Aws

AWS is supporting enterprises’ digital transformation through its AWS Partner Network

COVID-19 made serious socio-economic impacts during 2020, but the pandemic has had a forcing function at many companies to really think about how they operate differently and how they work with customers and consumers. In this situation, technology adaption is an inevitable trend with many success stories.

TechX, a technology startup focusing on cloud computing services, is among the technology solution providers gaining great success thanks to the technology transformation.

TechX was established in February 2020. Six months later, it became an Advanced Consulting Partner of AWS – a leading technology solution firm. With the support of AWS, and especially AWS Partner Network (APN), TechX has now grown from zero to a total of over 100 employees after one year of establishment, with two offices in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Also impressively, the TechX customer network reaches 150, including 100 small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with many in the banking and finance sector, and powerful groups. In 2020, TechX made revenue of $4 million.

Why APN?

Hong Tran, CEO TechX

Hong Tran, CEO TechX, who has 15 years of experience in the IT industry and provides solutions for banks, financial institutions, and powerful groups in Vietnam, recalled about three years ago, when technology was nowhere near meeting demands in Vietnam. Although customers were willing to fork out millions of US dollars a year on IT, tech firms could not expand their network of clients or improve customers’ experience.

“At that time, I met with a representative of AWS in Vietnam and learned more about AWS philosophy, which was different from other technology firms at the time. AWS focuses on real customer obsession. For example, they work closely with customers in Vietnam, engaging them in daily conversation and sharing experiences so that partners can develop from zero – the way TechX did,” Hong said.

AWS’ APN enables partners to provide customers with a free trial of its entire suite of services. APN also commits to being a long-term, useful partner for customers, asking them to pay for AWS only as long as they make a profit.

APN also grows with partners. Hong admitted, “In the past, when we worked with other partners, it often took us a week or even a month to get a reply. Now with AWS, TechX has immediate support.”

Moreover, APN has Go-to-Market support which helps partners with products development, marketing activities, and free trial.

“We are striving to help our partners grow and become as successful as they can. We have personally witnessed partners like TechX grow from zero employees to now well over 50 and probably even more. We will continue to help them scale their deep cloud expertise,” said Stanley Chan, head of Technology Partners, Asia-Pacific and Japan, AWS.

TechX is taking the next steps in its digital journey. In June 2021, it plans to complete Migration Competency, by July complete Managed Services, and by September complete Data & Analytics Competency, thus enabling it to become a Consulting Partner of AWS in 2021, to have a 200 per cent increase in revenue in 2021, and to increase the number of SMB customers to 5,000 by the end of the year.

How can partners benefit from AWS Partner Network?

Stanley Chan, head of Technology Partners, APJ, AWS

TechX is a typical example of how an enterprise benefits from APN. To date, over 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies are using APN partner solutions and services. Customers like Masan, Vietjetair, and multinationals with local presence in Vietnam like Samsung and Vodafone all leverage AWS, together with a number of AWS partners to realise their cloud transformation priorities.

For partners beginning their journey starting with AWS by building and developing their practice or technology, APN offers training tools and assigns resources to help them get up and going very quickly.

Next, APN works with partners to identify their areas of strength, where they can specialise, and to differentiate themselves in the market and in the AWS sales organisation.

Next is support to partners through marketing awareness and going to market to drive new business together via digital campaigns, online tools, and sales support.

APN also offers a broad set of resources, tools, and expertise to help its partners develop the right level of marketing based on their needs and the types of clients they target. Some of these are digital, and some of these are agency based and some of these are in person, depending on the customer strategy and partners’ growth strategies as well.

Stanley Chan said, “One example is our upcoming AWS online summit for ASEAN scheduled for May 18 and 19. It will be a large-scale virtual conference where we have customers, partners, and AWS teams share with and inspire each other with their journey to cloud and their digital transformation stories.”

According to Stanley Chan, much of the growth in the number of APN members is actually happening in Asia. According to International Data Corporation (IDC),the Asia-Pacific market for cloud is estimated to reach over $80 billion in the next several years.

“We still find that Vietnam is an emerging and growing market. We are looking at driving additional enablement, including training to make sure that the companies are confident and understand how they can use cloud,” he elaborated.

