Cao Lau, the Legendary Noodles of Hoi An in Central Vietnam. Cao Lau Noodles, Hoi An, Vietnam. Copyright 2015 Terence Carter / Grantourismo. All Rights Reserved.

Cao Lau, the Legendary Noodles of Hoi An in Central Vietnam

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In Vietnam’s historic riverside town of Hoi An, a noodle dish steeped in legend offers unique flavours and textures that only a rich culinary heritage and hours of preparation can produce. The ubiquitous dish, cao lau, is the essence of Hoi An in a bowl – so mysterious and seductive that we stayed three months to discover its secrets.

“Cao lau! Cao lau!” cooks and noodle vendors call out continuously from the crowded markets, curbside food stalls and backstreet eateries of Central Vietnam’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hoi An, an atmospheric riverside town of incense-filled Chinese temples and Japanese-style timber houses, surrounded by rice paddies.

As it quickly becomes apparent, cao lau is the historic town’s quintessential must-try dish, partly due to the legend surrounding its making, and partly due to the fact that the deliciously light yet complex rice noodle dish is the essence of Hoi An in a bowl.

Cao Lau, the Legendary Noodles of Hoi An, Vietnam

“Cao lau! Cao lau! You try my cao lau!” The constant cries fast become as irritating as that other ubiquitous request from the tailors lining the lantern-filled streets to come in and get a suit made. It will drive you crazy – until you actually try it. Then it’s no longer an annoyance but a temptation.

In Hoi An’s central market, where a dozen stalls sell cao lau among other local dishes, one cook has her sales technique down pat. Remaining silent amid the cacophony of “cao lau!” cries, she’ll catch your eye and thrust a spoon of steaming, aromatic, spice-laden broth in your direction. Succumb to a slurp and you’ll be pulling up a stool.

You won’t be the first. Few dishes have occupied travellers and obsessed food writers as Hoi An’s legendary cao lau. Indeed, the rustic, earthy noodle dish is more deceptive than its innocent, garden-fresh looks suggest. It’s the stuff of legends.

Guidebooks will tell you that cao lau can only be made with water from the ancient Ba Le well, one of dozens of centuries-old wells dotting the old town; that only lye* ash from a tree grown on the nearby Cham Islands can be used in the making of the noodle dough; and that only one family closely guards the secret recipe, and are so protective that they won’t allow outsiders to watch their covert noodle-making. Of course, that’s all a load of bull.

The fact that cao lau isn’t as mysterious as myths would have you believe doesn’t reduce its enigma.

This is a dish demanding respect, and, at its best, reverence. For it’s the perfect balance of textures and flavours that make cao lau special – it’s a dish that’s the sum of its part, each bowl carefully crafted as if it’s the last bowl ever to be made.

The first ingredient that will have you salivating after a bowl of cao lau is set down in front of you is the char siu pork – Cantonese-style barbecued or roasted pork, seasoned in a five spice marinade.

At Ty Cao Lau – a laneway stall set up around 4.30pm each evening – Mr Ty has been making cao lau, and only cao lau, for 20 years and his richly flavoured slices of tender pork are the tastiest in town.

After three months of daily tastings of cao lau, we determine his only rival to be Mr Hai of Hai restaurant (our favourite noodle shop in Hoi An), who carefully arranges three thinner yet even more succulent slivers of pork across his noodles.

Depending on the cook, an array of fresh locally grown mixed greens will be piled upon or beside the pork – fragrant mint, basil, Vietnamese fish leaf, rice paddy herb, crisp lettuce, sometimes coriander. Crunchy deep-fried squares of cao lau dough are sprinkled on top, while secreted beneath the noodles will be crispy bean sprouts.

Your first instruction from the cook, waiter or nearest local diner will be to add some of Hoi An’s famously fiery chilli jam from the condiment basket on the table.

