In October 2023, Arve Hansen (University of Oslo), Outi Pitkänen (NTNU Trondheim), and Binh Nguyen (McGill University) published "Feeding a tourism boom: changing food practices and systems of provision in Hoi An, Vietnam" in Food, Culture & Society — Taylor & Francis's peer-reviewed journal of food studies. It's the most thorough academic treatment we've found of how a UNESCO-listed Vietnamese town's food landscape has been reshaped by mass international tourism.
The paper introduces a useful concept — foodway encounters, the cultural moment when tourists eat and hosts cook — and traces how these moments, repeated millions of times across a decade, have rebuilt Hoi An's food system from the supply chain up. For travellers, it's the most rigorous explanation of why the food you find in Hoi An today is the way it is.
What the study did
Method
- Approach: Ethnographic fieldwork combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews with hosts, and analysis of food-system supply chains.
- Geographic scope: Hoi An broadly — Old Town as the most intensive tourism zone, plus surrounding villages (Cam Pho, Cam Nam, Cam An / An Bang) and rural communes that supply the central economy.
- Theoretical frame: combines three approaches:
- Foodways — the cultural practices around food production, consumption, and meaning.
- Foodway encounters — what happens at the meeting points between hosts and tourists with different food cultures.
- Systems of provision — how the supply chains, distribution, and infrastructure that deliver food to plates restructure under demand pressure.
The paper's contribution: most existing food-tourism research focuses on the tourist (consumer behaviour, willingness to pay, satisfaction). Hansen et al. instead centre the host, asking what happens to people who cook for tourists when tourism becomes the dominant economic context.
Key concepts
Foodway encounters. When a tourist eats at a Hoi An stall or restaurant, there's a translation happening on both sides. The host has to decide how spicy, how authentic, how safe, how expensive to make the dish. The tourist has to decide how adventurous, how cheap, how recognisable a dish to choose. Each individual encounter is small. Multiply by millions of encounters over a decade and you get a structural change in what Hoi An cooks.
The "comfort food and authentic at the same time" demand. The paper documents that international tourists typically want both — a degree of comfort and recognisability, alongside the cultural experience of "authentic" Vietnamese food. The two demands are partly contradictory. Hosts solve them by offering both Western and Vietnamese options, by lowering spice levels, and by curating menus that signal "authentic" through presentation while staying accessible.
Systems of provision restructuring. Pre-tourism Hoi An's food economy was mostly daily-market based — fresh ingredients sourced that morning, prepared that day. Tourism scale forced wholesale relationships, refrigerated supply chains, and ingredient predictability. Some traditional dishes (cao lầu, which depends specifically on water from Hoi An's Ba Le wells) became contested — purists held the line, tourist-facing kitchens used municipal water and adapted recipes.
What this means for your trip
1. There's no pre-tourism Hoi An food to recover
The paper's most important conceptual contribution is also useful as a traveller mindset: don't go searching for "authentic" Hoi An food as if it's a fixed thing that tourism corrupted. Hoi An's food landscape has been negotiated and renegotiated through every foodway encounter for two decades. What you eat in Hoi An today is the product of that negotiation, not a deviation from a baseline.
That said — different parts of the food scene are at different points along the negotiation curve. Some are deeply tourism-shaped; others much less so.
2. Old Town is where tourism shapes food the most
Hoi An's Old Town (the UNESCO-listed merchant-architecture core) is where tourism concentration is highest and where foodway-encounter intensity is highest. Restaurants in the Old Town have to balance the highest tourist-volume demand with the highest tourist-quality scrutiny.
Practical implications:
- Old Town restaurants are usually quite good — the highest scrutiny per encounter forces consistent quality. You won't find a bad meal here often.
- They're usually less surprising — the cuisine has been broadly translated for international palates over a long period. Spice levels are moderate, presentation is dialled in, prices reflect tourist economics.
- The translation can be excellent — some Old Town restaurants have used the foodway-encounter pressure as an opportunity to do something genuinely new (Morning Glory, Vy's Market, Mango Mango, Nu Eatery — though restaurant turnover means specific recommendations age fast).