Great importance is given to how new innovative use cases can be developed, specifically around analytics to better understand their existing business. “On the technology side, we actually just had our public sector general manager do a briefing to the Vietnamese press about EdStart. This is an initiative where we are looking to engage the younger population through technology and to use education software and other technology platforms to really train and upskill the population of Vietnam to be cloud-ready. So that is another big investment that we are making to ensure that Vietnam is cloud-ready and maybe cloud-first,” he noted.

APN is a global partner programme focusing on helping partners build a successful business by providing them with valuable business, technical, and marketing support. Today, it has tens of thousands of partners around the world, with over 60 per cent of those partners actually headquartered outside of the US. Customer or enterprise large and small, APN enables them to identify high-quality partners who can deliver value-added services and solutions on AWS. APN has two types of partnerships. The first is consulting partners. They include firms that provide IT consulting services, system integration, application development, and management services. They include TechX. The second is technology partners. These partners are software vendors and software as a service (SaaS) providers, operating systems and database vendors. Here in Vietnam, APN have partners like FPT Telecom, and KIU Global, a business management software platform provider, as well as large global technology partners like salesforce.com , Cisco, Siemens, and thousands of others.

FE Credit has chosen AWS to move to cloud

With AWS, FE Credit will transform into a comprehensive digital consumer finance provider, becoming Vietnam’s first non-bank financial services provider to be fully hosted in the cloud.

With this move to innovate, FE CREDIT has migrated most of its mission-critical applications to AWS, including the Infosys Finacle Digital Banking solution suite, and its own $NAP and SHIELD mobile applications for consumer loan, credit card, and insurance products. Leveraging AWS’ broad and deep portfolio of cloud services, including containers, serverless, and databases, enables FE CREDIT to launch new consumer products faster while lowering costs.

FE CREDIT’s customer base has grown nearly four-fold, from three million in 2015 to 11 million by the end of 2020, 95 of whom are smartphone users with an average of three to four hours of daily screen time. Meeting the financial needs of this ever-expanding customer base quickly and easily is a priority for the company. By scaling its workloads based on demand using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), FE CREDIT reduced the time required to deploy new functions for Finacle Digital Banking from three months to two weeks and expects to reduce infrastructure maintenance and operation costs over the next five years. FE CREDIT can also monitor and automate compliance more easily by leveraging AWS’s reliable and secure infrastructure, while continuing to store personal customer data safely in its on-premises environment in Vietnam.

“At FE CREDIT, we focus on providing our customers with innovative financial services that exceed their expectations. And moving our entire infrastructure to AWS is part of our decision to scale up our capacity for innovation. We gain the speed and agility required to launch new financial services more easily, and we are better able to fulfil the financial needs of future customers,” said Kalidas Ghose, vice chairman and CEO at FE CREDIT.

“Cloud technology helps financial services companies to rapidly deliver more innovative and personalised customer services,” said Conor McNamara, managing director of ASEAN at AWS. “By going all-in on the world’s leading cloud, FE CREDIT gains access to an unmatched portfolio of cloud services to remove technology barriers in the financial services industry and invent services which solve meaningful customer problems.”

For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.

AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning, and AI, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 80 Availability Zones (AZs) within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, and Switzerland.

Millions of customers – including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies – trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

Conor McNamara, Managing Director at AWS Southeast Asia

On May 19, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that creator of alternative food delivery app Robinhood has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to increase agility, innovation, and efficiency.

The Robinhood app from developers Purple Ventures has leveraged the breadth and depth of AWS’ unmatched portfolio of cloud services including containers (Amazon EKS), databases (Amazon Aurora MySQL), and computers and machine learning (Amazon SageMaker), making it the first in Thailand that does not levy application or gross profit fees on small food vendors, a sector that is struggling financially during the pandemic.

Srihanath Lamsam, managing director of Purple Ventures said, “AWS enables us to scale our technology infrastructure as we grow, which supports our plans to onboard more delivery riders and restaurants in Bangkok and to expand to other cities to support even more small food vendors across the country.”

The tie-up was revealed at the AWS Summit Online ASEAN 2021 – the biggest technology event in Southeast Asia. On the same day, UnionBank of the Philippines announced a partnership with AWS to migrate its IT infrastructure from on-premises to the world’s leading cloud by next year, thus creating new digital banking experiences accessible from mobile phones. Banks across Southeast Asia are adopting the cloud to exceed their customers’ expectations, pursue new opportunities opened by evolving regulations, and address challenges presented by the ongoing pandemic. These firms ultimately recognise the cloud as a business and technology enabler.

