Hoi an Odyssey Hotel

Luxury Hotel and Spa

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Category: Italian

Good Morning Vietnam, Hoi An, Italian Restaurant

Italian, Restaurant

If you are looking for Italian food in Hoi An Old Town, then you can certainly do a lot worse than Good Morning Vietnam. There aren’t too many dedicated Italian restaurants in the Old Town at the time of writing, and while there are certainly the odd one or two, and a few others that offer Italian food on their menus, Good Morning Vietnam is the best bang for your buck place that you will find. This has been my go-to Italian restaurant for many years as the quality is high and the prices very reasonable.

There are two floors to choose from here. Downstairs is the most popular by far as it seems 90% of the interior design effort went into it, and it is often quite busy. I would certainly recommend booking if it is in high season. The front of the restaurant is open to the street, which makes it very inviting from the outside, but means it can also get a little warm in the summer, but inside it has a very cosy feel to it. The walls are painted the ubiquitous Hoi An yellow and adorned with photos, which kind of makes it feel like you’re in someone’s home.

If downstairs is full, or maybe too hot, then you can venture upstairs. Most people never get this far and it often fills up only when the downstairs is full. I can kind of understand this, as although they have more room and bigger tables upstairs, which is perfect for larger groups, it does lack the charm of downstairs somewhat. It just feels a little like an afterthought. As we have been there many times though, we usually head straight upstairs as it tends to be quieter.

The Food

As I said earlier, I have been here many times over the years, and have tried many things on the menu. I have also ordered their pizza for delivery many times. Unfortunately, as is my way, I always forget to take photos so I do not have as many as I would like. The best place to start, I think, is the pizza. Good Morning Vietnam offers both medium and large pizzas with thin crust and a wide variety of toppings. The medium is more than enough for one person, and the large perfect to be shared. If you like a pizza with a thin base and traditional crispy crust then this will probably be the best pizza you will have in Hoi An. When I am in the mood for a light crispy crust, I always buy from here. It is the easy winner. I have tried many of the toppings and have not found a bad one yet, so am very happy to recommend the pizza to anyone.

While the price for a pizza is obviously going to be more expensive than your local Vietnamese food (and I have heard people complain about this), the high quality ingredients used here make the pizzas very good value for money and worth every penny.

I actually don’t order pizza often when I dine-in anymore as I order it regularly for delivery, so I will usually order something from the pasta menu. But before I even get that far, we always order the caprese salad and the garlic bread. The caprese salad is simply a large hunk of fresh mozzarella cheese with slices of fresh tomato, drizzled in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and topped with Italian herbs. It is wonderfully light and fresh. Well it would be if we didn’t always eat it with the garlic bread. The garlic bread comes looking like an enormously puffed up calzone. A ball of wonderfully hot and soft bread filled with air. Along with the caprese salad and a plate of the complimentary olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip it in, this is a fantastic way to start any meal.

I have tried many of the pasta dishes at Good Morning Vietnam, and the pasta is usually well cooked, although it can be a little on the soft side sometimes but never enough to deter me from enjoying any of the dishes. The lasagne is well sized and tasty, although possibly not as tasty as the one in Morning Glory Signature in my view. Having said that, it is certainly bigger and the garlic bread here is much better, and as I enjoy eating lasagne with garlic bread, the overall experience is tied. The ravioli is good also, although I have to say I prefer the pumpkin ravioli to the meat one, and as a man who likes his meat, this is no easy thing to say. The pumpkin ravioli is incredibly tasty, although it may not be enough to fill you up if you haven’t ordered the caprese salad and garlic bread like me. A couple of honourable mentions would go to the salmon tagliatelle and the tagliatelle Bolognese, as these are both very good and well sized for a main course for anyone. The only dish that I have been a little disappointed with, is the gnocchi gorgonzola. I love gnocchi and I love blue cheese, but I found this one to be a little sharp for my taste, like the cheap blue cheese you buy in the supermarket. I have only had it once so maybe it was just a bad blue cheese day and if you like very sharp blue cheese, then this might be just the dish for you.

Overall then, it is certainly worth paying Good Morning Vietnam a visit, as it is lovely place to sit and eat and the food is high quality and very reasonably priced. While I haven’t tried the non pasta menu, I have seen someone get the steak and that looks very good too. It is a solid Italian restaurant in Hoi An and worth a visit if you are looking for some Italian food.

The Drinks

While the bar here is stocked with a wide variety of spirits and they have beers like Huda available at a reasonable price, this is an Italian restaurant, so all I really care about is the wine. They have quite an extensive wine menu at very good prices, but they also offer house Italian wines by the glass and by the carafe as well as the bottle at a very good price indeed. This is great if you don’t want to slug through a bottle and just want a few glasses to go with your meal. I believe they offer two different house variations, and while both are not bad quality, it is probably worth paying just a little extra for the more expensive one. It is still cheap, but tastes a lot better. Both the reds are fine though and will go well with the food. I haven’t tasted the white so I won’t comment.

As you can probably tell, I have been to Good Morning Vietnam many times and ordered delivery even more frequently than that. If ever there was something to look for in a recommendation, that is probably all you need to know.

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Morning Glory Signature Restaurant, Hoi An

Restaurant, Chinese, Italian, Seafood, vegan, Vietnamese

Morning Glory Signature on An Hoi island in Hoi An is one of my favourite restaurants in Hoi An. I am not saying it’s the best, mainly because I’m not a professional food critic, and I believe food will always be subjective, but it is definitely one of my personal favourites. Unlike the original Morning Glory in Old Town that serves up wonderful traditional Hoi An and Vietnamese food, Morning Glory Signature caters to a more eclectic palate with its diverse menu and fusion-focused Vietnamese dishes.

