Vu Lan Vegetarian Food: What Vietnam Eats During Ghost Month

Every seventh lunar month, something shifts in the way Vietnam (베트남 / 越南 / ベトナム) eats. Restaurants swap their menus, home kitchens go meatless for a day or a full month, and pagoda courtyards fill with the smell of simmering jackfruit and toasted sesame. This is Vu Lan — the Buddhist festival of filial piety and the wandering dead — and the food tied to it is some of the most quietly inventive cooking you'll find anywhere in the country.

What Vu Lan Actually Is

Vu Lan falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, usually landing in August or early September by the Gregorian calendar. It overlaps with what's loosely called Ghost Month across East and Southeast Asia — a period when the gates of the spirit world are said to open and ancestors return. Vietnamese Buddhists mark it with prayer, lamp-floating ceremonies, and elaborate vegetarian meals prepared both as offerings and as a form of merit-making. Eating "chay" (the Vietnamese word for vegetarian, literally meaning "pure") during this period is considered an act of compassion — toward animals, toward wandering spirits, and toward your own accumulated karma.

You don't have to be Buddhist to eat well during Vu Lan. You just need to know where to look.

Pagoda Feasts: The Real Thing

The most serious Vu Lan eating happens at pagodas, particularly on the fourteenth and fifteenth of the lunar month. Larger temples in Hanoi, Saigon, Hue, and Da Nang prepare communal vegetarian meals that are open to anyone who shows up. These aren't simple affairs.

A typical pagoda spread during Vu Lan might include "bun rieu chay" — the crab-and-tomato noodle soup rebuilt entirely from tofu and mushroom broth — alongside "banh cuon" stuffed with wood-ear mushrooms and glass noodles instead of pork. There will almost always be some form of braised jackfruit, which does a convincing job standing in for slow-cooked meat when it's been simmered long enough in soy sauce, galangal, and five-spice. Lotus stems pickled in rice vinegar show up as a side. So does "ca tim kho" — caramelized eggplant cooked down in a clay pot until it's collapsed and deeply savory.

In Hue, the pagoda food tradition runs especially deep. The city has a long history of refined Buddhist cooking, and Vu Lan meals here tend toward more complex preparations: fermented shrimp paste replaced with fermented soybean, "banh xeo" folded around bean sprouts and mushrooms instead of shrimp and pork, and "mi quang (미꽝 / 广南面 / ミークアン)" rebuilt with turmeric broth and fried tofu. It's worth timing a visit to Hue specifically for this, if you can.

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Home Kitchens and Ancestor Offerings

At home, the Vu Lan table follows a different logic. Families prepare offerings for ancestors — small plates arranged on a tray near the altar, often including steamed sticky rice, sliced fruit, and miniature portions of whatever the ancestor was known to have loved in life. The food is left for a period of time, then the family eats it together. Waste is considered disrespectful; the meal gets finished.

Common home-cooked dishes during this period include "goi cuon (고이꾸온 / 越南春卷 / ゴイクオン) chay" — rice paper rolls filled with tofu, cucumber, mint, and pickled carrot — and various preparations of "dau phu" (tofu) that most Western vegetarians would find surprisingly meaty in texture and depth. Braised tofu with lemongrass and chili is a standard. So is tofu skin simmered in coconut milk with peanuts.

"Com tam (껌땀 / 碎米饭 / コムタム) chay" appears at roadside stalls during Ghost Month too — broken rice plates where the grilled pork is swapped for grilled lemongrass tofu or a fried egg, served with the same pickled daikon and cucumber you'd get any other day.

Vegetarian Che: The Dessert Side of Vu Lan

"Che" — the broad category of Vietnamese sweet soups and desserts — is where Vu Lan food gets genuinely festive. Most "che" is already plant-based by default, which makes it a natural fit for the season.

During Ghost Month you'll see vendors and pagodas ladling out "che troi nuoc" (glutinous rice balls in ginger syrup), "che dau den" (black sesame soup, thick and slightly bitter), and "che ba mau" — the three-color dessert of mung bean, red beans, and pandan jelly over crushed ice. Coconut milk is the binding liquid in most of these, which keeps them rich enough to function as a full dessert despite having no dairy or eggs.

In Saigon (사이공 / 西贡 / サイゴン)'s District 5 and the streets around Binh Tay Market, "che" vendors during Vu Lan set up longer than usual, sometimes running past midnight on the peak days. A bowl runs 15,000–25,000 VND depending on what's in it.

Photo by Nguyễn Thị Thảo Hà (Ha Nguyen) on Pexels

Where to Eat Chay During Vu Lan

Beyond pagodas, dedicated "quan chay" (vegetarian restaurants) across the country do their busiest trade of the year during the seventh lunar month. In Hanoi (하노이 / 河内 / ハノイ), the streets around Quan Su Pagoda have several long-running vegetarian spots that fill up fast on the first and fifteenth of each lunar month — those two days being the standard meatless days for practicing Buddhists year-round, not just during Vu Lan.

In Saigon, the concentration of vegetarian restaurants in District 3 and around Vinh Nghiem Pagoda makes it easy to eat chay for a full day without repeating a dish. Most places offer set lunches for 50,000–80,000 VND that include rice, two or three mains, soup, and a small dessert.

If you're in Hoi An during Ghost Month, several of the old town's vegetarian restaurants — most of them operating year-round for Buddhist practitioners — expand their menus and extend their hours. "Cao lau (까오러우 / 高楼面 / カオラウ) chay" appears occasionally, which is a small miracle of adaptation given how specific the original dish's ingredients are.

Practical Notes

Vu Lan falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month — check a Vietnamese lunar calendar for the exact Gregorian date each year. Pagoda meals are usually served around midday and are free or donation-based; arrive early, especially at well-known temples in major cities. Vegetarian restaurants across Vietnam tend to be closed or running reduced hours on non-Buddhist days, but during Ghost Month they operate at full capacity, often with queues by 11:30 a.m.