Conor McNamara, Managing Director ASEAN, AWS said, “We saw a notable acceleration in the pace of adoption, and broadening of the customer bases, as well as an acceleration in the overall rate of customers starting their journey on AWS.”

In this trend, XL Axiata – one of Indonesia’s largest telco operators – along with Petronas, Zalora, Moderna, ICS Compute, and hundreds of others are also gaining success with AWS. ICS Compute in Indonesia took on 50 new projects by co-selling with AWS that contributed 90 per cent of the partner’s overall business in 2020.

XL Axiata meanwhile changed its strategy to reimage business modes, reimage operations, and reimage ways of working, team synergy, simplicity, and exceptional performance. Yessie Yosetya, chief of Information and Digital Officer at XL Axiata said, “To deploy this strategy we are embracing the cloud transformation journey. Partnering with AWS will enable XL Axiata to continue innovating for sustainable business growth.”

To give builders of tomorrow the flexibility they need to build and run any workload, anywhere, with the benefits of the cloud, AWS continues to develop new products and services to provide the possible broadest and deepest portfolio to meet partners and customers’ demands in ASEAN. Many Amazon products are available to support customers such as Forecast, Kendra, DevOps Guru, Lockout, Connect, HealthLake, and more. More than 100,000 customers currently use AWS for machine learning.

Conor added that his group is going to launch the upcoming AWS Region in Jakarta as it looks to better services, and the needs of its fast-growing community of Indonesian customers. AWS is keen on localisation of its service offerings by providing local language support for services such as translate and transcribe for Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, and Bahasa speakers.

AWS has also diverse partner community in ASEAN that can support partners the best. Presently, 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies are utilising AWS Partner Network solutions and services. Moreover, it currently has 20 partner competences in ASEAN across a range of specialisations. AWS has been actively investing in ASEAN since 2009, when it opened the first office in Singapore, and since then has established offices in seven cities across six countries. Last year, outposts were launched across several ASEAN countries, thus allowing its customers to run AWS infrastructure and services on premises for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Besides startups, AWS has played an important role in the success of many ASEAN unicorns, including Razer and Zilingo. Small- and medium-sized businesses and public sector groups are other targets for AWS.

Such businesses form the backbone of the ASEAN economy, employing more than 80 per cent of the regional workforce and contributing to over half of regional GDP. “We are committed to digitalising one million SMBs in the region over the next three years,” Conor elaborated. “We will partner with both our consulting and technology partners to provide easy-to-use and packaged solutions that can help accelerate this mass digitalisation agenda.”

He added that AWS is still at a relatively early stage in the investment curve for the region. “We have plans to continue to invest across all of these dimensions in the months and years to come,” Conor said.

La Vie has been one of the pioneers of water protection in Vietnam

The recognition reflects the constant efforts of La Vie, a member of Nestlé Group, to protect water resources for future generations despite the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Alliance for Water Stewardship is a global organisation dedicated to promoting cooperation between businesses, governments, and nonprofit organisations to encourage the adoption of common system standards for sustainable water use. As of present, La Vie is the first and only business in Vietnam to have received the AWS Standard certification as the La Vie factory in Long An was the first certified factory in the country.

The La Vie factory in Hung Yen has made constant investments in initiatives to protect water resources. Specifically, La Vie made efforts to ensure that every drop of treated wastewater undergoes strict control through an automatic wastewater monitoring system before returning to the environment. The wastewater leaving the factory can be used to irrigate farms while reducing the risk of water pollution.

For many years, La Vie has been collecting garbage every day on the canal in Van Lam, Hung Yen province where Nhu Quynh pumping station is situated with a view to improving the water environment for the community. The company also supports households to connect to the standard water system in the locality as well as improve sanitary conditions and water quality at local schools.

Joining hands with the community to protect water resources

Nestlé is committed to certifying all of its factories with the robust AWS standard by 2025, including La Vie.

The AWS Standard is applied by businesses and organisations having water plants globally to understand and identify challenges, opportunities, and risks of water resources in their areas. Businesses will team up with relevant stakeholders to address challenges and achieve the targets of sustainable water balance, good water quality, equity in clean water use, and water ecosystem protection.