The next will be to combine all the ingredients to ensure the chilli jam and sweet pungent broth, created from the pork fat juices that has been drizzled over the noodles, is thoroughly mixed through. After the noodles, it’s the broth and pork that truly sets apart one cao lau from the next.

Yet the key ingredient of cao lau will always be the cao lau noodles. Invented by a Chinese family, they’re more similar to Japanese wheat-based udon noodles. Boasting a similarly coarse dense texture, cao lau noodles differ in their pale brown colour, rough-hewn surface, and subtle smoky flavour.

Hoi An has a long history of trade with China and Japan, which peaked in the 16th century. Many Chinese and Japanese merchants married local Vietnamese women to facilitate business. So it should be no surprise that this fusion noodle was born in Hoi An.

Sold fresh or dry at Hoi An markets and seen laid out in the sun on large, shallow rattan baskets on footpaths and roads around town, the noodles are delivered direct to eateries daily from the artisanal noodle workshops around Hoi An.

The best noodles are produced in two rudimentary family kitchens operating out of the home of the fifth generation descendants of the original cao lau noodle creator who worked at Hoi An’s first Chinese noodle factory.

Their address is no secret. Indeed, their daughter is a tour guide and was booked to host a group of German tourists the day we dropped by to observe the noodle-making process and do an interview for a magazine story. We easily arranged our visit with a local chef friend who buys their noodles.

Early one morning, we spend a couple of hours with the smiling hardworking family of six, as they near the end of their work ‘day’ – which began around midnight! – in which they produced 150 kilos of noodles.

We watch one woman kneading by hand the dough they’d began making seven hours earlier from broken rice that had been ground into powder and then soaked in buckets of water from the nearby well.

To the dough mixture they had added the lye* water made from ash burned from a massive pile of branches stacked in their yard from a variety of fragrant, locally grown trees, such as pine.

We cough as the smoky scent of smouldering burt wood, now filling the dimly-lit soot-covered room, steams the alternate layers of dough and strips of noodles that another woman has made, using a traditional, hand-wound, Italian-style pasta maker.

It’s the men’s role to keep the fire stoked, lay out the dough and the noodles on racks, and cart those heavy racks back and forth between the steamer and the motorbikes that arrive every now and again to collect the finished noodles. It’s a sweaty job.

After a couple of hours observing the process and asking lots of questions about weights, measurements and times, our chef friend figures out the cao lau noodle recipe. Still, I ask him to find out if the wiry old gentleman who is the patriarch of the family will share their secret recipe.

With a big toothy grin and a glint in his eyes, he says: “We do it all by hand!” rubbing his calloused, wrinkled hands together before heading into the house for his breakfast. That’s the secret to cao lau.

Minutes later he reappears and sits down on the steps – to tuck into a bowl of cao lau.

*Notes on Lye Water for Cao Lau

Lye water is a solution of lye, a powerful base or alkali that was historically created from wood ashes and rainwater and was used to make Chinese noodles, as well as century eggs, pretzels and hominy, and to cure things like olives, among other foods, and was essentially lime or potassium hydroxide (KOH).

These days baking soda or baking powder is used in the home kitchen while industrially, lye water was replaced by commercial lye (sodium hydroxide or NaOH), a chemical that can be highly caustic and toxic and should be handled with caution. Do not get these things confused: it can be very dangerous.

In China, lye is still favoured for use in several styles of thick wheat noodles to give them a chewy texture and yellow colour, including cumian from Shanghai, and several other noodles which gave rise to the coarse Japanese udon noodles, which are also wheat based.

It’s worth noting that the thicker chewier handmade Japanese ramen noodles (not to be confused with instant ramen) are made with kansui, an alkaline solution for which baking soda is often used as a substitute. Yet cao lau noodles are made with rice, and this is what really sets Hoi An’s noodles apart.

Where to Eat Cao Lau in Hoi An

These are our favourite spots for a bowl of cao lau from our time living in Hoi An.

