VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam has been suggested to introduce its diversified and special cuisine to the world to attract travelers. But what should it do?

A common courtesy statement Vietnamese usually hear from the South Korean actors when they visit Vietnam is that: “I love pho (noodle soup served beef or chicken, a Vietnamese traditional dish).

In the US and Europe, pho has also been the Vietnamese food most mentioned by the people who have been to Vietnam. Only in recent years, have the western tourism publications added nem (spring rolls) and banh mi (bread) into the list of the Vietnamese popular food.

Meanwhile, Vietnam not only has pho to introduce to the world.

However, the limited knowledge of foreign travelers about Vietnamese cuisine shows Vietnam’s shortcomings in popularizing its specialties.

In Vietnam, every locality, from the north to the central region or the south, has its specialties. Different personalities of local people and different ways of processing allow creating different dishes.

The local residents in coastal provinces use the common material – seafood – for their dishes, but the food tastes differently. Quang Ninh province has been well known for “cha muc” (grilled chopped cuttlefish), while Hai Phong City people make “nom sua do” (sweet and sour grated salad with nettlefish) very well. While Nha Trang City has wonderful dried cuttlefish, HCM City has been famous for sea snails.

The most outstanding feature of the Vietnamese cuisine is that it has two culinary centers with quite different styles, including Hanoi – the symbol of the northern delta, and Hue City – the land of the royal style.

Besides, Vietnam also has the so called “hybrid food style” – or the “street food,” which travelers can taste at all the noisy tourist centers like Hanoi, Quang Ninh, Hai Phong in the north, Nha Trang, Da Nang in the central region, or HCM City in the south.

What should Vietnam introduce to the world? Pho has been popularized for a long time that it has been automatically considered the Vietnamese traditional food. However, this may not be true when people are not in Hanoi or HCM City.

Therefore, it would be a difficulty for tour guides to talk about the local traditional dishes when they lead tourists to Da Nang City or Khanh Hoa, where pho is not the local specialty.

A tourism expert has noted that the tourism promotion campaigns with the focus on popularizing pho has led to the inaccurate understanding of travelers about the Vietnamese cuisine. Travelers may think that pho is typical for the Vietnamese cuisine, and pho is everything Vietnam has.

Meanwhile, other special dishes still have not been introduced to travelers.

Hue City, the ancient royal capital city, has too many good dishes to offer, from the main courses to desserts, from royal to popular dishes. The culinary art of Hue food is always a part of the tours to the city as a cultural value worth of being discovered by tourists.

However, Hue still has not found a dish which is most typical for the city which it should focus on when running advertisement campaigns.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Cong Hoan, Deputy Director of Hanoi Redtour, complained that the firm can only introduce local specialties to the small inbound groups of tourists. Meanwhile, the infrastructure conditions are not good enough to receive big groups of travelers.

To Quoc