To this end, La Vie not only adopts water saving initiatives at the factories but also shares them with businesses and local communities. The company also cooperates with the local authorities and schools to raise the awareness of the community about the challenges for water resources.

La Vie is carrying out various programmes to achieve its goal of drawing net zero water from local communities by 2025

To meet the criteria for the AWS standard, businesses need to go through five assessment processes with strict requirements. The assessment is conducted by an independent organisation under the close supervision of AWS. In addition, after obtaining certification, businesses will be re-evaluated annually to ensure the continued and improved implementation of water protection activities.

Over the past 30 years of operation in Vietnam, La Vie has made significant contributions to the community through its Creating Shared Values programme, which brings long-term benefits for relevant stakeholders and society towards sustainable development. Most recently, La Vie has announced its goal of drawing zero water from local communities by 2025. It will supply them the same volume of clean water its plants use from local sources and return to the environment 100 per cent of the water it draws from water bodies.

Businesses in Vietnam are stepping up their digitalisation efforts

In late May and into this month, ASEAN and the wider world witnessed the return of major technology shows from giants. Following the 2021 AWS ASEAN Summit on May 17-18, last week Intel and Ericsson held Computex 2021 and Ericsson Unboxed Office 2021, giving insights into new products and technology trends. The events came at a time when businesses are pushing ahead with tech-based transformation in order to adapt to new challenges and the acceleration of digital transformation efforts.

AWS Summit Online ASEAN

Big gains

Despite a year of suffering and upheaval, many big names like AWS, Intel, and Ericsson thrived in 2020 and are further boosting their footprint in Vietnam and the wider region by leveraging new innovations.

Based on recently announced fourth-quarter results, AWS boasts a $50 billion annual run rate business with 28 per cent on-year revenue growth. According to Conor McNamara, managing director for ASEAN at AWS, several factors have played a key role in the company’s success.

“Firstly, AWS always places customers at the centre of all its decisions. Some 90 per cent of our products and features at AWS come directly from their feedback, and the other 10 per cent is when we invent on their behalf,” McNamara explained.

In addition, the group takes a long-term approach to its business and always looks to delight customers, even when it presents a risk to its short term business performance. Finally, it remains laser focused on operational excellence to the point where the difference between perfection and current performance is indistinguishable to customers, McNamara added. AWS’ growth momentum continued in the first quarter of 2021, with revenues of $13.5 billion, 3.1 per cent higher than the $13.1 billion consensus estimate.

In this technology trend, Intel is also a winner. Full-year revenues for 2020 set an all-time record for Intel of $77.9 billion, up 8 per cent on-year. This marked its fifth consecutive year of record revenues. Impressively, Intel’s first-quarter revenue exceeded January guidance by $1.1 billion led by continued, strong PC demand. PC unit volumes were up 38 per cent on-year, and notebook volumes also set a new Intel record.

“Intel delivered strong first-quarter results driven by exceptional demand for our leadership products and outstanding execution by our team. We’re rapidly progressing our plans with a reinvigorated focus on innovation and execution,” said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. “This is a pivotal year for Intel. We are setting our strategic foundation and investing to accelerate our trajectory and capitalise on the explosive growth in semiconductors that power our increasingly digital world.”

At Computex 2021, Intel announced a slew of new products in a move to make big gains this year.

Global demand

Similarly, Ericsson, a leader in 5G with 127 commercial contracts and 79 operating networks around the world, saw organic sales grow by 5 per cent for 2020. Börje Ekholm, president and CEO of Ericsson said, “Our strategy, built on increased investments in research and development for technology and cost leadership, continued to bear fruit in the first quarter of 2021. We saw organic sales growth of 10 per cent, primarily driven by market share gains in networks. We are well positioned to take advantage of the continued market momentum with a competitive 5G product portfolio and cost structure.”

“There is strong momentum in global 5G demand with lead markets moving forward at a high pace, creating opportunities for Ericsson to grow its core business,” Ekholm added. “To that end, we continue to invest in further strengthening our portfolio and growing our global footprint. With the investments we are making in our business in 2021, we are creating a strong platform for the long term with strengthened competitiveness in the core business as well as in Enterprise applications.”