3. The further you go from Old Town, the less tourism-shaped the food
Practical zones, in roughly increasing order of distance from foodway-encounter intensity:
- Cam Pho ward (just west of Old Town across the Cam Nam Bridge): mid-tourism zone. Local breakfast spots, rice-noodle shops, and bun cha stalls operate primarily for local commuters. Mixed in with tourism-oriented businesses.
- Cam Nam island (across the southern bridge from Old Town): more residential, less tourism-saturated. Excellent for evening seafood at riverside stalls — about a 10-minute walk or 5-minute bike ride from Old Town.
- Cam Chau and surrounding rice-paddy villages: local-only food economy. Small home-cooking spots, farm-to-table done from genuine necessity rather than as a marketed concept.
- Tra Que vegetable village: a destination for cooking classes; the village itself maintains pre-tourism farming practices.
- Cam Kim island (across the Thu Bon River, accessed by a short boat): rural, almost entirely off the tourism food map. Small homestays serve home-cooked meals to a tiny number of overnight guests.
For travellers wanting "less translated" food, leaving Old Town for a meal — even just a 1-km walk — meaningfully shifts what you'll find.
4. Cooking classes vary widely in foodway-encounter intensity
The paper's framework helps explain why Hoi An cooking classes feel so different from each other:
- Restaurant-run classes in Old Town — high foodway-encounter intensity. The dishes have been translated for international students. You'll learn good versions of classic dishes, presented for international expectations.
- Family-home classes outside Old Town — low foodway-encounter intensity. The dishes are what the family actually eats. Your spice level and ingredient choices are calibrated to what's in the kitchen, not to a curriculum.
For a Hoi An cooking class day tour, the family-home format is generally the deeper experience.
5. Spice levels and adaptability are not deceptive — they're hospitality
A specific point worth noting: Hoi An kitchens that adjust spice levels for international guests aren't "watering down" their cuisine — they're practising hospitality. The paper documents this as a deliberate skill that hosts develop, not a compromise. If you'd genuinely prefer the original spice level, ask explicitly; most kitchens will happily oblige. The default-down isn't a fixed setting.
Limitations & caveats
- The study is qualitative ethnography, not a quantitative survey. Sample sizes are small by design (focused interviews with hosts), and the findings are interpretive rather than statistical. They're robust within the ethnographic tradition but don't lend themselves to "X% of restaurants do Y" claims.
- Open-access status varies. The article is published in a Taylor & Francis journal; individual access depends on institutional affiliation. The paper's preprint and a Norwegian-archive version (NTNU Open) provide alternative routes.
- "Authentic" is an analytical category, not a moral one. The paper deliberately avoids ranking restaurants by authenticity. Our traveller-facing translation (Old Town vs outer wards) describes where foodway-encounter intensity differs — not which is better.
- Hoi An's food scene continues to evolve. Specific restaurants and stalls cycle in and out of business. Frameworks survive years; specific recommendations age in months. Treat any specific restaurant in this article as illustrative, not authoritative.
- The paper covers Hoi An, not Vietnam more broadly. Hanoi, HCMC, and other UNESCO-listed destinations have different food-tourism dynamics; conclusions don't transfer wholesale. Our Hanoi-specific street food spending research covers the equivalent ground for the capital.
Sources & further reading
- Primary source: Hansen, A., Pitkänen, O. & Nguyen, B. (2023). Feeding a tourism boom: changing food practices and systems of provision in Hoi An, Vietnam. Food, Culture & Society. DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2023.2263986.
- Open archive: NTNU Open repository — open-access version of the paper.
- Companion food-tourism research: What is Local food? Dynamic Culinary Heritage in the World Heritage Site of Hoi An, Vietnam (ResearchGate).
- Related on Hanoi: Hanoi street food spending research — the quantitative side of Vietnamese food-tourism research.
Related on this site:
- Hoi An destination guide — Old Town vs surrounding wards
- Hoi An community-based tourism research — the resident-economy companion paper
- Hoi An cooking class day tour — practical food-experience option