Translated literally as 'fresh beer', bia hoi was introduced by the French and is the taste of northern Vietnam. It's cloudy, light and contains no chemicals or preservatives, so causes no hangovers, in theory at least. Brewery men deliver it in metal barrels every morning (below), and it must be consumed by nightfall or it goes off. It costs about 3,500 Vietnamese dong (HK$1.70) a glass and is sold in earthy street restaurants that serve surprisingly good food.
19 Ngoc Ha
This is the best bia hoi restaurant in Hanoi, just around the corner from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. Here, on child-sized plastic seats beneath an outdoor canopy of umbrellas and trees, a feast of excellent bo xao lan (fried beef with chilli and lemon grass, below right), muc xao (fried squid) and com rang (fried rice) with four glasses of beer set us back 98,000 dong.
5 Ngoc Ha Take note of the Vietnamese food names. The vast majority of bia hoi restaurants have no English menus and you might inadvertently order thit cho (fried dog) or me rat sot toi (gizzards with garlic). This bia hoi is an exception, however, and the English menu shows the speciality is goat (de). Not that you need a menu to realise it. If you arrive just after the lunchtime rush as we did, you can endure the spectacle of three goats having their throats slit next to the loos, their screams sounding unnervingly human. As a result we chose large steamed prawns (tom) and fried chicken (ga xao), which with two beers cost 81,000 dong.
Thai Ha, 12A Bo Tung Xeo
The name of this restaurant translates as 'tortured beef' and refers to the method of killing a cow slowly by slashing it with a knife, apparently to make its meat more tender. Fortunately, the animal is already dead before it is hoisted onto a spit outside the aircraft hangar-sized restaurant, where women sit amid piles of vegetables and barrels of bia hoi. A beef dish, a helping of rice and two beers came to not much more than 50,000 dong.