The way it does this, is not simply by offering a wide menu, which it does, but by being so cavernously huge. This place is several restaurants in one, with multiple places to sit and drink and eat. The main Morning Glory Signature restaurant is upstairs and has a wonderfully large balcony overlooking the street below. It is a fantastic place for people watching, but fills up very quickly, so is often best to book if you know you want to be sitting there.

Morning glory signature hoi an balcony area
Morning Glory Signature Hoi An busy balcony

But apart from the eponymous Signature restaurant, there is also a vegan restaurant, Vy’s deli, and a Cafe selling Chinese dumplings. These are all nice places to sit (although not as nice as the balcony area, it has to be said) and all well covered by a fast-moving and efficient service staff.

The real beauty of this place, is that although there are several restaurants and menus to choose from, you don’t have to be sitting in the correct place to see each menu. In other words, you can be sitting in Morning Glory Signature and still order from the menu of Vy’s Deli, or the Vegan place. This opens up a world of possibilities, giving you the choice of everything from Vietnamese, Chinese, to Italian; from steak to seafood, to beef stew, and it means that each member of a party can order from a different menu and get a completely different style of food. It is not often that you get such a variety of different foods served in the same place with such a high level of quality.

This is the main reason it is one of my favourite restaurants in Hoi An. Of course, having so many options can get a little confusing, and sometimes finding what you want might be a little testing, but if you do find yourself getting frustrated looking through the menus, just ask the staff for the ipad, they will happily give it to you. And the ipad has pictures of all the dishes too. A much better way to peruse the menus, especially if you are a visual eater.

The Drinks

As you might expect, a place of this quality comes with a well-stocked menu of drinks to choose from. You will find everything you want here, from soft drinks, to beer, to spirits, to, of course, wine. This is the kind of place I like to drink wine in, and they have a lot of choice available. The better news is, that it is not as expensive as you might expect. In fact, a glass of red or white starts at around 120,000 VND, and there are several choices around this price point. This is certainly not as expensive as you see in other restaurants of this quality, and yet another reason why I keep coming back here.

The Food

As I have already stated, one of the positive points about Morning Glory Signature is how much choice you get from being able to choose separately from all of the different menus that they have on offer. Another positive point is just the sheer quality and taste of the food that comes. And I mean everything. Be it Vietnamese food, Chinese dumplings, or Italian food, the quality is high and the flavours immense.

The first time I came here was when my family was visiting from the UK. We went in as a large group and got seated on the balcony. This would be almost impossible now without a reservation, but Hoi An was still opening up after Covid at that time, and so the tourist numbers were lower. We ordered pretty much everything from their Vietnamese fusion menu and put everything out on the table to share as a group. This, in my view, is the best way to eat Asian food if you are in a group as you get to taste so many different things. And the tastes present in the dishes here are phenomenal. The standout for me is the crispy pork in tamarind sauce, but they are all so wonderful and varied. Each dish offers a completely different flavour profile to the next, so it gives your palate a good work out, in a very good way. These dishes are not your run-of-the-mill Hoi An dishes that you find in every other cafe and restaurant in Old Town, these dishes are special.

The next time we went to Morning Glory Signature, there was just me and Phuong. As expected we could not get a table on the balcony, so we settled for a table inside. This time we both fancied something different, though. Phuong had her mind set on dim sum, while I fancied a lasagna. Luckily we were in Morning Glory Signature, where all things are possible. We ordered a few different dishes of Chinese dumplings, a Greek salad with avocado, and I had my beef lasagna with garlic bread. A couple of glasses of Shiraz were in order to help wash the whole thing down.

Chicken and ginger dumplings

As you can probably tell, I find it difficult to remember to take photos before I start eating.

The standout of the dumplings were the chicken and ginger dumplings. These were a taste sensation. If you like ginger, then you will love these. They were simply delicious with quite the ginger spice hit, and my only regret, was that there were only 5 of them. I know for a fact that I will be ordering these every time I come here, regardless of my other orders. Phuong liked one of the other dumplings more as I think the ginger was a little too strong for her, so bear that in mind. To be fair, though, they were all very good, and extremely flavour-diverse.

My lasagna was also unexpectedly excellent. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so good. Probably because their Asian food is so strong, that I thought they must have a weakness somewhere, and that weakness would probably be the lasagna. It wasn’t. When it first came, I have to admit, I thought it might be a little small, but by the end of it, and with everything else we had to eat, I had eaten more than enough. And it was delicious. They nailed the flavours that I love in lasagna, but also got the texture of both pasta and meat spot on. It is now, for me at least, probably the best lasagna I have had in Hoi An. I would even put it above the lasagna in Good Morning Vietnam

The prices aren’t bad either. For this standard of food, in a setting so nice, you would expect to be paying a premium, but it’s really not that expensive. For a rough benchmark, my lasagna was 155,000 VND. I don’t think anyone could complain about paying about $6.50 USD for the “best” lasagna in Hoi An.

To the time of writing this, then, I still haven’t had a dish in Morning Glory Signature that i did not like, or that I thought was disappointing. The quality is superb. The choice is phenomenal. And it is still probably my favourite restaurant in Hoi An. Now, as I said earlier, taste is subjective, so you might not like it as much as I do, but you should still go try and see for yourself. At least once. And have the chicken with ginger dumplings.