Asia Flavours

Sunday Brunch at Le Beaulieu, Hanoi

Asian hotels do brunch so well and the Sofitel Metropole in Hanoi is no exception. There is a large selection of buffet options, including an extensive seafood bar with oysters, crab, tiger prawn and smoked salmon sashimi. The highlights for me were the cold buffet and the puddings which were seriously extensive, including a large cheese selection. The cold buffet had some interesting dishes such as a sea urchin panna cotta, actually one of the nicer sea urchin dishes I've had but nonetheless it still had an element of tasting like you imagine a rockpool would taste like! At US$50 per head without wine and US$85 with free-flowing red or white, it is a relatively expensive indulgence but well worth it (as long as you don't need to be too active in the afternoon!).

Le Beaulieu
Sofitel Metropole
15 Ngo Quyen Street

Terraces, Hanoi

Wow, can it rain in Hanoi - not as bad as HK's Black Rain but enough to put you off leaving the hotel for dinner. In light of the heaven's opening, we decided that the Metropole's European pavement cafe seemed like a good option. The covered terrace runs around the front of the hotel and has magnificent views over the chaotic road traffic. Everyone in Hanoi seems to have a scooter and the roads are full, right into the late evening. At one point we started to take bets on the most number of people we'd see on one scooter - for the record, it was six: two adults and four children!

The brilliant and atmospheric setting was not let down by the food. I had snapper meurniere with cherry tomato tatin, caramalised with honey. The fish was beautifully tender but the star of the show was the cherry tomato tatin which consisted of a stack of slightly sweet ripe cherry tomatoes waiting to burst in your mouth.

Ice cream seems to be extremely popular in Vietnam with lots of outlets offering interesting flavours (everyone rates Fanny's Ice cream Parlour but unfortunately we didn't get the opportunity to visit). For desert at Terraces I had a "Charlie Chaplin", an ice cream sundae named after one of the hotel's most famous guests. It was a health conscious individual's nightmare but on a humid, wet evening in Hanoi was absolutely perfect - although I actually couldn't physically move after the meal!

If it hadn't been for the rain, I doubt we would have gone to a European restaurant in Hanoi but I'm glad we did. I suspect that the atmospheric location had a lot to do with the enjoyment but the food, though expensive, was a good match for the great setting.

Terraces, Sofitel Metropole
15 Ngo Quyen Street
Hanoi

Spices Garden, Hanoi

If you want to try the renowned Vietnamese "street food" without any worry about a dodgy stomach then the Sofitel Metropole has a solution: Spices Garden. They put on a buffet lunch covering all the essentials, including various "stalls" offering hot food such as pho noodles, and also some of the weird stuff like half duck eggs. Not for the fainthearted, half duck eggs have been slightly incubated and so there is a small duck foetus inside each one. Apparently they are really good for you but, to be honest, I'm not that convinced by the concept (even after a glass of Vietnamese wine!).

Unfortunately no one told us that the set lunch included main courses in addition to the extensive buffet and so we rather overindulged on the street food element. Having said that, that was probably the right decision as we felt that the buffet options were more interesting and rather tastier. The main courses involved a slightly stringy stuffed squid with dill sauce, an excellent steamed sea bass with leek and soy sauce and roasted beef fillet in a green pepper sauce with mashed yam. The green pepper sauce had a lovely rich flavour that went beautifully with the steak but although the yam had a fantastic purple colour, it was rather dry.

The buffet elements were lovely and the setting is excellent with its modern Vietnamese decor. It's not in any way risky but if you want to explore "street food" in a more comfortable setting, this is the place!

Spices Garden
Sofitel Metropole
15 Ngo Quyen Street
Hanoi

Hanoi Cookery Course

The Sofitel Metropole's half-day cookery course was the absolute highlight of my trip to Hanoi. I love to do cookery courses whenever I go on holiday, partly because of the totally useless kitchen facilities in my flat in Hong Kong and partly because my main culinary experiences to-date have been very European-focused. Unlike the excellent cookery school at the Four Seasons in Chiang Mai, the Metropole's course was not hands-on but somehow that didn't seem to affect how much we learnt (or, for that matter, how much we enjoyed it).

