HCMC Restaurant List Updates: October 2024

An opinionated ramble, a new fave place, and some travel eats

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:

onehollowleg

A post shared by @onehollowleg

This month’s A tale of two…had me trying variations of bánh mì chay, and in List Newbies you’ll find shop details.

54: A tale of two bánh mì chay

I’m still trying to get better at keeping my entries succinct, but once I go off on a tangent, I rarely want to come back again. (Sorry, paid subscribers.) Highlights of this month include a new fave Japanese spot; some seasonal desserts; another pizza topping showdown; and a short trip to Hanoi. At the bottom of the post, you’ll find the travel dining notes.

A new wrinkle on the forever lack of newbies: I know I still have literally hundreds of new-to-me restaurants to try in this city, but it’s nice to get excited about a place that’s new to everyone. After reading this article about new openings in Saigon last month, I thought about why none of them interest me and why many popular openings of recent memory fail to spur excitement: I see so much sameness in decor or concept or both. I can’t tell one cocktail bar from another or one fine dining spot from another. That many new openings lean toward luxury is also why they are of little interest to me. Even when they might not consider themselves fine dining, the lighting and plating and prices seem to look in that direction. My cynical side believes many are going after a Michelin mention and want to bring in a stream of customers or online influencers, or both again, to fuel that. There’s too much homogeneity for me, regardless of cuisine, and so as much as that’s the turn off, I’m also left wondering how I’m supposed to decide between them all.

The industry is tough, and from what I understand, especially so in Saigon the past year. So I will not judge a business’ attempt to drum up business too harshly. I am also at a moment in my dining life where I’m not attracted to fine dining. I have been outrageously privileged with past experiences at some of the most celebrated fine dining establishments in the world. I was never disappointed, and I cherish how the meals contributed to my maturity as a diner and an eater. But I can’t deny that they were all trophy eats in some way. Not only do I not need trophies anymore, I don’t have the income anymore to maintain a trophy cabinet.

My current mindset is a mix of practicality and DGAF wisdom and apathy related to age. This restaurant list I keep up reveals that I do have ego around my credibility as a diner, but more and more it’s just fuelled by me as an audience of one instead of what others may think of my choices. This moment in my life is also shaped by the world at large. There is a lot of terrible things going on right now, and often when I think of what I want to eat when going out or ordering in, I just want guaranteed joy. If I miss out on potential new joy? I have to NGAF.

And of course, that article was written for a specific group of people. There are dozens upon dozens of other restaurants that would have opened in the last month, too, which don’t get publicized or more likely, get PR through social media channels instead. I do follow a number of Vietnamese accounts on TikTok, but the nature of that beast can sometimes make it very difficult to even discern the name or location—a trick to up view count. I think the biggest challenge for me when seeing places there is that the location is often further than I’d like to go.

One more time, and most importantly, I am very much not the target patron for any of these new establishments. So, my opinion is moot and only a small peanut from the gallery. But it can be quite salty…!

October’s MVP meal of the month was in Hanoi.