COOKING CLASSES IN HOI AN ATTRACT INTERNATIONAL VISITORS
In 2012, Lonely Planet rated cooking classes in Hoi An among the top 10 special travel experiences in the world. Visitors experience not only a unique local product, but also participate in every process of making food and enjoy the raw flavors, tasty herbs and fresh spices typically used in Hoi An dishes.
Tourists learn to cook at the Hoian Eco Cooking Class facility
Cooking classes in Hoi An can take place at restaurants or hotels right in Hoi An city within a few hours, can also last from early morning to lunchtime in several craft villages such as Tra Que Vegetable Village, Hoi An Silk Village, or at families in Cam Thanh Commune (Hoi An City).
The first thing to do in the cooking program is to go to the market. With pre-designed dishes, visitors will choose what to cook, such as meat, fish, noodles, vegetables, and spices such as lemon, garlic, and chili. The first experience of visitors is to choose the ingredients by themselves, to feel the attraction from fresh ingredients, not frozen or packaged products at supermarkets. Then the instructor will show them how to “bargain” like local people to get the best price at the market.
If you do not want to buy vegetables at the market, you can go to Tra Que vegetable village with farmers, learn about how to grow vegetables and choose vegetables from the fields for your dishes.
After that, visitors will cycle through rice fields or go by basket boats, cross the Bay Mau coconut forest to the cooking places. For about 30 minutes to an hour, this jungle trek attracts visitors by activities such as boating, boat racing, rocking bottles, mud wading, fishing, crab fishing, water coconut felling, etc. They then go along the small creeks to the marina to enter the classroom.
Most of the cooking classes in Cam Thanh commune or Thuan Tinh island are designed in coconut houses right in the large, airy garden, with wooden tables and chairs. At the Hoi An Eco Cooking Class facility (Hamlet 2, Cam Thanh commune, Hoi An city), visitors will see the family’s mill which has been used for decades.
Currently, cooking tours combining discovery, experience and community based ecotourism are popular choices for tourists to Hoi An, especially tourists from Western Europe, USA, Australia, Korea and Japan. According to Mr. Tran Ba, Director of Ba Tran Co., Ltd., because of cooking, every tour only has a few people to more than 10 people, but sometimes when there are 40 guests in the morning. The number of foreign tourists learning to cook is quite large and regular. The tour programs are sold online or through the recommendation of hotels in Hoi An. On TripAdvisor, “Cooking tour”, “Cooking Class”, “Eco Cooking class” in Hoi An are highly appreciated and got high ratings by visitors.