The course started with a cyclo trip to the 19-12 Market (a slightly hair-raising experience given the traffic in Hanoi, where traffic lights are really not considered to be much more than street-side decorations). I'm not sure we'd have been brave enough to wander through the wholesale market by ourselves so it was really useful to go with one of the hotel's chefs. You could literally buy everything, from herbs and spices, to freshwater snails and roasted dog. At one point by the spices stall, the chef was trying to convince us that if we included turmeric in our cooking whilst pregnant, the child's skin would be whiter - ummmm, really? That slightly dubious old wives' tale aside, it was fascinating. Apparently the Vietnamese won't buy refrigerated meat or milk because the suspicion is that anything refrigerated won't be as fresh as it should be.

Back at the hotel we were shown how to make six different traditional Vietnamese dishes: Hanoi deep-fried spring rolls, marinated pork grilled in bamboo, steamed ca qua fish with beer and herbs, grilled chicken skewers with lemon leaves, sauteed pumpkin branches with garlic and Vietnamese banana flower salad. Most of the dishes - perhaps with the alternative ingredients they suggested - could be easily done at home. Also, as there were only five of us in the class, we were able to see everything really clearly and to ask as many questions as we liked.

In case we still felt hungry after trying all the different dishes, we ended the course with a buffet lunch at the excellent Spices Garden where they have traditional Vietnamese street food stalls (without the risk of a slightly dodgy stomach!).

Sofitel Metropole Hanoi
15 Ngo Quyen St

Green Tangerine, Hanoi

After wandering round the beautiful, if slightly dilapidated, streets of Hanoi with its stunning French colonial era architecture, I thought it was only right to try some of the French / Vietnamese fusion cuisine on offer in Hanoi. The setting of the Green Tangerine is lovely, set as it is in a brilliantly restored colonial villa. The restaurant has the benefit of being right in the centre of Hanoi but is set back from the road with its courtyard protected from the hustle and bustle of the trauma-inducing road traffic by an ordinary looking street entrance.

The menu is sophisticated although it did seem like it was almost trying too hard to impress with an overwhelming assortment of flavours in each dish. My starter - scallops cooked with apricot seeds "o mai" and served on puff pastry with a black olive jam and a creamy champagne sauce - worked well with a lovely combination of flavours. The only negative (and it really is minor) was that there was a rather large excess of puff pastry on the plate given the amount of scallops, jam and sauce. The main course - salmon "ca kho" braised in lemon grass, ginger and fish sauce, served with leek in a kumquat dressing and strawberry chutney - was cooked beautifully and the salmon was wonderfully flavoursome with the citrus dressing of the leeks off-setting the otherwise slightly sweet flavouring. The sauce was perhaps a little bit thick considering the delicacy of the other elements but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I could have eaten any one of the puddings on the menu, mainly traditional French puds with interesting Vietnamese twists. Luckily for me the restaurant was able to assist with this dilemma by offering a sampler pudding. The five items (which I've photography really badly - apologies) included creme brulee, a chocolate truffle and a particularly nice kumquat ice cream.

I read a lot of reviews about the Green Tangerine before I visited Hanoi, several of which said that it was overpriced and that the staff (particularly the French chef) were rather snooty and unwelcoming. Well, it's true, it was expensive (by Hanoi standards) but then again, it is an upmarket French fusion restaurant in a brilliantly restored colonial villa and so this shouldn't really be that much of a shock. I agree that the French chef was perhaps a little charmless but the Vietnamese staff were perfectly pleasant. All in all, it was a lovely meal with good food and a nice ambience.

Green Tangerine
48 Hang Be, Hanoi
Tel: 825 1286