Vegan and Vegetarian in Vietnam: Phrases, Chay and Traps

One word does most of the work: chay, pronounced roughly "chai", meaning vegetarian. A restaurant signed quán chay or cơm chay serves nothing else, and because the tradition is Buddhist rather than dietary, those kitchens usually cook without egg or dairy too. So chay food is normally vegan by default. The difficulty is everywhere else, where fish sauce goes into almost everything.

That is the whole shape of vegan travel in Vietnam. Inside a chay restaurant you can order anything on the menu without asking a question. Outside one, a plate of stir-fried vegetables arrives seasoned with nước mắm and nobody thought to mention it, because to a Vietnamese cook fish sauce is salt.

The Vietnamese phrases that do the work

"Tôi ăn chay" on its own is understood as a religious statement and gets a helpful answer. "Tôi ăn chay, không nước mắm" is understood as an instruction and gets the right food. Say both halves every time. It is clumsy and it works.

Why chay is usually vegan already

Vietnamese has one word where English has two. Chay covers vegetarian and vegan together, which sounds like a problem and mostly is not, because the tradition behind it is stricter than Western vegetarianism rather than looser.

Mahayana Buddhist kitchens avoid the five pungent vegetables, which are garlic, onion, shallot, leek and asafoetida, and they generally cook without egg or dairy. Vietnamese cooking barely uses dairy in the first place. A temple-adjacent chay kitchen is therefore vegan and allium-free without being asked, which also makes it the easiest food in Southeast Asia for Jain travellers.

Hue has 108 pagodas, which is why its vegetarian cooking outruns its restaurant listings.

Two caveats. Secular chay restaurants aimed at a general lunch crowd do use garlic and onion freely, and some use egg. And "chay" occasionally appears on a menu meaning "no red meat" in places used to confused tourists. If it matters, ask: có trứng không?, is there egg.

Hue is the deepest version of this. Com chay there grew up around the Nguyen court, which ran from 1802 to 1945, and the city still has more dedicated vegetarian kitchens per head than anywhere else in the country. A plate in one of them is a cuisine with its own dishes rather than a menu with the meat taken out.

The fish sauce problem

Nước mắm is in the broth, the marinade, the dipping sauce and the dressing. It is not an ingredient a Vietnamese cook lists, any more than an Italian one lists salt.

The dish that catches most people is pho. A traditional broth is simmered with bones for twelve to twenty-four hours, so it cannot be made vegetarian on request. Asking for "pho without the beef" gets you meat stock with no beef in it. Order phở chay by name, which is a different recipe with a vegetable broth, or do not order pho.

Vegetarian pho is a separate recipe, not ordinary pho with the beef left out.

Shrimp paste, mắm tôm, is the other one. It turns up in northern dishes and in dipping sauces thinned with lime, where it looks like nothing.

The two days a month when the country goes vegetarian

On the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month, mùng một and ngày rằm, millions of Vietnamese eat meat-free. Those two dates fall near the new moon and the full moon and they move against the Western calendar, so check them on a lunar calendar converter before you travel.

A chay table in Hue. Everything on it is vegetarian by default, which is the whole point.

What changes on those days:

• Ordinary restaurants and market stalls put on chay dishes that are not there the rest of the month
• Dedicated chay restaurants are at their busiest, queue early and sell out of the better dishes by mid-morning
• Vegetarian hotpot, lẩu chay, appears on menus and families eat it together

Plan a long lunch on one of those days somewhere with a pagoda nearby. It is the single best vegetarian eating in the country and it costs almost nothing.

Where vegan food is easy in Vietnam

Vegan listing apps rank Vietnamese cities by counted vegan restaurants: Ho Chi Minh City about 130, Hanoi about 67, Da Nang 46, Hoi An 24, Hue 20, with Da Lat and Nha Trang around 11 each. By that measure Hue is mid-table.

By any other measure Hue is the best place to eat vegetarian in Vietnam. It has been the centre of Vietnamese Buddhist scholarship since 1558, it has 108 pagodas and around 300 temples, and the Nguyen court developed over 125 vegetarian dishes for palace rituals. Many people in Hue eat chay two to six days a month as ordinary practice.

Nuoc mam is used the way salt is used, which is why it is rarely mentioned.

The two measures disagree because Hue's vegetarian food lives in unmarked cơm chay places near pagodas that never appear on a vegan app. Search cơm chay in Vietnamese on a map rather than "vegan", pick the one busy at noon, and eat better than you will anywhere on the listings. The same trick works near Phuoc Lam Pagoda in Hoi An, where rice plates run 20,000 to 35,000 dong, and around Pho Da Pagoda in Da Nang.

Central Vietnam is where a vegetarian traveller has to plan a little harder.

So central Vietnam is not the hard part, whatever the vegan blogs say. Hue is the most vegetarian-friendly city in the country, and in Hoi An cao lau has a chay version in most places that serve it. The restaurants of Hoi An old town cover the rest.

Learn one line and the rest follows: toi an chay, khong nuoc mam. Vegetarian, no fish sauce. The second half is the half that matters.

Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An are the three places where a dedicated chay kitchen is never far. Hue is the surprise on that list: as the old Buddhist capital it has served vegetarian food to monks for centuries, and com chay there is a cuisine rather than a substitution. Da Lat and Ninh Binh are workable. Phong Nha, Dong Hoi and the smaller towns along the coast are where the phrase book starts earning its place.

Where vegan travel in Vietnam gets hard

Three situations, none of them a city.

Small towns and the highlands. Da Lat and Nha Trang have a fraction of the choice of the big cities, and a market town with no pagoda may have none at all. Carry something.

Transit. Sleeper buses stop at roadside canteens built around pork and rice. The vegetarian option is usually rice, morning glory and whatever else can be assembled, and it is cheerfully done if you ask.

Anywhere food is arranged in advance. Homestays, boat trips and guided tours cook to a fixed plan and carry the ingredients in. This is the one that catches people out, and it is entirely avoidable: say it at the time of booking, in writing, not to the guide on the morning. On a multi-day cave expedition every meal is carried in by porters, so a request made at 7am cannot be met and a request made three weeks earlier is routine.

Around the national park itself, top restaurants in Phong Nha covers a small town with a handful of places that will cook chay on request. If you are still assembling dates and regions, the Vietnam trip planner is the place to start, and in the south Nguyen Hue walking street sits in the city with the most vegan restaurants in the country.

Season matters more than most food guides admit. Markets thin out and menus shorten when when the rains come, so check the best time to visit Vietnam before you fix your dates.