Bún Chả Hương Liên

On a humid May evening in 2016, Anthony Bourdain sat down on a blue plastic stool at 24 Lê Văn Hưu with a sitting United States president and ordered bun cha. The photograph that came out of that meal — two men, two beers, one bare wooden table — became one of the most reproduced food images of the decade, and it turned a family-run grill house in Hanoi's Hai Bà Trưng district into a pilgrimage site. Bourdain's verdict on camera, for Parts Unknown, was characteristically economical: low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer.

What makes Bún Chả Hương Liên worth the trip is not the fame. It is the arithmetic of the grill. Pork belly and minced pork patties are marinated in fish sauce, sugar and shallots, then cooked over charcoal until the fat renders and the edges caramelise. They arrive in a bowl of warm, sweet-sour dipping broth — nuoc cham sharpened with lime, vinegar, garlic and chilli — alongside a tangle of cold rice vermicelli and a heap of fresh herbs. You build each mouthful yourself: noodle, herb, pork, broth. The charcoal smoke is the point of it, and it is what separates bun cha from every grilled pork dish you have eaten anywhere else.

The restaurant spends most of its day doing what it has always done, feeding the neighbourhood across three floors of simple tables. Come at lunchtime for the original experience, or in the evening when the open frontage glows and smoke drifts across the pavement. Expect to share a table, and expect a queue at peak hours — especially from tour groups following in Bourdain's footsteps.

Order the crab spring rolls alongside the bun cha. They are fried to a shattering crisp and are the other dish the kitchen is properly known for. Bia Hà Nội, poured over ice, is the correct drink, and the whole meal rarely costs more than a single cocktail in a Western capital.

For anyone tracing Bourdain's Vietnam, this is the natural first stop: not a temple of fine dining, but a working neighbourhood grill that happened to be exactly right on the night the world was watching.