Eating out, having take aways or food deliveries are all very accessible here in Hanoi, and the reasonable pricing and promising idea of saving our time for doing groceries and cooking makes them very appealing.
No need to worry about groceries or planning ahead, you can choose from a wide selection of meals and order whatever you feel like in the very moment. But here is the catch, obviously restaurants are making their money by selling us their food, ideally to repeat customers that will come again and again. In order to maximise that, meals must be as tasty as possible, otherwise people are not likely to come back. And what are the easiest and cheapest ways to make food tasting better, LOADS of FAT, SALT, SUGAR, MSG.
Nothing to say against a tasty treat of a food professional here or there, but the main of your meals are always better to be homemade. Only if you cook by yourself you can know which ingredients have been used and assure they are as much as possible fresh, tasty and healthy, and that they have no hidden and unnecessarily added calories.
Positively groceries and the variation of ingredients available here in Hanoi have become increasingly better over the last years, in both quality level and variety. And if you plan and prepare your meals in bulk for a couple of days a time it is actually not that time consuming.
When it comes to restaurants there are as well big differences in terms of quality and there are of course options that are truly using healthy and nice fresh ingredients. I will keep working on that topic and will soon share more posts about places and suppliers I can highly recommend.