HCMC Restaurant List Updates: September 2024

Flooded streets and wrong information, step aside

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 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:

onehollowleg

A post shared by @onehollowleg

I wrote another tale earlier this week, about the noodle soup bún mọc, and below you’ll find related shop details.

52: A tale of two bún mọc

One thing I tried to be better at this month is not making these issues so lengthy. I do write these updates partly for myself as dining diaries, but as I put them on this platform, I want people to read and enjoy them. I’m not sure how many of you paid subscribers actually read these issues fully, or at all, so I must both apologize and offer thanks. Salient points, getting to the point, the gist—all things I tried to keep more top of mind as I wrote each entry this month. Was I successful? The jury is very much still out.

MVP meal of the month was tough as I had two meals that brought much joy and reminded me why Saigon is a special place.