Ty Cao Lau

This mobile cao lau stand opens daily at 4.30pm on the corner of a lane off Phan Chu Trinh St, one block west of Le Loi St. VND 20,000/$1 a bowl.

Hai

A simple eatery on the ground floor in the Hai family home at 6A Truong Minh Luong, off Phan Boi Chau St. Open 11am and closes when the cao lau runs out. VND 30,000/$1.45 a bowl.

Ms Ly Cafe

This charming restaurant in Ly’s family home is a good lunch choice if you want air-conditioning and cold beer with your cao lau. Ly makes a beautiful cao lau, as well as some of the most elegant renditions of Hoi An’s other classic dishes. 22 Nguyen Hue St. 0510 386 1603. 10am-10pm.

Mai Fish

The riverside location of this beautiful colonial villa, and smooth jazz soundtrack, makes our friend Chef Duc’s restaurant a lovely spot for cao lau after dark. 45 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai St. 0510 392 5545. 11am-10pm.

Red Bridge Cooking School

Learn to make cao lau and other Vietnamese dishes at Hoi An’s best cooking school. The price includes pick up and transfer there by vehicle and a return trip by boat. 0510 393 3222. See www.visithoian.com

The Last Great Taste of Hoi An Food Tour

Cao lau is one of 40 local specialties sampled on this fantastic street food tour, one of Southeast Asia’s best, operated by expat Australian foodie Neville Dean and hosted by local Hoi An born guide Sen. See www.tasteofhoian.com

Where to Stay in Hoi An

Anantara Hoi An

A short stroll from Hoi An’s central market, this riverside, colonial-inspired hotel with swimming pool is ideally located for discovering cao lau. 1 Pham Hong Thai Street. Book the Anantara Hoi An with our booking partner booking.com.

Published 20 February 2015; Updated 26 May 2013

A shorter version of this story originally appeared in the March 2014 issue of Feast, an Australian food magazine by SBS to which we contributed on everything from Bangkok’s off the beaten track floating markets to Vietnamese fish sauce. Sadly, the April 2015 issue was the last. 

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A travel and food writer who has experienced over 70 countries and written for The Guardian, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, DestinAsian, TIME, CNN, The Independent, The Telegraph, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, AFAR, Wanderlust, International Traveller, Get Lost, Four Seasons Magazine, Fah Thai, Sawasdee, and more, as well as authored more than 40 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, DK, Footprint, Rough Guides, Fodors, Thomas Cook, and AA Guides.

29 thoughts on “Cao Lau, the Legendary Noodles of Hoi An in Central Vietnam”

  1. It’s wonderful! Let us know if you need tips. We’ll be back there again next week. Lots more unique dishes from Hoi An too. We researched stories on Hoi An’s cuisine over a three month period in 2013, but not all have been published yet, so we can’t post everything unfortunately. Will try and get one of our Culinary Guides up soon though. Thanks for dropping by!

  2. Looks amazing, great find, thank you. Heading to Hoi An in a couple of weeks, this will be really useful!

  3. Hi Elizabeth – let us know if you need tips. We lived there for a few months and Terence was just there again last week. We’ve got more posts going up soon. It’s a gorgeous spot.

  4. We spent four days in Hoi An in November and loved it. The banh mi, the noodles, the motorbike through town to the beach…all were wonderful. We greatly enjoyed a tour of the markets and the cooking class offered by Red Bridge. Also bought an amazing painting off the wall of a restaurant down by the water. It’s hanging over the fireplace in our living room right now, a reminder of Hoi An’s charm. I’d love to go back some day.

  5. Hi Scott – isn’t Hoi An lovely? The Red Bridge cooking class was brilliant, wasn’t it? We love buying art when we travel for the same reasons too. Thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts!

  6. Cao Lau is my favorite dish in all of Vietnam! I was told on my second trip I could buy dry versions at the market, but they were less dry, but not dry, I think covered in oil and was told they would last 1 month in my suitcase traveling before getting moldy or spoiled. But I was traveling another 6 weeks including in India, so I wouldn’t chance it.
    Can anyone tell me how long they will last? I could refrigerate while in my hotel, but then in between cities while traveling they’d be in my suitcase.

