City Bites – Saigon
Saigon Noir – scooters, spies, and steaming soups
Some cities don’t need introductions. They greet you with noise: the hum of scooters, the blare of horns, the crackle of ice crushed into glasses. Saigon — or Ho Chi Minh City, if you insist on being precise — is one of those places. The moment you arrive, it grabs you by the throat with its humidity and stuns you with a mix of smells: fuel, lemongrass, grilled meat, and dreams melting under the sun. It’s a city in constant motion, never stopping, not even for a second.
Everything blends here: colonialism and capitalism, broth and bourbon, war memories and free Wi-Fi. Grandmothers cross hellish intersections like it’s nothing, delivery riders chase orders as if they were dollars, and meanwhile — between a bánh mì and a glass of condensed milk coffee — the city reinvents itself. Always. Because Saigon never really changes — it layers itself.
Food, as we know, is the most direct way to understand a city. And Saigon’s food is an open confession: sweet, sweet-and-sour, spicy, and above all, impossible to classify. Just like its neighborhoods: one with baguettes, one with woks, one where karaoke blares alongside spiced rice at 3 a.m. Here, cuisine is resistance seasoned with coriander, memory served with iced coffee, diplomacy dipped in fish sauce.
Saigon gets under your skin while you’re still trying to figure it out, but eventually, you realize you don’t really need to. Just sit on a plastic stool, take a deep breath (if you can), and let the city tell you something. About itself. About you. About what remains when everything seems to be gone — but somehow, it never really left.
*
Its official name is Ho Chi Minh City, but no one really calls it that. At least, no one who truly lives here. Saigon is more than a name: it’s a habit that won’t die, a word that rolls on your tongue like the ice in a cà phê sữa đá. A name whispered between clenched teeth, like an ex you never quite got over. Sure, everything changes here — but with a certain style. The past didn’t vanish. It just started cooking something new with whatever was left in the fridge.
There are scooters everywhere. I don’t mean it figuratively. They’re everywhere. Hundreds, thousands of them, like a metallic swarm on a caffeine rush. And on them? Everything: teenagers in school uniforms, women in business suits and stilettos, delivery riders transporting meals and dreams, grandmothers with the poise of retired generals crossing traffic as if they had Moses’ powers. And maybe they do. Because you don’t really “cross” Saigon — you endure it. You slide into it like a sweaty shirt, and you learn to move with it, not against.
The beauty is, it gets you with food — like any city that knows how to seduce without overexplaining. Here, food is memory and survival, identity and compromise, a constant negotiation between who you were and who you can afford to be today. A Saigonese phở isn’t just soup: it’s proof that even in a broth you can hide a war, a getaway, a laugh, a whole family. You’ll find the North, the South, France, China, the U.S., and a mother’s voice telling you to eat. And you eat — because here, people are always eating. Everywhere. Standing up, sitting down, squatting, in the dark, in full sun, under the rain, in silence or shouting.
In Saigon, every bite is a layer, an edible palimpsest. It might be a colonial baguette stuffed with pâté and coriander, or a bún thịt nướng that feels like a delicious mistake: cold noodles, hot meat, crunchy peanuts, fresh herbs you can’t name, and a sense of balance that makes you forget you’re sitting in an alley that smells of fermented fish. But it works. Everything here works — even when it doesn’t seem to make any sense.
*
And then there’s coffee. In this city, coffee is a secular religion. It’s not just fuel — it’s a way of being in the world. Sitting on a low stool, glass sweating in your hand, watching the city pass by — that’s Saigon. A metal filter, two fingers of condensed milk, ice galore, and a robustness so strong it wipes out your convictions. Forget Italian espresso. Here, coffee talks to you — it speaks of plantations, French missionaries, and young locals reinventing everything inside cafés that look like a Wes Anderson set — but with faster Wi-Fi.
In this city, coffee is a statement of intent. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hipster with a Japanese dripper or a grandmother using her daughter’s old phin filter — sooner or later, you sit, sip, and listen to the city speak. The cà phê sữa đá — black coffee, condensed milk, ice, and patience — is more than a drink: it’s a unit of time, a secular ritual, a public confession without a priest. And while you drink, you watch. The city is all there, in that sweating glass: the never-ending traffic, the long shadows of colonial buildings, the flickering neon above a chipped signboard.
In the evening, while elsewhere people search for dimly lit bars with signature gin and tonics, here you find yourself in a café that looks like a Wong Kar-wai set, surrounded by ambient playlists and students with laptops. And no, it’s not a pose — it’s just that Saigon has learned to live with chaos without making a fuss. Every neighborhood has its hidden spot, its loyal clientele. It’s a city that never asks who you are — it just watches you find out for yourself.
