Vegan Burger in Vietnam

Anyone following our Vegan Food Quest will know that we love a good vegan burger, we can’t help it; the combination of a burger, bun, toppings and condiments, if done well, is always something to get excited about. We’ve had some awesome vegan burger successes and some epic vegan burger fails during the last 8 months of our mission to find, eat and write about the best vegan food in the world.

So when we saw a vegan burger on the menu at a restaurant just outside Hoi An’s ancient old town, we had to give it a go to see how it would compare.

There were a few western things on the menu including a hotdog and some crispy fake chicken pieces but we had that vegan burger on our mind so there was no real choice to be made. We ordered chips which were deliciously homemade (not as good as Caryl’s mum makes them but still of a very high quality).

All chips should be homemade…

There were a few salads on the menu so we opted to be virtuous and order a carrot, mint and peanut salad. That makes up for the chips right? It had a soy dressing but was missing the peanuts and was a little too laden with raw onion for our taste but as it was really fresh and pretty tasty (and we love vegetables) so we managed to eat it all.

Huge fresh salad packed full of carrots and Vietnamese herbs, probably earned us enough brownie points to have more chips?

And then on to the burger! Like all bread that we’ve tried in Vietnam, the burger bun was lovely. Light on the inside, crusty on the outside; so far so good. Inside the bun there was a ‘BBQ  sauce’ but it was nothing like a BBQ sauce that we in the Western world might relate to, more of a delicious spice paste of shallots, garlic, chili, lemongrass and coconut.

There was a usual salad topping of lettuce, cucumber and tomato and we added an additional slice of fresh pineapple. One member of the Vegan Food Quest team thinks that fresh pineapple should always accompany a good burger and so the extra fruity topping was requested when ordering. This resulted in some very puzzled looks from the staff who thought we were a bit strange at this stage. This didn’t stop us though and it turns out that the pineapple did actually go really well with this burger (one member of the Vegan Food Quest team is now saying “I told you so”).

Our research shows you can get a great vegan burger in Vietnam

The burger itself was homemade from tofu and mushroom and really good, ticking all the boxes regarding taste, not falling apart and having a good texture. All in all, it was well worth the money (45,000 VND / £1.30 / $2.12).

Mid researching… all in a days work for the Vegan Food Quest team

We’ll be back to eating traditional Vietnamese food again tomorrow now we have successfully completed our mission to find, eat and write about a Vietnamese Vegan Burger.

Our vegan burger was from Karma Waters, they can be found at 213 Nguyen Duy Hieu, Hoi An, Vietnam.