The fact that all bia hoi places in Hanoi have the same basic setup throws the gates wide open on the kind of connoisseurship I’ve come to really appreciate. Finding the perfect bia hoi place takes patience and lots attention to the minute details that make the truly great bia hoi spots really stand out from the rest.

Your basic bia hoi spot is usually in a storefront with the red and yellow bia hoi logos on the signage out front. The store front is also the first floor of a house and bia hoi businesses tend to be a family affair. But not all bia hoi spots are in storefronts. For example, there are two bia hoi places in the intersection under the elevated train just around the corner from our apartment. No storefront required. At these places the bia hoi is kept cold by the massive blocks of ice that rest on top of the kegs. Other, more uptown, bia hoi joints have proper refrigeration and so the bia hoi that is brought to your table will be colder than at the more rough and ready places. If your bia hoi isn’t to your liking temperature-wise, you can ask for an igloo-style cooler filled with ice to place in your glass. Many bia hoi places are in storefronts, so the option of drinking inside is an option, though it’s more of an inside-outside situation because the roller doors they close after closing are rolled up and so the storefront is wide open. You will do most of your bia hoi drinking sitting at the little red or yellow stools and tables on the sidewalk, where the bia hoi people will kindly point a fan in your direction. Unless your wife who still loves you is with you, in which case they will point the fan in her direction only. There are bia hoi spots all over Hanoi and the beer is always the same fresh and light and low-alcohol lager served in a green bia hoi glass that is really easy to drink a handful of in the mid-afternoon and which it’s pretty hard to imagine a better mid-afternoon refreshment option given the ungodly heat and humidity in country. Bia hoi‘s an extremely important cultural and social institution here. Except not on Beer Corner, which sells name-brand Vietnamese beers in bottles.

That’s about it for the basic bia hoi spot situation. Now for the details that set the truly premium bia hoi spots apart from the other perfectly adequate and enjoyable spots.

First, the food. Bia hoi in Hanoi is seriously cheap. A glass of cold bia hoi costs anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 VND. Neither is a lot of money in strong American. 14,000 dong is about 59 cents in dollars.

*Just a side note: Gina’s really struggling to come to terms with the VND to USD conversion here. She thinks that anything that costs more than 100,000 VND is expensive and will need some serious convincing and soothing before she’ll lay out that kind of dong. 100,000 dong comes out to about $4.23 American. So when we go out for a nice dinner with multiple courses and a nice bottle of Australian Shiraz, like we did last night, I tell her it was expensive but not too bad: around 500K, instead of the 1,418,000 dong we really spent (which comes out to about 60 bucks). This soothes her and helps her to relax and enjoy. *

And so as I was saying the bia hoi is dirt cheap, which is a little bit of a problem for the bia hoi places who don’t actually make much money selling beer at all. They get their scratch from selling food that they cook right there for the folks who, as drinking folks will, inevitably get hungry and need to send some snacks down after the bia hoi to try to talk some sense to it before it really wreaks havoc on their ability to drive their motorbikes home. I have to confess that we tend to do our bia hoi drinking before dinner and so haven’t actually had any of the food at the bia hoi joints we frequent. And when I promised via the translate app on my phone to order some of the really delicious-smelling grilled chicken Foxy Tiger Mom was grilling up while we enjoyed our bia hoi yesterday next time we went there, the almost shockingly young bia hoi girl who is Foxy Tiger Mom’s daughter looked pretty mortified, probably because of a poor translation issue. (More on Foxy Tiger Mom and shockingly young daughter below.) But the bia hoi folks don’t seem to mind that we only drink, I suspect because we impart an air of cosmopolitan sophistication and exoticism to their place that makes it more appealing to wealthy Western tourists passing by.

The second thing that makes the really truly premium bia hoi joints stand out is the clientele. This ranges. For example, there are the intersection under the railroad tracks bia hoi places that’re packed all day every day with Vietnamese men who clearly take their job of sitting and smoking and drinking bia hoi seriously, indeed. And although we are not tourists, it’s clear that this place is not for us. Then there’s the more lively in a mixed clientele sort of way bia hoi places like the one we went to on one of the few nights we stayed out past nine. I’ll say more about this place below, but for now I just want to point out that this place was really fun, with a mixed crowd of families and people on dates and kids from across the street who came to interrogate us and the one chick who was clearly dressed for success—success being finding premium male for marriage and baby making ASAP because of the biological clock situation and all. We have not been able to find this place again and so haven’t returned, which makes me a little sad, except that I know about where it was and so am not giving up.

The third thing that really sets a premium bia hoi place apart is location. And I don’t mean the sort of abstract sense of location that makes DUMBO more prime, location-wise, than pretty much anywhere in the Bronx. I mean location in the concrete sense of how close it is to your bed. This is important. Our two favorite bia hoi places are two blocks north of our apartment. They are at the same intersection, caddy-corner from each other. One is sort of more uptown by bia hoi place standards: It’s on the corner and when you sit inside-outside you feel like a lord despite the little stools and table because the inside is elevated and you have to take a pretty big step up to enter. It’s fun to sit there, but you might feel a little disconnected from the street action as you observe from your lord-like vantage point. The second place is definitely street level and not on the corner and has a more family-run type of vibe. This is where you will have your beer served by Foxy Tiger Mom and her shockingly young daughter.

