Author Vu The Long was born in 1947 in Hanoi. After many years working at the Vietnam Institute of Archeology – Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, he has a passion for learning about culinary arts. Not only initiating the program “Vietnamese Kitchen” on VTV2 television, but Archeology Doctor, Vu The Long is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Vietnam Culinary Culture Association.
The book was published by the Writers Association and Chibooks Publishing House, partly expressing his thoughts: Eating is a very important aspect of culture. Find out the identity of Hanoi’s food culture and go deeper, the identity in the eating of Hanoians, and then from there to preserve, promote and develop Hanoi’s food culture. It is equally important to build a new Hanoi culture.
Hanoi people – eating and drinking for a while used to be like going back in time to the early years of the 20th century, to reminisce, to discover how Hanoians used to eat, prepare and create cuisine, How have they “treated” (rejected, accepted, or even “assimilated”) to the new culinary colors introduced into the capital through the “migration” flows, East-Western and South-North exchanges, etc.
To find a way to approach Hanoi’s food culture, Dr. Vu The Long writes down what a person of the “about seventy years old” age living in Hanoi knows what they drank and ate. family and people around you of all ages, generations have eaten. It is a warm-up step with the hope of having some benefit for the study and preservation of Hanoi’s food culture.
The combination of the personal experience of a person born and raised in Hanoi with the meticulous research of a researcher from archaeological texts and artifacts to “live” documents – are the old men and women of the previous generation who have brought readers a book full of material but still alive, still very “life”, so that we can feel the “depth” of Hanoi cuisine, of Hanoi’s cultural identity during the turbulent 20th century.
V.H