March 24, 2026 · Marc Vinson
Distinctive Tastes of Vietnam: The Cuisine Is About Balance, Not Heat
Vietnamese cooking gets filed next to Thai on most people's mental map, usually under the heading of spicy Southeast Asian food. That is a misread. Heat is available in Vietnamese cooking but it is rarely the point. The organizing idea is balance: salty against sour, sweet against bitter, rich against fresh, soft against crunchy, all of it adjusted at the table rather than settled in the kitchen.
The plate is not finished when it leaves the kitchen
This is the thing that surprises people most in class. A bowl of phở or a plate of bánh xèo arrives as a starting point, and next to it comes a pile of herbs, lime, chili, and lettuce. You are supposed to build each bite yourself.
That is not a garnish tradition, it is the structure of the meal. The eater does the final seasoning, which means one dish can be sharp and herbal for one person at the table and rich and mild for the person beside them.
Herbs are a vegetable, not a sprinkle
Western cooking uses herbs in teaspoons. Vietnamese cooking uses them in handfuls. Mint, cilantro, Thai basil, and perilla show up as a plateful you tear into your bowl as you go.
Once you cook this way for an evening the amount starts to feel normal, and a phở with three leaves of basil on top starts to look like a rounding error.
Nước chấm is the whole cuisine in one bowl
If you learn one thing from Vietnamese cooking, learn this dipping sauce. Fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water, garlic, and chili. That is the entire list.
What makes it worth learning is that there is no correct ratio, only a correct balance, and you find it by tasting and adjusting. Too sharp, add sugar. Too flat, add lime. Too aggressive, add water. It is the best possible practice for the skill that matters most in any kitchen, which is tasting something and knowing what it needs.
Phở is a broth with a soup attached
Everything that makes phở worth eating happens before any noodle is involved. Bones go long and slow, the onion and ginger get charred first for depth, and the warm spices, star anise, cinnamon, clove, coriander, go in as a sachet so they perfume the pot without clouding it.
Clarity is treated as a mark of skill, which is why the pot is skimmed rather than boiled hard. The assembly at the end takes about a minute. The broth is the dish.
Bánh xèo is named after the sound it makes
The name means sizzling cake, for the noise the batter makes hitting a hot pan. It is a crepe of rice flour, water, and coconut milk, colored gold with turmeric, and the whole ambition is that it comes out thin and crisp rather than soft.
Then you tear it up, wrap the pieces in lettuce and herbs, and dip. It is a good example of how the cuisine keeps handing the assembly back to you.
Two layers of history on every table
Centuries of Chinese influence brought noodles, the wok, and stir-frying. Later French colonization left behind bread, pâté, coffee, and a fondness for the baguette that became bánh mì.
Neither one arrived as a replacement. Both got absorbed and rebuilt into something that is unmistakably Vietnamese, which is a decent argument that the cuisine has always been better at adaptation than at purity.
North and south are not the same food
Northern cooking, around Hanoi, tends to be more restrained and more savory, with less sugar and a lighter hand on the herbs. Southern cooking, around what is now Ho Chi Minh City, runs sweeter and richer, with coconut in more places and herbs by the armful.
It is worth knowing so that you can taste a dish and understand what it is aiming at rather than deciding it was made wrong.
Distinctive Tastes of Vietnam is one of our hands-on class menus at the Sherman Oaks Galleria academy: phở, bánh xèo, and chả giò, cooked from scratch and assembled the way they are meant to be eaten.
See the menus →