HCMC Restaurant List Updates: March 2024

Welcome back to an intended monthly and often unintentionally lengthy* overview of my dining adventures here in Saigon. These regular updates 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 of the email to read the full post and view all the photos.

This content is for paid subscribers, and I hope adding colour to the list each month will make it both more useful and more interesting for them. 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 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.

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This was another month of internal struggle. Do I prioritize favourites or new places? It used to be easy to order something new for a delivery lunch, but some of my Sickness Cocoon standards are now just standards. Too many places, too little time, too little money. I tried, though, and I did add a few new places to The List. Leaving my comfort zone also meant not adding new places because of disappointment—including an overdue visit to an ice cream parlour that fell very flat for me.

My bigger dilemma involves pizza. In the Covid era, I made pizza weekly to fulfill cravings, and because I couldn’t get what I wanted in Edmonton. Now I want to eat pizza weekly because there are more than enough places here that serve craveable pies. Even though there was obviously more good pizza when I lived in New York, I didn’t eat it as often as now; I didn’t have the pandemic precedent of a weekly fix.

But again, shouldn’t I try new things? I’ve said I’m over novelty, but there’s still a little guilt factory inside of me churning out finger wags for not taking more chances or just trying what I like from a different purveyor. And, of course, the biggest finger wags appear for not eating more Vietnamese food. But that’s nothing to do with not wanting Vietnamese food and more about still figuring out one, how to match my preferences to Vietnamese cuisine and two, the issue of most often being a solo diner. It’s an ongoing process.

Sticking with what I like has a lot to do with the fact that money spent on bad food just crushes me. Enough to deal with the finger wag factory pollution most days. On others, I remind myself that I live in a metropolis with endless options and get over my hesitation.

I forgot to do an MVP meal of the month last update, which I guess is fine given it was covering three months. I’m not going to forget March’s.