{"id":104,"date":"2019-01-28T00:27:46","date_gmt":"2019-01-27T17:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/?p=104"},"modified":"2020-10-30T19:17:45","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T12:17:45","slug":"night-food-cart-sellers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"Night Food Cart Sellers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have dinner really late — usually no sooner than 11 pm, and sometimes 2 am.<\/p>\n

At this time the only eating options available are those food carts attached to a motorbike selling sticky rice, boiled corn, sausages, dumplings, and so on. The food is cheap, delicious, and pretty nutritious too, so I’ve been a regular customer for almost 2 years. I almost always order a box of sticky rice with 2 eggs, a sausage, some pate, and an ear of corn. That usually takes care of dinner.<\/p>\n

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You can find these food carts on any major streets of Hanoi.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Typically there are almost always customers so the sellers are pretty busy. Today business was a bit slow so I sat down and had a chat with the guy.<\/p>\n

Apparently both he and his wife are food cart sellers. His wife is standing right across the street. They both rent a room in My Dinh, and every day they begin working at 6 pm and go home around 3 am or when the food is all sold out.<\/p>\n

Around this winter time, corn is in high demand. Many times when I stop by after midnight, the corn is all gone. It seems like they all know each other though. Several times the guy directs me to another vendor down the street who still has corn left.<\/p>\n

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My typical dinner box with sticky rice, sausage, and 2 eggs. This particular box costs around 35,000VND.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Business is typically highest during nights with football matches, or when university students have exams coming and are all cramming late. The man said during those peak days, they can sell over 2 million dongs’ worth of food (wow!).<\/em>\u00a0That I assume is many many times greater than the income they can earn from farming back at their hometown. Other days when it’s rainy or especially windy though, almost nobody goes out on the street and he has to bring all the sticky rice and corn home and eat by himself.<\/p>\n

They have to constantly be on the look for police. The man said that once a woman had her entire cart picked up and taken away on a police truck. She had to call a xe \u00f4m to get home. Luckily the same has never happened to him, but he almost always has to be ready to bail at any moment. That feeling of nervousness can suck a lot, I imagine.<\/p>\n

Not all vendors are the same! I think they source their food from different suppliers, because I can tell the corn tastes very different from seller to seller. The same for the sticky rice and eggs: some vendors are excellent at cooking yummy eggs and sausages while some just suck. I once bought a box of sticky rice from a guy on Y\u00ean L\u00e3ng right across our office. It was so bad, the eggs were watery and the sausages so badly burnt that I never returned to buy from him even though he was the nearest vendor.<\/p>\n

Frequenting these night food carts often enough, I notice the customers are almost always people working night shifts: taxi drivers, hookers, karaoke staff, security guards, and sometimes\u00a0 also university students.<\/p>\n

The past two years I’ve definitely spent a considerable amount of money on eating at these food carts. I’d be happy to support these sellers though! They’re working a hard job at odd hours, and without the steaming hot food they’re cooking, night owls like me would be stuck with the cold packaged crap at Circle K.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have dinner really late — usually no sooner than 11 pm, and sometimes 2 am. At this time the only eating options…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187,105],"tags":[31,17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leminhha.vn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}