HCMC Restaurant List Updates: July 2024
A new taste of the sea and a burrata showdown
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.
*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 more of a nod to the amount of effort I might put into finding places and as 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 for Saigon:
July had me start a little personal project of becoming more familiar with Vietnamese cuisine. The latent result would be to get better at articulating what I like or don’t like about a particular dish.
First up was phỏ. The spots I wrote about in issue 44 are identified below, as I’ve added both to the list.
A couple of pop-ups were part of my July eats, which helped me shake the illogical guilt of always eating from the same restaurants. But the pop-ups involved people and places that I already know and like so, to be fair, no shaking happened.
I was happy to see the return of a chef residency at Que, especially as I haven’t dined there since mere days before my pneumonia struck last December. Chef Kevin Bach from Seattle is running the small kitchen for five weeks (this weekend is his last), and it was so nice to try his food in a space I’m very fond of.
The other pop-up was by Chef Mendy Hu, whose Chinese food I’ve enjoyed a few times, including that last 2023 visit to Que. Mid-month, she had a pop-up at a different venue in anticipation of opening her own restaurant, hopefully in the very near future.
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