If you visit Quy Nhon but you have no idea about places to eat, you really don’t know much about the coastal city. You will be lost in a forest of restaurants, from common to luxurious ones. Restaurants and tea shops in Quy Nhon are booming more and more. Curiously enough, in such a small city, the business is so thriving.
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Sitting by street vendor carts which park along Quy Nhon beach, you can enjoy grilled fish, cuttlefish or local Vietnamese popular fruits like unripe mangoes, guavas, etc. Photo: Internet
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There are rather numerous of good restaurants and tea shops. If you are a backpacker from far away, you should ask receptionists of your hotels about them. Don’t worry about quality and price because their food is very delicious while the prices are extremely reasonable. The two factors are commonly recognized by gastronomic Quy Nhon people.
I just mention here some famous street food in Quy Nhon because I am a common tourist who prefers to eat street food.
The first street dish in my list is grilled fermented pork roll - a speciality of Binh Dinh - with soya sauce, chilli and fresh garlic. The most famous makeshift stall among those selling the speciality locates at the Tran Binh Trong - Phan Boi Chau intersection. The stall is always crowded. Price of each grilled fermented pork roll in February 2009 was just 2.000 VND.
Next to the portable stall is a very well-known fruit juice shop. Many local people says that the fruit juice there is the best and cheap (6,000 VND/glass of juice). There are two type of fruit juice: mixed grinding juice and cube-cut mixed fruit with milk and dried coconut. The dishes taste so nice. That’s the reason why the shop is always crowded and its customers have to wait.
The next dish is banh canh – a kind of local rice spaghetti. I find banh canh at a shop on Phan Boi Chau Street the best. The shop is about 50m away from the fermented pork roll stall and has a nickname as “shop of scolding”. Because the banh canh there is fairly tasty and the shop is rather crowded, the shop owner is God! A bowl of steaming hot banh canh costs only 4,000-5,000 VND. The shop also serves spring rolls at 700 VND/item.
Opposite to the banh canh shop is a 3,000 ice-cream shop. The name 3,000 means that all kinds of ice-cream available there are sold at the same price of 3,000 VND. Don’t forget to enjoy the shop’s unique cuisine: mixture of 2 fruit flavored scoops and 1 flan cake. Others dishes such as Vietnamese shredded papaya salad with beef liver (5,000 VND/plate) and dried cuttlefish seasoned with spices, sugar and salt are savory, too.
About 100m away from the ice-cream shop as the crow flies, a makeshift stand which sells shellfish and arkshells is situated on Tang Bat Ho Street, opposite to Le Loi school. The dishes are unspeakably delicious and dreadfully inexpensive! Just 5,000 VND/plate of shellfish and 6,000 VND / plate of arkshells.
You can find shellfish at another shop on Mai Xuan Thuong street, near the head office of Sacombank, Binh Dinh branch. The shellfish here isn’t as good as the dish of the former. Yet, the latter offers fermented sticky rice with ice at just 3,000 VND.
A portable stall on Phan Dinh Phung Street is long popular for many years with its Vietnamese shredded papaya salad with beef liver. It also sells fermented pork rolls, sweet mung bean soup and sweet corn soup which are very luscious.
You may stroll along Quy Nhon beach near Seagull Hotel and enjoy grilled fish, cuttlefish with unripe mangos or guavas, eating grilled coconut milk flavoured rice cake with chilli sauce; drinking sugarcane juice at makeshift stands there at relatively low expense.
How can you forget Quy Nhon once you enjoy its popular dishes and recipes regardless by accident or by intention? Everybody who has ever visited the coastal peaceful city does talk about the dishes and recipes in his chats with friends later.
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