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60 free Vietnamese Food trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Vietnamese food is built on balance: five tastes, five colours, hot ingredients against cold ones, and a bowl of fish sauce on every table. This quiz starts with the dishes everyone knows, phở and bánh mì, and digs into where they actually came from: a textile-market province south of Hanoi, a French baguette stretched with rice flour, a 1958 Saigon bakery, and the 'pilotless' meatless phở of the postwar years. From there it travels the country: bún chả and egg coffee in Hanoi, bún bò Huế and its lemongrass broth, the lye-water noodles of Hội An, sizzling bánh xèo and coconut worms in the Mekong Delta, plus fish sauce grades, Tết's square rice cakes, royal court banquets, yin-yang food pairings and a few eating idioms that mean something else entirely. It suits cooks, travellers planning a trip and anyone who has ever argued about the right way to garnish phở. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Vietnamese cuisine and the individual dishes, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A Vietnamese meal is built to balance how many fundamental tastes (ngũ vị)?
Five
Sweet, salty, bitter, sour and spicy each map to one of the classical elements, and cooks aim for the same number of colours on the plate too.
Q 02Potatoes are called khoai tây in Vietnamese, a name that literally means what?
Western yam
Ingredients the French brought in were often named after a similar native food plus tây, 'western': onions became western shallots and asparagus western bamboo shoots.
Q 03Phở is reputed to have emerged around 1900-1907 in which northern province southeast of Hanoi?
Nam Định
Villagers of Vân Cù there insist they were eating it long before the French arrived, and a villager named Vạn opened Hanoi's first province-style stand around 1925.
Q 04Phở first appears in written records from which period?
The early 1900s
Georges Dumoutier's exhaustive 1907 account of Vietnamese cuisine does not mention it at all; a 1931 dictionary was the first to define it as a soup.
Q 05Why was beef historically uncommon in Vietnamese cooking before the colonial period?
Water buffalo were needed for farm work
Demand for beef only took off under French rule, which is why some historians credit the French with a hand in phở's birth.
Q 06One theory traces the word phở to which French beef dish?
Pot-au-feu
Rival scholars point instead to the Cantonese street cry ngưu nhục phấn, 'beef noodles', with the final syllable worn down over time.
Q 07Phở gà appeared in 1939, possibly because beef was not sold at Hanoi markets on which days?
Mondays and Fridays
Rare-beef phở tái had already been introduced by 1930, and 1920s vendors even experimented with tofu and giant water bug extract.
Q 08Meatless state-canteen phở of the postwar subsidy period was nicknamed phở không người lái, meaning what?
Pilotless phở
The joke referred to the US Air Force's unmanned reconnaissance drones; the broth was often just boiled water with MSG.
Q 09Which accompaniments mark out southern-style phở from the northern original?
Bean sprouts and hoisin sauce
Southern broth is also sweeter and cloudier; northern phở stays clear and subtle, with quẩy dough sticks for dipping.
Q 10Along with cloves and black cardamom, which spice is a hallmark of the phở broth spice bag?
Star anise
Cooks char the ginger and onion over an open flame first and skim constantly, which is the secret to a clear broth.
Q 11In 2017 Vietnam designated which date as the 'Day of Pho'?
December 12
Japan had already picked April 4 as its own Phở Day the year before.
Q 12What does the name bánh mì literally mean?
'Wheat bánh'
The pain de mie story is a false etymology: bánh has meant rice cakes and pastries since at least the 13th century, long before any French contact.
Q 13In WWI, Vietnamese bakers stretched baguettes with which cheap ingredient, which also made them fluffier?
Rice flour
That airy, thin-crusted loaf is what makes a Vietnamese baguette different from a Parisian one to this day.
Q 21Egg coffee (cà phê trứng) was created in Hanoi in 1946 in response to what?
Wartime dairy shortages
Nguyễn Văn Giảng's invention tops coffee with a custard foam of whipped egg yolks and tastes something like tiramisu.
Q 22Salt coffee (cà phê muối), invented in 2010, tops the drink with what?
Salted cream foam
The salt sharpens the sweetness the way a pinch of salt intensifies caramel.
Q 23Bạc xỉu, mostly milk with a splash of coffee, originated in the 1950s among which Chợ Lớn community?
Cantonese-Vietnamese
The name is a worn-down transliteration of the Cantonese for 'a cup of white milk with a little coffee'.
Q 14Hòa Mã, among the first shops selling filled bánh mì thịt in 1958, opened in which city?
Saigon
The 1954 partition sent over a million northerners south, transforming the city's food; another migrant sold sausage sandwiches from a basket on a mobylette.
Q 15Which cheap cheese, rejected French food aid, ended up stuffed into some 1950s bánh mì?
Cheddar
Until then sandwiches had stuck close to French taste, essentially a jambon-beurre with mayonnaise or liver pâté.
Q 16The shredded pickles (đồ chua) in a classic bánh mì are made from which two vegetables?
Carrot and daikon
Fresh cucumber, coriander leaves and sliced chilies round out the standard garnish.
Q 17Where did Lee's Sandwiches, credited with popularising bánh mì among Americans, begin?
Northern California
New Orleans later produced a 'Vietnamese po' boy' that won the 2009 Oak Street Po-Boy Festival, and Philadelphia sells a 'Vietnamese hoagie'.
Q 18What is waiting in the cup when the coffee drips through in a classic Vietnamese iced coffee?
Sweetened condensed milk
Fresh milk spoiled fast in the tropics and dairy farming barely existed, so the shelf-stable tinned substitute became the standard.
Q 19What is the small metal drip filter used to brew Vietnamese coffee called?
Phin
Every Vietnamese coffee variation shares three things: Vietnamese-grown beans, this filter, and tinned milk if creamer is wanted.
Q 20Which coffee species, dark-roasted, is the standard for Vietnamese coffee?
Robusta
Its extra bitterness, with nearly double the caffeine of arabica, was found to offset the sweetness of the milk.
Q 24Which Hanoi dish did Barack Obama eat with Anthony Bourdain in May 2016?
Bún chả
Bún Chả Hương Liên still sells a 'combo Obama' and has photos of the visit on its walls.
Q 25The 'combo Obama' at the restaurant he visited includes the noodles, a fried seafood roll and what?
A bottle of Hanoi Beer
Food writer Vũ Bằng described Hanoi in 1959 as a town transfixed by the dish.
Q 26What does the name bánh xèo refer to?
The sizzle of batter in the pan
It is essentially a crisp savoury crepe, folded around pork, prawns, mung beans and bean sprouts and wrapped in lettuce to eat.
Q 27What gives bánh xèo batter its yellow colour?
Turmeric
The related Huế pancake bánh khoái does use egg yolks in its batter and is shaped like a half-moon.
Q 28Mekong Delta (Miền Tây) bánh xèo are typically how big?
About 12 inches across, like a small pizza
Central Vietnamese versions are palm-sized with fewer fillings, and often darker from a dose of fermented shrimp paste.
Q 29What are gỏi cuốn, the unfried Vietnamese rolls, wrapped in?
Rice paper (bánh tráng)
The sheet is dipped in water to soften, filled with pork, prawn, herbs and vermicelli, and served unfried at room temperature.
Q 30In Japan, gỏi cuốn are called nama harumaki, which means what?
Raw spring rolls
Some Vietnamese American restaurants coined 'summer roll' as a seasonal marketing play to set the unfried version apart.