  7. Hi Bob, if you’re talking about the cao lau noodles, you need to buy the dried noodles not the fresh ones, and they’ll last for many months as long as you keep them in an air-tight container in a dry cupboard. You also mention ‘oil’, they might have been talking about the chilli paste/sauce that is eaten with the noodles: https://grantourismotravels.com/2016/09/07/hoi-an-chilli-sauce/ That keeps for months also, though we found it can leak a little, so best to make sure it’s tight, tape it up, and put it in a couple of plastic bags and seal those tight too. Dried noodles don’t need to be refrigerated. The sauce doesn’t either until you open it.

  8. Hi Lara!
    A TripAdvisor traveler who lives in Hoi An told me you can buy the dry noodles there; but the local lady I was with asked for the dry noodles and showed me a different one from the fresh one. But it was wet in some way, it looked oily to me. Not a paste.
    Is there a totally dry version like the dry boxed pasta we buy in the west?
    If you provide me with your email, I can send you photos of both the fresh, and what I was told is the dry one.

  9. Hi Lara – I posted my reply to you about 12 hours back. Should it be appearing here or does it wait for your approval?
    Thanks.
    Bob

  10. Hi Bob, yes, there are definitely dried noodles. They’re not boxed as such, but they’ll put as many as you want in a big plastic bag. The ones she showed you sound like ‘fresh’ cao lau noodles. They’re not wet as such but do have a moist look about them. The women at the stalls on the outside of the market, such as the woman pictured above, sell both fresh and dried. I know it’s not really clear from the pic above, but the noodles she has in the foreground are the ‘fresh’ noodles and you’ll see they look a bit doughy and the ones at the back, which her bowl of noodles are sitting upon, are the dried noodles.

    I would recommend you do the excellent Morning Street Food Tour with one of the girls from Hoi An Food Tours, as they visit the market, and get them to help you buy the right ones. And don’t forget to take the sauce home too! I’ll email you now so you can send the photos.

  11. Hi Bob, yes, we like to approve them, so we can delete all the spam we get :) But I’ve just responded to your last comment and I’ve just emailed you, too. Happy to look at a couple of pics and explain the difference. Are you in Hoi An now? If you haven’t done a street food tour before, I’d recommend doing the morning tour with one of the girls from Hoi An Food Tours as they visit the main market and they’re happy to help you shop. They can make sure you buy the right noodles. Now after you make these noodles, make sure you share a pic! :)

  12. Hi Lara! I replied to your email with pics, but then saw that the reply address was do not reply.
    Can you send me your email or advise where the upload pics option is here?
    Thanks
    Bob

  13. Hi Bob, I think you might have replied to somebody else’s email… I just sent you an ordinary everyday email. If you respond to that, you can email me a couple of pics, just please keep them small :) We don’t have a place to upload them here. Perhaps also compare the pics you have to the details I described in the photo above.

  14. Hi Lara – I have posted below the two questions I had, that you suggested I post here:

    Regarding the dry cao lao noodles I will buy when in Hoi An – and will be traveling for a few weeks more before coming home:

    I won’t put the noodles in the fridge as you advise :-). But when I am in my a/c hotel room, as you suggested, what do I do with them when I take them out of the bag? Are you saying I need to get a plate from the hotel, and just have them sitting uncovered on that plate each time I go to a new hotel? :-)

  15. Hi Bob – you need to buy the dry noodles and when you buy them they’ll pop them in a plastic bag, so just keep them in the plastic bag. You don’t need to remove them or do anything with them. They can stay in your suitcase/backpack. Hope that answers your question?

  16. Are you allowed to share the recipe of the noodle that your chef friend figured out? It’d be nice to have some copycat version of the authentic stuff since we can’t go back anytime soon. And googling “cao lau” only gives recipes for the entire dish instead of just the noodle.