ASEAN cloud-driven trend

The unprecedented events of last year have put companies in Vietnam and beyond under threat, forcing them to transform faster, and more efficiently. Petronas, the national petroleum company of Malaysia, decided to choose AWS cloud in its transformation and achieved the most optimised cost to serve across the total value chain, facilitating competitive pricing and segmentation.

Petronas has been active for years in Vietnam through Petronas’ subsidiary PC Vietnam Ltd., and the transformation is also benefiting its journey here. Aadrin Azly, chief digital officer of Petronas, told VIR, “The tools that Petronas build and deploy on the AWS cloud platform are available enterprise-wide based on business needs. The move to cloud has enabled us to be more agile, scalable, and become more cost-efficient.”

Prior to the pandemic, enterprises have long considered the move to the cloud. And while many took the first steps to drive initial workloads to the cloud, the shift into the digital world moves ever faster, particularly with the days of IT capabilities being centralised in data centres steadily declining. Dean Samuels, chief technologist at AWS, said “Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen an evolution in the AWS region in terms of global expansion. Up until today, we have had over 25 geographically distinct regions around the globe, where customers are able to leverage the various AWS services from our platform. In the next 12-18 months, we’ll actually have another five regions that will come online.”

Trends across sectors

In Vietnam like elsewhere in ASEAN, domestic and foreign-invested enterprises are making similar moves. For instance, Vietnam-based video conferencing provider TranS, who leveraged AWS to seamlessly scale, has seen its user count grow from 1,000 to 450,000.

Similar trends in telemedicine have also been seen where organisations like Doctor Anywhere, Dr. Raksa, and HaloDoc have been able to expand their service offerings while scaling seamlessly and cost-effectively on the AWS cloud.

In the banking and services sectors, FE CREDIT, the largest consumer lender in the country and a subsidiary of VPBank, went all-in with AWS in April; and the previous month Vietnam Maritime Commercial Joint Stock Bank selected AWS as its preferred provider for TNEX, Vietnam’s first digital-only bank.

In ASEAN, many unicorns including Grab, Traveloka, Tokopedia, and hundreds of others are also joining the cloud game. The next wave of ASEAN unicorns choosing cloud to build their business on, including Razer and Zilingo, has been also seen – and the same can be said of regional startups, including Pomelo Fashion, Thailand’s largest fashion e-commerce platform.

Santosh Gon – Chief information officer, Aviva Singlife Digital transformation was one of our key strategies over the last 18-24 months. The primary outcome was to drive productivity of our distribution workforce to provide them with the right tools and the right data, such that it enables them to do the new business more digitally. That includes things like lead management, fact finding, electronic submissions, and automated underwriting to name a few. With the merger of Aviva and Singlife, we have broadened our strategy. The focus now is on distributors, as well as customers and our partners. The strategy is now aligned towards the wider ecosystem, where we are leveraging digital and data to drive a more coherent strategy. Technology is being seen as a key driver of our business strategy. Now, we’re focusing on skill building around new capabilities, such as cloud, AI, and cognitive automation. Yessie Yosety – Chief of information and digital officer, XL Axiata XL Axiata is a part of Axiata Group, one of the largest telecommunication conglomerates in Asia. In response to COVID-19, we changed our strategy to reimagine the business model, reimagine our operations, and reimagine our ways of working with a culture of uncompromising integrity, team synergy, simplicity, and exceptional performance. We are thus embracing the cloud transformation journey. In all, Xl Axiata is pursuing double the productivity and around 15-20 per cent cost savings over five years from leveraging public cloud. The most important part when you are embarking on a cloud transformation journey is to build a centre of excellence, and we will need to establish this. On our future plans, we are planning to expand our applications on the cloud to big data analytics, automation, and AI. Dr. Justo A. Ortiz – Vice chairman, UnionBank of the Philippines Union Bank’s transformation journey involves culture, strategy, space, process, people, and partnerships. In the process pillar, among the tech we decided to build capabilities on is the cloud, which complimented our push for financial inclusion and inclusive prosperity. Financial inclusion is a big theme in the Philippines, with about 70 per cent of the adult population unbanked or underbanked. Aside from it serving as Union Bank’s higher purpose, the challenge of banking them is also a test for us to become a low-cost producer by reimagining our existing processes, both back-end and front-facing. Going to the cloud is among the first steps. But the journey is not only about technology, but mostly about people’s mindset and culture, new ways of thinking, and new ways of doing to unlearn, relearn, and keep learning.

