Restaurants in Da Lat

There are a few restaurants and street food stalls in Da Lat that offer cuisine from all the three regions of Vietnam, although food and cuisine in Da Lat is very basic. A popular dish for breakfast or dinner is a rice noodle soup called 'pha' from northern Vietnam, or the Hue beef noodle soup from Thua Thien Hue Province in central Vietnam.

Finding a restaurant or café that serves Western food is difficult. Moreover, although there are countless eateries in Da Lat, the food they serve caters to tightly-budgeted packaged tours, which means that the food is not always the best.

All over Vietnam, some Vietnamese dishes, ingredients or cooking methods are universal while others are uniquely local or regional.

After a day of shopping at the Da Lat market you can enjoy many of the different dishes at the market stalls or in one of Da lat's restaurants. Please use our Da lat restaurant Guide below for more information on restaurants in Da Lat. For more general information regarding cuisine in Vietnam please consult the Vietnam Restaurant Guide.

Food and Cuisine in Da Lat

Da Lat (Central) Market

This famous market in the centre of the city is open every day until the evening. Locals flock here to buy fresh produce, and this is the best place to visit if you like fresh fruit. If you are keen on excellent vegetable soup, there's a restaurant at the entrance of the market that is always buzzing with customers.

On the second level of the market, you will also find a stall that serves vegetarian food. The hill station of Da Lat has a cool tropical climate that has turned it into one of the most fertile regions in the country. Here you will be amazed to find a huge array of fruits and vegetables from the lower hillsides, as well as those grown in Europe.

Succulent foreign strawberries and creamy artichokes mix with avocados, beetroot and dragon-fruit. In Cho Da Lat vendors sell strawberry jam, cashew, and local grape wine.

Restaurants in Da Lat

Eating out in Da Lat, you'll find more cafes than restaurants. However, these cafes all seem to serve exactly the same thing every day. The menus are made up of eight pages of beverages and ice cream, and just one page that lists food items for the main course.

To add to the monotony, most of these dishes are spaghetti-based. There are street stalls all over the place where you can eat baguettes, three types of snails, skewered meat, and the traditional 'pha'. But if you're looking for a classy restaurant that serves local cuisine, you won't find it.

The restaurants you do manage to find serve mostly Western food, along with a few Asian dishes. Surprisingly, health-conscious travellers can eat rather well in Da Lat. They can try duck, chicken legs, and pig brain braised in traditional Chinese herbs.

At first, the taste may seem strange and pungent, but many foreigners have fallen in love with it. The best restaurants for this type of food are Tai Ky Restaurant on Bui Thi Xuan Street, open from noon to night, and Nhu Y. A meal will cost you VND 8,000 to 12,000.

Da Lat Wine

A note about the famous wines of Da Lat - Vang Dalat wine is an aperitif served at parties and family dinners, Red Vang Dalat wine goes well with red meat like beef and lamb; and White Vang Dalat is preferred with salad, seafood and white meat such as poultry and pork. Vang Dalat also makes good cocktails and can add some zing to almost any dish.

The wine of Da Lat has a good heritage. It all began in 1998, with vintners trained in Bordeaux, and the wine is not just made from grapes. Grapes from Bin Tonh province (about 125 km from Da Lat) are mixed with berries such as strawberries grown in Da Lat.

The resultant wine, especially the red variety, is so well liked that Da Lat now makes about 700,000 litres of wine a year. Not only does all of Vietnam drink Da Lat wine, the drink is also exported to Cambodia, Japan, Malaysia, and Korea. This is not to say that Da Lat wines can rival the great wines of the world, but they are highly enjoyable, and ridiculously cheap.