  17. Hi Kimmie, unfortunately it’s impossible to make an authentic cao lau noodle that tastes exactly like the cao lau noodles in Hoi An as the ingredients are hyper-local and the process is incredibly laborious and time-consuming. It’s the reason we’ve never shared a recipe here. Since we first published this story back in 2012 in Feast magazine, I’ve spotted dozens of recipes in print and online, but they’re not true cao lau recipes. They seem to either call for “wide flat noodles”, which is ridiculous as cao lau noodles are not wide nor flat, LOL, or Japanese noodles, such as udon, which they only resemble in thickness and chewiness, or soba, which they kind of resemble in texture and colour. But cao lau simply isn’t cao lau without the noodles.

    You may have spotted the dry cao lau noodles for sale at the market in Hoi An? They travel well. I’ve brought them back from Hoi An here to Siem Reap before and also had friends passing through bring them here. That would be your best bet if you’re keen to make the dish at home, to get someone to pick some up for you. If you were friendly with your hotel reception staff, I would email the hotel and see if they’d buy some and send them to you. I’ve used Vietnam Post (VN Post) before and they’re excellent, affordable, and offer tracking.

    I’d offer to send you some, but not sure when we’ll get back ourselves. We were often popping across to Vietnam pre-pandemic. But will wait till we get our boosters before travelling again. If we do get back, I’ll email you and send you some if you’re still keen. Would love a bowl of cao lau right now!

  18. Hi Lara,

    I attempted to buy what I was told were dry Cao Lau noodles at the Hoi An market – but they were very oily, so I didn’t buy them.

    Is that what the dry noodles look like?

    Also, I would be traveling another 4 weeks or more in this hot climate and was concerned they might become moldy since they were not truly dry. Have you traveled with them for this period of time in hot climates? Of course, I’d keep it in my room, but there is no a/c on when I am not in the room – or when I am traveling from city to city.

    Of course I could keep them in my room fridge in between trips.

    If you could clarify all this so I would know if and what to buy next time in Hoi An.

    I expected them to be dry like the dry boxed spaghetti we buy here in the west.

    Thanks
    Bob

  19. PS – I apologize as I saw I asked a similar question some time back.

    I think I understand that they will look wet – which maybe I thought was oily but it is not oil?

    And they will keep without getting moldy for 4+ weeks in hot SE Asia weather?

    Thanks
    Bob

  20. Hi Bob, lovely to hear from you. If the noodles are oily (that’s to keep them separated so they don’t stick together), they are actually the fresh noodles.

    They definitely have dried noodles at the markets and the sellers of the fresh noodles usually sell both fresh noodles and dried noodles. They won’t be boxed but they’ll put them in a bag for you. If you want to get them vacuum sealed, you can probably do that at a local post office.

    The fresh noodles will not last long, so you definitely want the dried noodles. Ask your hotel staff to write down “dried cao lau noodles — not fresh” on a piece of paper in Vietnamese and show the sellers. If you don’t have any luck, the staff might even go with you.

    Let me know how you go. Good luck!

    Lara

  21. Hi Bob, no problem at all. I remembered you :) Lucky you, getting back to Hoi An!

    You definitely want the dried noodles. See my tips on the previous comment.

    Are you heading to Siem Reap on your trip? If so, you can pick up some noodles for me, too, LOL!

    Enjoy Hoi An!

    Lara

  22. Good way of telling, and pleasant article to obtain information concerning my presentation subject, which i am going to convey in institution of higher education

  23. Hello Nora, can you please give me more information about your presentation at your higher education institution? This post is based on my original research based on our time living in Hoi An, eating the noodles daily, observing the noodle making family, and interviewing the noodle makers. So you CANNOT use this information in your presentation without my permission. I am happy to give permission as long as you acknowledge that I am the source and email me a copy of the presentation. If you don’t respond here, I will email you.

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