A street food crawl through Hoi An's old town

Hoi An is a small town with an outsized food reputation, and almost none of the best of it is found in a restaurant with a printed menu. The real crawl happens at plastic stools on the sidewalk, at a market stall, or from a woman with two baskets on a shoulder pole.

Start with cao lau, the dish that belongs to Hoi An and nowhere else. Thick, chewy rice noodles, slices of char siu-style pork, fresh greens, and pork cracklings, all tossed in a light broth — but the specific texture of the noodles supposedly depends on water drawn from a particular ancestral well in town, which is why cao lau made elsewhere in Vietnam never quite tastes the same. Look for it at the stalls around the central market rather than at a tourist-facing restaurant.

Banh mi gets its due here too — Hoi An's versions, filled with pork pâté, fresh herbs, pickled vegetables, and a fried egg, regularly place among the country's best, and the queues at the well-known stalls (locals will point you to them) form early and move fast.

For something less exported, look for banh xeo — a turmeric-yellow rice crepe filled with shrimp and bean sprouts, folded and eaten wrapped in lettuce and herbs, dipped in a sweet-and-sour fish sauce. It's usually a sit-down, cook-to-order dish rather than a grab-and-go one, and the smaller family-run spots a few streets back from the river tend to do it better than the ones directly on the tourist strip.

End the crawl at the night market after dark, when the old town's lanterns come on and dessert stalls sell che — a category of sweet, layered drinks and puddings built from beans, jelly, coconut milk, and crushed ice, different at every stall and worth trying more than one.