HCMC Restaurant List Updates: January 2025

Mostly Chinese food and some publishing news

Welcome back to an intended monthly and unintentionally lengthy* overview of my dining adventures here in Saigon. These regular updates are for paid subscribers and include places I’ve newly added to my HCMC Restaurant List, mentions of ones I’ve returned to recently, and anything notable from places I visit regularly enough to consider my Steady Dates. They all reflect my tastes, interests, and preferences and shouldn’t be thought of as an essential guide to city eats. Food is my passion, and I’m happy to write and share these memories, however unwieldy they end up being.

*These overviews are longer than will appear in your email, so if you’re a paid subscriber, please do click out to read the full post on the web and view all the photos.

I hope adding colour to the list each month makes it both more useful and more interesting. I’m happy that I’ve moved the bulk of the who/what/where/why of my eating adventures from Instagram to the newsletter. Having these posts be paid is not about gatekeeping. It is a small nod to the effort I might put into reading about and finding places and a fun thank you to paid subscribers given the more emotional nature of my other paid content.

At the end of every month, I post photos on Instagram of what you can read about below. If you don’t follow me there, here are the monthly visuals from Saigon:

onehollowleg

A post shared by @onehollowleg

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I am so proud to share that I had another article published in Saigoneer. This piece is about Trần Pizza, which can either be described as a street food spot in the guise of a pizzeria or a pizzeria in the guise of street food. You decide. Paid subscribers know that I’ve become a big fan of Hiếu Trần’s pizza, and I’m now an even bigger one given the time I’ve spent getting to know his story. I hope you enjoy reading it. The photos by Pete Walls are great, and I think they bring the piece to life better than I could have ever expected.

Snap from my most recent visit, including Hiếu and his girlfriend Phương

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Chúc mừng năm mới! An khang thịnh vượng! Happy Lunar New Year! Vietnam is almost finished celebrating the Tết break, and I am sad that my lazy and quiet week at home is almost over. I think that the pleasure of staying in Saigon during the holiday is a well-known thing among new and old residents. The weather at this time of year is most pleasant; the traffic is minimal, reducing pollution and making for quieter streets; and everyone is relaxed. Yes, many businesses close but many also stay open.

For most of my time off I kinda (rice-)cooked with more thought and just made what I normally do for the rest, but without the pressure of a schedule. No bedtimes, no wake-up times. A month ago I had ideas to be more energetic about cooking during the break, but for months now, I have increasingly felt less energetic and excited about anything related to food. I don’t know if it’s fatigue or boredom or my chronic mild depression, but if I don’t have plans to make my simple natto on rice, I struggle with making a decision on what or where to eat. I want everything. I want nothing. I get famished and do eat, but I often wish my body could temporarily take a break from food just so I wouldn’t have to make a decision; so I wouldn’t have go out/spend money; or so I wouldn’t have to prepare something.

Lack of energy around cooking 100% has to do with how much I dislike my kitchen. For two and a half years, menu planning, cooking, and photographing was what I did to deal with the difficult emotions of the pandemic and me realizing that I could no longer stay in Edmonton. It became a very important outlet for me. I didn’t need to channel physical energy, and it wasn’t so much about creativity. It was more like cooking gave me tangible tasks and challenges that involved both thinking and not thinking.

Cooking didn’t lift depression, but it was time away from wallowing. I think it is probably something that would be good for me to always have with me as a strategy for dealing with myself. Unfortunately, I hate my cooking space here, and I don’t have the means — likely will never have the means again — to acquire a new space to cook comfortably in and yet still tick off all the other boxes I need for my home. Acceptance is a process that involves my rice cooker.

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Decision fatigue impacts this monthly post, so it is shorter than usual. The decisions I did make to eat something other than natto rice ended up being good ones, so there are still worthy things for me to share about my January dining.