10 Reasons Abraham Lincoln Would Be Great At Best Food In Hanoi

Follow them and you won't go wrong. We're not going to presume to know more than the locals.

These places are so abundant that it would be ridiculous to list favourites. You can barely walk a block in the Old Quarter without stumbling across a run down opening packed with tiny plastic stools, low tables and enthusiastic diners. Hanoi tourist information may well be the best place in Vietnam to sample street food.

And at Seoul barbeque tables, the serving staff help with the lighting of fires, the replenishing of fuel, the changing of grill plates as well as setting the meat over the flame and its occasional turning - all of the tasks with the potential of mishap. Beef rib meat and skirt steak, along with pork belly - sometimes marinated, sometimes not - are what we gravitated towards when selecting from the menu but there are many other cuts on offer. It's a communal style of dining where grog is sipped or skolled during cooking and eating, a factor that panders to my tendencies.

Cliched as it may be from the outside, there are charcoal grill plates all over town giving colour and flavour to pork and beef, from modest street eateries in clandestine alleyways to sizeable indoor halls equipped with space-age silver or copper siphons that are lowered over each grill to hoover up the meaty smoke. I want to write about some of the dining experiences we had in Seoul in a series of short posts, starting with perhaps my only point of familiarity, Korean barbeque. All those tedious mornings as a child, dwelling over milk, cereal and toast followed by the teenage rebellion of bypassing breakfast for more shut-eye meant that - except for special weekend brunches of cooked morning fare - I was rarely eating anything substantial before noon.

These days there would be a dietary intolerance or a term to describe the kind of antipathy I felt when I was younger. When I came to Vietnam, I overcame my aversion to breakfast. The freshness of the noodles, the form of the dumpling, the richness of the broth.

Here, at stall number 13 at the Kwang Jang Market, our vendor is concerned more about the flavour and consistency of what we eat before it's customised at the table. Predictably, she roars at me and waves me away. Before I mount my bike for getaway, I attempt to get a decent photograph of the vendor's cramped work space.

Money gets diverted to all who've had a hand in proceedings, including my kindly parking attendant. The karaoke singer breaks off mid-crescendo when he somehow hears me call for the bill. Cracking the code for payment prolongs matters, however.

Once done, quickly getting wind on one's person is paramount. Just as many napkins are being used to dab at beads of sweat as those being used for missing one's mouth. At this moment in this summer, getting these noodles down is hot work.