mediterranean sauce, as well as sandwiches, pasta, and pizza. The goat cheese and prosciutto platter is superb, as is the roasted chicken in a white wine sauce. The Chinese emblem embroidered on staff uniforms and napkins is a wish for prosperity and longevity. The restaurant has a second location renowned for its French-Vietnamese menu in the backpackers' district at 18 Vo Thi Sau Street.
A favorite with locals, Am Phu ("hell restaurant"), has been in operation for more than 80 years, serving excellent Vietnamese cuisine. It's famous locally for com am phu, a colorful rice, pork, shrimp, and herb specialty dish—the seven colors of this dish represent the first seven steps of Buddha. This isn't a tourist spot; everyone eats together at large tables covered with red plastic tablecloths. Although there are no prices listed on the menu, most dishes cost less than 70,000d depending on how large a serving is requested.
Don't be put off by the grungy interior of this restaurant. The quality of the decor is in inverse proportion to the quality of the food. This favorite among locals serves only eight dishes, all specialties of the region. The price of 30,000d per dish should allow you to try them all—if you're hungry enough.
This inspired little beach club 15 km (10 miles) from Hue has shady beach cabanas, hammocks, and a large cobalt-blue fishing boat that serves as the bar. It's a laid-back place, with a simple Vietnamese seafood menu, where you feel a world away from the annoyances of the city. They make it easy to stay with a few huts housing dorm-style accommodations. Its sister accommodation Villa Louise with tastefully designed ocean view villas and three swimming pools is a gem in the crown of this stretch of pristine beach. The Beach Bar is on private land, and you pay 100,000d on weekdays and 150,000d during weekends and on holidays to enter (which is refundable against food and drink orders).
At Duyen Anh Restaurant you can pick up your own live fish, shrimp, or lobsters from the tanks, and vegetables are homegrown in the nearly 5,000-square-foot garden viewable from your dining table. All dishes are designed to share. Crab salad is a delicate combination of crab meat, crab roe, and baked rice paper with fresh banana blossom, bean sprouts, and herbs. The best seats are on the second floor or in the private pavilions on a waterlily pond. Although it has a beautiful setting and a playground for kids, it's far from the city's center.
It might be overcrowded during lunch and dinner, but this open restaurant's wide range of Hue specialties such as nem lui (grilled pork sausage on lemongrass stick), banh khoai (savory pancake), tapas like beo, nam, loc, and noodles with grilled pork and salad are all worth the wait.
Fresh daily ingredients are the pride of this small restaurant located near the iconic Truong Tien Bridge. While the restaurant’s menu features a wide range of Vietnamese and local cuisines, their pizza is the best in town.
Packed with tourists and teeming with easy riders and souvenir hawkers, this basic restaurant located near the entrance to the citadel is run by guidebook sweetheart, Mr. Lac. Sadly, what once was a great little local spot churning out a couple of delicious staple Hue dishes has turned into a giant enterprise with an equally giant menu and following. Despite the lackluster food, you can't help but admire Lac for building such a successful business, especially as he is deaf and mute and lives in a country where opportunities for the disabled are few and far between. Eat elsewhere, but do drop in for a drink (preferably a beer), and wander upstairs, where the secret of Lac's success is revealed. Every customer is given a wooden stick and bolt bottle opener, fashioned and signed by Lac himself. The lucky few travelers that have spent enough time with him to appreciate his desire to travel, send photos of the bottle opener from various landmarks worldwide.
This busy little café is one of the oldest in Hue. On a busy corner by the side of the river, it specializes in just one dish: banh khoai, crispy pancakes stuffed with bean sprouts, shrimp, and little mounds of pork, served up with herbaceous side salads and a spicy peanut sauce. To eat, cut them in half, wrap them in herbs and rice paper, and dip. The shady seats on the sidewalk are perfectly positioned for watching life go by.
Inside the historical Azerai La Residence Hue, this pricey brasserie rivals anything you might find in Paris. The French fusion degustation menu (which must be requested eight hours in advance) features six exquisite courses, ranging from smoked duck carpaccio to beef tenderloin with rosemary. International wines are paired with each course, including an impressive dessert of molten chocolate with red hibiscus coulis served under a crystallized sugar dome.
No visit to Hue is complete without sampling the city's most famous breakfast dish, bun bo Hue, a glorious lemongrass-and-chili infused beef broth, served with slippery round noodles, beef, pork shank, and a fistful of fragrant herbs. It's not unlike fiery northern pho, and is best slurped from specialty kitchens; the best in Hue is Quan Cam, a tiny family-run noodle shop on Le Loi Street.
San May is a small decent vegetarian restaurant on the quiet Thanh Tinh Street. Dine amid soothing music in a nha ruong (Hue's traditional panel house) surrounded by a beautiful garden. Their menu is a wide range of many plant-based dishes and one of their signatures is juicy pomelo salad served in a meticulously carved pomelo fruit.
There are times when only a good old-fashioned curry will do, and the talented Indian chefs here make some of the best. Highlights of the menu include anything from their tandoori oven, soft buttery naan, mixed vegetable or meat grilled dishes, and tikka. For vegetarians the channa masala and paneer dishes come in belt-slackening-size servings, and for upset stomachs, the honey lassi is a great cure.
This vegetarian food stall is located right on the edge of Hue's Night Pedestrian Zone. This is the cheapest food stall in town with tasty plant-based dishes starting from 10,000d. It's overcrowded during full moon and new moon days (on the 14th, the 15th, the last and first day of each lunar month) when most of the Buddhist local people have vegetarian meals for religious purpose.
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