Hai Café

We came here twice during our time in Hoi An as we loved the atmosphere in the courtyard and we had such wonderful service. We ate lovely Banh Mi and drank Dalat wine and spent a good couple of hours enjoying the whole experience! We also came back to do the evening cooking course with Chinh and she was such great fun! The course is a quick introduction to Vietnamese cooking and you don't actually do any of the cooking yourself, but you are shown each step before that. We prepared 3 dishes and were served these at the end with an additional 2 to try. Myself and my partner don't eat seafood but they had no problem tweaking the recipes for us. If you just want to have a small intro, I would absolutely recommend this as a perfect evening. It's great value at $19 and that includes a free drink. We were totally stuffed at the end of it with utterly delicious food.

After finally finding Nu Eatery but unable to get in without a booking, we decided to look for a nice place to have dinner and found this place, Hai Cafe, in between the retail shops along D Nguyen Thai Hoc street. We were attracted by the smell and smoke emanating from their barbecue area near the entrance. The courtyard cafe is part of the Red Bridge cooking school and the open air set up was nice on a balmy evening. We ordered the crispy pancakes,fried spring rolls, barbecued prawns wrapped in cucumber and of course the barbecue pork skewers. They were all lovely although a tad more expensive than the regular eateries. A good option.

We chose to do the 2-hour class and ended up having the place to ourselves. Our chef was incredibly personable and fun and let us get involved. The food was delicious and we ended not being able to finish all of our creations! My friend was a vegetarian and they adjusted the menu so that she could enjoy all the courses as much as I did. Lovely experience, the right price and great recipes to try at home!

We had an excellent dinner here and were attracted to this as we had done the Red Bridge Cooking class which starts in the restaurant. The food might not have been cooking school standard but was very good, the place was very busy but the service was quite quick considering how many people were there. Not a place for a quiet dinner but a place to go and enjoy in the company of othe