Quang Ninh turns cuisine into a unique tourism product

Quang Ninh cuisine is considered a heritage within a heritage. Promoting culinary potential, upgrading existing products and launching many new and attractive culinary tourism products, Quang Ninh has been gradually realizing the goal of developing cuisine into a unique tourism product, promising to form a potential night-time economic model.

Compared to a miniature Vietnam, Quang Ninh has sea, mountains and plains, so Quang Ninh cuisine is also the richest and most diverse in the country.

Creativity and a lifestyle that is suitable to natural conditions have created a cuisineQuang Ninhhas characteristics and regional identity.

For people whose lives are closely linked to the sea, most of their dishes will be made from seafood.

However, each locality has a different way of processing the same raw materials. For example, in Quan Lan, sea worms are mainly dried before processing, but when coming to Mong Cai city, everyone knows the dish of fresh sea worms coated in breadcrumbs and fried... When talking about dried squid, people immediately think of Quan Lan island squid, Co To island squid, but when coming to Ha Long, you must definitely eat sticky rice with squid rolls, seafood noodles, and cu ky noodles...

Binh Lieu, Ba Che, Dam Ha, Tien Yen are mountainous areas, the people here have created their own culinary features closely linked to nature.

These are dishes made from river products such as: stream fish wrapped in betel leaves, snails cooked with glutinous rice; dishes exploited from the forest such as betel leaf sausage with ant eggs, stir-fried ant eggs eaten with sticky rice, wild spinach soup of the Tay and San Chi ethnic groups... In addition, there are also corn wine, potato wine, leaf yeast wine, sim wine, purple Morinda officinalis wine (Ba Che, Tien Yen) that make tourists ecstatic.

Talking about Quang Ninh cuisine, we cannot help but mention dishes made from cereals, especially cakes of ethnic groups such as Quang Yen gio cake; wormwood cake of Binh Lieu, Ba Che, Hai Ha, Dam Ha, Tien Yen, Mong Cai regions; Tai Long Ep cake of San Diu people; Banh Day, Banh Chung Gu of Tay and San Chi ethnic groups...

Each region has its own special dishes that visitors want to enjoy and buy as gifts.

Based on culinary strengths, in recent years, many localities in the province have maintained the organization of culinary festivals and cultural festivals with the focus on performance, display, introduction and enjoyment.specialtyregion

These include the Van Don Food Festival with a competition to prepare and present dishes made from oysters, the Tien Yen Chicken King Competition introducing dishes made from Tien Yen chicken; the Pho stir-fry competition within the framework of the Soong Co Festival (Binh Lieu), and the Duong Hoa Tea Culture Festival (Hai Ha).

In the post-COVID-19 period, many new culinary tourism models have been developed in Quang Ninh, focusing on exploiting culinary strengths to increase attractiveness to tourists.

For example, the restaurant ship model on Ha Long Bay. This is a model of a ship to visit the Bay combined with a high-class culinary experience. With this product, visitors can choose a buffet of over 100 dishes, order dishes on demand or enjoy dishes that are carefully created by the chef and taken care of in every detail to become the essence of art.

Restaurant cruise products are the highlight of Ha Long tourism, including brands such as Sea Octopus, Ambassador and most recently Paradise Delight. These are all high-end tourism products, meeting the needs of high-spending customers and achieving quality service for conference and seminar attendees.

Along with renewing and upgrading existing culinary products, Quang Ninh also maintains the organization of the Quang Ninh Cuisine Festival, a culinary cultural event on a provincial and regional scale.

2023 is the third year that the Quang Ninh Food Festival is held, with a scale of 200 booths. The festival has many activities such as the opening of the event with a special art program; booths introducing cuisine and OCOP products of Quang Ninh province and provinces and cities representing the 3 regions of North-Central-South.

At the Festival, chefs and artisans demonstrated culinary processing and cocktail mixing using Quang Ninh products such as Morinda officinalis wine, Apricot wine, Sim wine, etc.; promoted tourism products, unique and attractive tourism stimulus programs; performed culture, art, and folk games of localities in the province; honored typical tourism businesses, units, and booths at the event.

According to Ms. Nguyen Huyen Anh, Deputy Director of the Department of Tourism of Quang Ninh province, this event is of great significance, being a festival of the local tourism industry, an opportunity for tourism enterprises and business establishments inside and outside the province to connect, exchange and learn experiences in developing cuisine into a unique tourism product, attracting tourists.

At the same time, this is also an opportunity for Quang Ninh to promote and honor the typical culinary and cultural values ​​of its localities to domestic and international friends and tourists.

In just 3 days, Quang Ninh Food Festival attracted 10,000 visitors to visit, shop and experience.

These figures have partly affirmed the appeal of Quang Ninh cuisine, contributing to making cuisine a unique tourism product and promising the potential to organize more regularly and periodically, exploiting the value of cuisine as a bridge between regional cultures.

By 2025, along with 11 localities across the country, Quang Ninh was chosen by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to develop night tourism. With the launch of many tourism productscuisineWith new and unique cultural and artistic activities performed at night, Quang Ninh is gradually turning culinary tourism into a key product to develop the night-time economy, increase visitor attraction, increase spending and extend the length of stay of visitors.