The closeness-to-home factor’s important because, if you’re out drinking bia hoi with Gina, you will walk home instead of taking a motorbike even though walking is not the Vietnamese way. To get from our apartment to our favorite bia hoi places is not for the faint of heart, and can be a truly hair-raising, white-knuckle, nails-digging-deeply-into-palms experience for FNGs. This is because you have to cross two one-way, three-lane streets that are some of the most congested I’ve ever seen anywhere to get there. Admittedly, after a little while in country, particularly after having visited some pagodi and starting to flow Buddhism, and even more particularly on the way home because you’ve by then had quite a few glasses of bia hoi, the whole street-crossing business gets to be no problem, Jack.

The last thing that makes a truly very premium bia hoi place stand out is the service, by which I mean the bia hoi girls who are nothing like the Beer Corner beer girls or the BBeer: The Culture of Belgian Beers girls (who I don’t think know that they work in a bar). The bia hoi girls are different.

When you lower yourself onto the little sidewalk stool at a bia hoi joint, there’s a damn good chance that a beautiful girl will bring your cold, light, refreshing lager in a green glass immediately. No menu. No ordering. Just cold beer to refresh and revive your spirits against the summer swelter. There’s also a damn good chance that the beautiful girl who served your beer is 13, maybe 14, maybe even 12 years old. And the fact that after couple cold bia hoi you maybe start to check out the shockingly young bia hoi girl may make you feel icky if you’re an FNG and haven’t yet learned that those sorts of moral sentiments have no business in country.

This idea might make you uncomfortable. I get it. So to assuage your ethnocentric neuroticism a bit, I will just point out that the shockingly young bia hoi girl you’ve been checking out will sit down at the tiny table next to yours and enjoy a cold bia hoi or two of her own when she gets a break. And at this point you will say to yourself, “Fuck my ethnocentric moral sentiments. Put me in the shit, Sarge.” Because it’s obvious that this shockingly young little chicky is totally fair game checking out-wise—no problem—and is also almost certainly fair game for potentially making a premium marriage with if you’re not already married to your wife who still loves you. If none of the above helps with the ethnocentric moral sentiments neuroticism problem, all hope is not lost. I advise that you just pretend you’re a Mongol warlord with unlimited power who can do whatever he wants and who certainly harbors none of the neurotic moral sentiments under discussion here—Genghis Khan will do—and just relax and enjoy yourself. This will be easier if you’re drinking bia hoi at the more uptown, elevated place on the corner.

There are two girls who work our more uptown bia hoi local on the regular. It’s really hard to say how old they are. “15? 16?” Gina guesses. “Although they could easily be 14 or even 13.” One of them seems to be having a lot of fun, indeed, and giggles pretty much nonstop, particularly when I order the beers, which I insist on doing in laughable Vietnamese. The other definitely does not giggle and looks at you with a look that is a mixture of interest and suspicion and who if you don’t squirm a little internally—because your neurotic ethnocentric moral sentiments default settings just overrode everything you’ve learned in country—if this doesn’t happen, the internal squirming, the first time you realize she’s kinda foxy and that you’ve been unconsciously checking her out, you may be a seriously disgusting person, indeed, what I said above about pretending to be Genghis Khan be damned.

Our other favorite bia hoi place, which is caddy-corner to the more uptown place, tends to be run by a mom and daughter team. The fact that I call Foxy Tiger Mom Foxy Tiger Mom has nothing at all to do with the associations with Asian tiger moms we get from that one book. She’s displayed none of the Asian tiger mom traits that you’re probably familiar with. For example, it’s totally unlikely that her shockingly young daughter will ever became a world-class pianist who goes to Juilliard on scholarship because her mom stood over her at the piano with a ruler and would swat her knuckles bloody if she even so much as thought about not injecting the correct level of emotional nuance into that one movement of Rachmaninoff’s 3rd. Plus, who has the time to get truly world-class-level good at the piano when you’ve worked as a full-time bia hoi girl since you were seven? And so no, it has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the fact that Foxy Tiger Mom sometimes wears a shirt that says Foxy Tiger Mom.

It’s worth mentioning that the bia hoi girls at our two favorite bia hoi joints are clearly still in training and are a long way from reaching the level of the truly skilled bia hoi girl par excellence who served us at the lively and diverse, clientele-wise, bia hoi place that I can’t remember the location of. To be fair, this chick was probably pushing 30—there’s really no way to tell—and had clearly been in the bia hoi girl profession a long time and so her game was on point. She moved balletically from table to table, chatting up the smoking men and people on dates and that chick who was clearly on a mission while serving green glasses of cold bia hoi with a grace and alacrity that those busty Oktoberfest Frauen can only dream of. And she does all this without the bustiness that you’d be forgiven for thinking might give the German beer girls the edge, except nope. Not even close. They just can’t compete. And when they ran out of bia hoi, this chick didn’t hesitate. No, she calmly and foxily mounted her motorbike and took off, only to to return within minutes with cases and cases of cold Bia Saigon in cans because she knows that her job is to keep the beer drinking and snack eating going well into the night, and she takes this job very seriously, indeed.

There was a foxy-bia hoi-girl-in-training there who I’d say was at least 16, and who by this point I didn’t feel at all bad, ethnocentric moral sentiments-wise, about checking out. But it was clear she’s still a long way from completing her training and becoming a truly next-level balletic and graceful and chatty and supremely competent-on-a-motorbike bia hoi girl par excellence whose excellenceness is so clearly exemplified by the foxy chick who’s pushing 30 at that one place I can’t find. But I have no doubt she’ll come around.