What to eat, country by country

Northern Vietnamese food is the restrained version — less sugar, less chilli, more dill and black pepper, and freshwater fish rather than sea fish. Hanoi is where to eat pho, which arrives clear and plain with the herbs on the side rather than heaped in; bun cha, grilled pork in a bowl of sweet-sour broth, eaten at lunchtime and almost never in the evening; cha ca, turmeric fish fried at the table with dill; and banh cuon, steamed rice sheets that are a breakfast rather than a starter.

Central Vietnam is the fussiest and the most interesting. Hue cooks small, elaborate dishes out of an imperial tradition — banh beo, banh nam and banh loc, rice cakes the size of a coin — alongside bun bo Hue, a lemongrass and chilli beef soup that is the opposite of Hanoi pho. Hoi An has cao lau, thick noodles that exist nowhere else, and a banh mi culture that rewards queueing.

Southern food is sweeter, greener and more generous with coconut milk and herbs. Com tam, broken rice with grilled pork, is the working lunch of Ho Chi Minh City. Banh xeo in the south is a large turmeric crêpe you wrap in lettuce and herbs yourself. The Mekong Delta adds river fish, snakehead and elephant ear fish eaten straight off the frame.

Khmer food is quieter than Thai food and closer to Vietnamese in its restraint. The backbone is kroeung, a paste of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and kaffir lime, and prahok, fermented fish, which does the work that fish sauce does elsewhere. Amok trey, fish steamed in banana leaf with kroeung and coconut, is the national dish and is worth eating somewhere that makes it properly rather than in a buffet. Num banh chok, rice noodles under a green fish gravy, is a breakfast sold from baskets in the morning and gone by ten. Kampot pepper, which grows on the southern coast, is the one ingredient worth carrying home.

Lao food is the least known of the six and the most distinctive. Sticky rice is eaten by hand at every meal and is the measure of the whole cuisine. Laap here is the original — herbaceous, bitter, sometimes raw — and tam mak hoong, the Lao papaya salad, is saltier and funkier than its Thai cousin. Luang Prabang has its own dishes: or lam, a stew thickened with a numbing wood pepper, and kaipen, Mekong river weed dried in sheets and fried. The bitterness in Lao cooking is deliberate, and it takes a couple of meals to read.

A market at seven in the morning tells you more about a place than a museum does at ten. These are the ones we send people to, ideally with a guide for the first hour so that the unfamiliar things get named.

• Dong Xuan and the lanes around it in Hanoi, for dry goods, and any of the morning street markets in the Old Quarter for produce.
• Ben Thanh in Ho Chi Minh City is for souvenirs now; Binh Tay in Cholon is the working one.
• Warorot in Chiang Mai, for northern sausage, dried chilli and snacks, and Or Tor Kor in Bangkok for the best produce in the country.
• The Russian Market in Phnom Penh for food stalls at the back, and Siem Reap’s Psar Leu for the version without visitors.
• Luang Prabang’s morning market, which runs along one street and is finished by nine.
• Beringharjo in Yogyakarta for batik and street food, and Ubud’s produce market before seven.
• Carbon Market in Cebu, early, for mangoes and dried fish.

A cooking class is the other half of this. The good ones start at the market, take an hour over the shopping, and teach three or four dishes you would actually cook again. Hoi An, Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang, Siem Reap and Ubud all have classes we use regularly, and one per country is about right.