There are many varieties of bun cha across Vietnam, but the Hanoi version is still held in high esteem.

Bun cha has received worldwide recognition after it’s featured on the show Parts Unknown, in which former US President Barack Obama and the host Anthony Bourdain enjoyed this dish together. What’s so special about this dish? Let’s find out!

Bun Cha (grilled pork with rice noodles) is an exquisite dish that’s intricately linked to Hanoi, where it originated. There are three components to this dish: a bowl of grilled thinly sliced pork belly and/or minced pork patties served in light dipping sauce with pickled veggies, a plate of rice noodles, along with a basket of fresh herbs such as perilla leaves, coriander, and lettuce.

There are many varieties of bun cha across Vietnam, but the Hanoi version is still held in high esteem. And although not much is known about how and when it was invented, bun cha has been referred to multiple times in literature.

In Hanoi: 36 Pho Phuong (Hanoi: 36 Streets and Guilds), a book that showcases the variety of Hanoi cuisine, writer Thach Lam acclaims: “It’s just the same kind of Bun Cha , with the same kinds of vegetables and rice noodles. So why is Hanoi’s Bun Cha so scrumptious and delicious, from the fragrance to the sauce.”

The essence of Hanoi’s cuisine relies on delicacy and elegance. Compared to other regions like Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), where tend to use a lot of strong and sweet flavors, foods in Hanoi are simpler, more rustic, but are imbued with sophistication.

Bun Cha consists of four main components – grilled meat, rice noodles, dipping sauce, and veggies. Photo: Thuy An

Of course, Bun Cha is not an exception. The sliced pork and pork patties are well-marinated with a variety of spices such as fish sauce, liquid caramel and garlic. The longer the marinating period, the more pronounced the flavor becomes. Afterward, the meat is grilled over hot charcoal until it turns into a gorgeous golden-brown color.

The dipping sauce is also a part making the dish quintessential. It consists of fish sauce, sugar, water and vinegar are combined in a golden ratio. The overall flavor should strike a balance between sweet, sour, and savory. Most stores add chopped garlic to make the sauce even bolder and more pungent. If you’re a fan of spices, don’t hesitate to sprinkle on top some black pepper and slide in a few thin slices of chilies. In the dipping sauce, you’ll also find pickled carrots and green papaya, which add such a flair to the food.

And you cannot forget the component that almost all noodle dishes in Vietnam have – a basket filled with all the fresh herb goodness. There is lettuce, mint, coriander, perilla, and basil, all of which chase away the fattinessof the meat and give a fresh dimension to the meal. So, grab a piece of meat, dip it into the sauce along with some noodles and herbs, and indulge in a stunning harmony of savory, sour, spicy, and sweet flavors.

The store is posited in 34 Hang Giay, where you can watch the flow of people moving. Photo: Thuy An

Bun Cha can be easily found anywhere, from luxurious restaurants to street-side eateries. But one of my favorite spots is a store located in the bustling street Hang Giay. When passing by the store, you’ll be surrounded with the intriguing aroma of grilled pork that’s hard to pass up. It’s actually quite spacious, so there shouldn’t be any problem with seating. If you like, you can choose to sit at the table set up outside of the store and watch the world go by.

The minced pork patties here are quite special as they are wrapped in perilla leaves. Photo: Thuy An

In the morning, this store sells pho. But during lunch time, Bun Cha is served. The pork belly slices here are neither too fatty nor too gamy. In fact, they’re soft and very well-seasoned. The minced pork patties are quite special as well; they are wrapped inside perilla leaves of which pungent taste pairs awfully well with grilled meat.

The meat is grilled over charcoal. And even from afar, its intriguing aroma is mind-boggling! Photo: Thuy An

The dipping sauce has a well-balanced flavor, too. The garlic and chilies aren’t put directly into the sauce, so feel free to season to your taste. The herbs are fresh as well!

If you have a chance to visit Hanoi and want to taste something that showcases the best of Hanoi cuisine, give Bun Cha a try.

Address: No. 34 Hang Giay

Operation hour: 11 am – 2 pm

Price: VND 40,000 (US$1.74)