Hội An is a small town with an unusually specific food culture and an entire industry built on making clothes in forty-eight hours. Both work considerably better if you arrive knowing how they operate, and both punish a rushed schedule.
The town's peculiarity has a cause. Hội An was a major international port from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, trading with Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Dutch merchants, and the communities that settled here left their cooking and their skills behind. Then the river silted up, the trade moved to Đà Nẵng, and the town spent two hundred years too poor to knock anything down. That is why the old town still stands and why the food is unlike anywhere else in Vietnam.
Three dishes that exist only here
Cao lầu. Thick, chewy, slightly smoky noodles, quite unlike anything else in Vietnamese cooking, served with slices of char siu-style pork, fresh herbs, bean sprouts and crisp squares of fried dough on top. There is very little broth — it is closer to a dressed noodle dish than a soup.
The noodles are traditionally made with water drawn from one particular well in the town and lye from ash burned on a specific island, which is either genuine terroir or excellent marketing depending on who you ask. Nobody disputes the texture, which is the point: dense and springy, closer to udon than to phở noodles.
White rose dumplings. Translucent rice-flour parcels of minced shrimp, pinched into a flower shape and topped with fried shallot, served with a light dipping sauce. A very small number of families make them for essentially every restaurant in town, which is why they are remarkably consistent everywhere.
Bánh mì. Vietnam's sandwich exists nationwide and reaches an unusual peak here, largely because of two or three shops that became famous and a dozen more that quietly match them. Follow the queue rather than the sign — the celebrated ones have lines that move fast, and the unheralded ones two streets away are frequently better.
Beyond those three, look for mì quảng, the turmeric-yellow noodle dish of the surrounding Quảng Nam province, and bánh xèo, a crisp rice-flour pancake you wrap in herbs and lettuce yourself.
Where and when to eat
The central market, at the eastern end of the old town, has a food court at the back that opens early and is the cheapest good eating in Hội An. Point at things.
An Hội, across the bridge, has a night market and a strip of restaurants that are aimed squarely at visitors — fine, and not where the town eats.
The better strategy is to cycle out. Ten minutes in any direction puts you among rice fields and village restaurants where the same dishes cost a third as much. The road towards Trà Quế, the herb-growing village north of town, is particularly good for this.
Two habits worth adopting. Eat lunch late, around one, when the tour groups have moved on. And accept that the good places close early — many kitchens stop at eight or nine, and a ten o'clock dinner means the tourist strip by default.
A cooking class is more worthwhile here than in most places, because the good ones start at the market at dawn and include a boat trip to the herb village. You learn the ingredients rather than just the recipes.
The tailoring, realistically
There are several hundred tailoring shops in Hội An and the quality range is enormous. The difference between a garment you wear for years and one you never take out of the wardrobe is almost entirely down to how you order it.
Bring a reference. A photograph is good. An actual garment whose fit you already like is far better — a tailor can measure and copy a jacket that fits you in a way they cannot interpret a picture from a website.
Allow forty-eight hours minimum, and preferably three days. The shops that promise a suit by tomorrow morning can do it, and the result is a suit made overnight. Order on your first afternoon, not your last.
Expect two fittings, and possibly three. The first fitting will not be right. That is not a failure; it is how tailoring works, and the shops that skip it are the ones producing the disappointing results. Budget the time.
Ask what the fabric actually is and be sceptical of the answer when the price is low. Cashmere at that price is not cashmere. The value here is in linen, cotton, cotton-wool blends and mid-weight wool, all of which can be genuinely good. Ask to see the bolt, feel it, and check whether the shop can tell you the weight.
Check the inside at the first fitting. Seam finishing, lining, buttonholes and the shoulder construction on a jacket are where corners get cut, and they are invisible from outside until the garment fails.
As a rough guide to what is realistic: a well-made linen shirt is a modest sum, a lined wool suit is several hundred US dollars depending on the cloth, and anything dramatically below those figures involves a substitution somewhere. Shoes and leather bags are made here too, and the same rules apply.
If something is not right at the final collection, say so. Alterations are included and expected, and shops would rather fix it than have you leave unhappy.
What to actually have made
The things that work best are the things that benefit from fitting and are hard to buy off the peg: a linen shirt or two, a lightweight jacket, trousers copied from a pair you already own, a coat if you have the time for three fittings.
The things people regret are the elaborate ones — a heavily structured suit ordered in two days by someone who has never owned a tailored suit, or an evening dress copied from a photograph without a clear idea of the fabric.
The old town itself
The old town requires a ticket, sold as a booklet of coupons that admit you to a set number of the historic houses, assembly halls and museums. The fee funds conservation. Walking the streets does not require it; entering the buildings does.
Worth using the coupons on: the Japanese Covered Bridge, which is the town's emblem and dates to the sixteenth century; one of the Chinese assembly halls, built by merchant communities from specific provinces; and one old merchant house, of which the Tấn Ký house is the usual recommendation.
Go early. The old town between six and eight in the morning is a working neighbourhood — deliveries, breakfast, people opening shutters — and by ten it is not.
The lanterns come on at dusk and are the reason a large proportion of visitors are here. On the fourteenth day of each lunar month the town switches off its electric lights for the full moon lantern festival, and paper lanterns are floated on the river. It is busy and it is still worth seeing.
Getting out of town
Hire a bicycle. This is the single best thing to do in Hội An and most accommodation provides them free. The rice fields start within ten minutes, and the lanes between them are flat and almost traffic-free.
An Bàng beach is about four kilometres away on those lanes, and it is a proper beach with places to eat along it. Cửa Đại, closer, has suffered severe erosion.
Cẩm Thanh, south-east, is a village surrounded by a forest of water coconut palms threaded with narrow channels, traditionally paddled in round basket boats. The basket boat trips have become a somewhat rowdy attraction at the main jetty; go earlier, or arrange it through a smaller operator, and it is peaceful.
Mỹ Sơn, an hour inland, is a complex of Cham Hindu temple towers from the fourth to fourteenth centuries, heavily damaged during the war and gradually being conserved. Go at opening, before the heat and the coaches.
Practical notes
Season. February to May is the best window: dry, warm and not yet at the peak heat. June to August is hot and busy. October and November are the rainy months and Hội An genuinely floods — the old town has flood-height marks on the walls and shopkeepers move their stock upstairs. Check before booking those dates.
Getting there. Đà Nẵng is the nearest airport and railway station, about forty-five minutes away. The train journey between Đà Nẵng and Huế over the Hải Vân pass is one of the best rail rides in Southeast Asia and worth building into a route.
Time. Three nights is right. Two is enough to see the old town and not enough for a second fitting.
For the town's own page, see the Hội An destination guide.