*
The French wanted to civilize it. They called it the “Paris of the East”, with wide boulevards, fountains, and neoclassical buildings — as if planting a few ficus trees and building an opera house could change a city’s soul. But Saigon was never meant to be tamed. It pretended, for a while. It let itself be dressed up, learned to say bonjour and added foie gras to the menu. But under the starched tablecloth, there was always steamed rice and the scent of fermented broth.
There were bistros with French names, bakeries that made baguettes lightened with rice flour, egg coffee, and coconut desserts dressed up as mousses. Vietnamese cooks learned the art of ragù and béchamel while preparing pot-au-feu with fish sauce for monocled officials longing for Lyon. Then the war ended — the colonial one, that is — but they stayed. And the flavors blended, as always. That’s how the bánh mì was born: the baguette turned sandwich, the invasion transformed into a snack.
Then came the Americans. And with them, a new wave of protein, dollars, and moral confusion. The Yankees didn’t just come to Saigon to fight — they came to spend. The city turned into a massive rear base, a war set where battles were fought far away and forgotten between a glass of whiskey and an overcooked steak. Bars, hotels, nightclubs, GI barbershops, and restaurants serving hamburgers and Coca-Cola — everything was available, as long as you had the money or the right uniform.
The conflict? That was elsewhere — though you still had to dodge the occasional bombing or revolutionary disguised as an embassy secretary or accountant. Here, people did business — through the black market, smuggling, or dreams sold by the hour in the rooms of brothels. And even there, food drew the line: filet and ice cream for some, spiced rice and porridge for others. But no one complained too much. In Saigon, you survived. With dignity, if you could. With cunning, if you had to. With a crooked smile and the quiet certainty that every invader eventually leaves — but the soup stays.
And the women? They were everywhere. Cooking, selling, bargaining, surviving. Some ended up in the trap of soldier entertainment. Others managed better. But all of them, in one way or another, left a mark — and the city still carries that imprint. Because even when the war officially ended — April 30, 1975, with the last chopper lifting off from the embassy roof — Saigon didn’t close the curtain. It just changed scenes.
*
Under the new regime, the script called for real communism and rationing, ration cards, nationalized restaurants, and kitchens reduced to the bare minimum. But beneath the surface — as always — people kept cooking. In homes, alleys, and courtyards. No foie gras, no bourbon, but the broth was boiling again. Here, memory always passes through the stomach.
Then one day, without warning, the city started breathing again. It was the late 1980s, and someone in Hanoi had decided that maybe central planning worked better on paper than in real markets. Enter the Đổi Mới, or “renovation” — and with it came open markets, capital, containers, and new dreams. Saigon, always inclined toward trade and compromise, didn’t need to be told twice. It took off its ideological hat, rolled up its sleeves, and went back to doing what it does best: cooking up the future with leftovers from the past.
Night markets filled with smells and neon. Street stalls — never entirely gone — became the center of a new urban ferment. The bánh mì got its crunch back, phở became glamorous, and street food began showing up in travel guides under “authentic experience.” The youth, raised on Korean soap operas and pirated movies, started dreaming of Tokyo and Brooklyn — but never truly left the alleys of District 3.
Restaurants were born with their feet on the ground and their eyes on Instagram. Some served deconstructed bánh xèo, others went for a fusion of monastic cuisine and Nordic minimalism, and some took nước mắm and turned it into a fine-dining reduction. But the truth is, even the fanciest dish needed to have something real underneath. Because people here can tell. They know when a broth is made with love, and when it’s just marketing in fish sauce.
Meanwhile, beer. There used to be only industrial lagers, the kind you knock back on a stool next to a pot of snails. Today, hops have become urban poetry. They’re brewing mango IPAs, Phu Quoc pepper saison, robusta coffee stout. Microbreweries pop up between skyscrapers and art galleries, designers compete for the most hipster label, and bartenders tell you the history of beer like it’s an epic poem. But deep down, it’s always the same ritual: drinking together, forgetting together, and telling each other it’s all going to be fine — maybe tomorrow.
Then came Covid. And Saigon stopped. For real, this time. Silence, shuttered shops, motionless scooters. But even in the darkness of those months, something was simmering. Literally. Home kitchens became survival factories again. Food was sold on social media, delivered on foot, cooked on balconies. The city didn’t give up — it just changed format. From restaurant to ghost kitchen, from market to group chat. After all, adaptability has always been Saigon’s signature dish.
And when the pandemic fog lifted, the city picked up again as if nothing had happened. Or rather, as if it had learned to pretend nothing had happened. But something had changed. More attention to ingredients, more desire to tell stories. The new Saigon isn’t just young and vibrant. It’s also sharp, ironic, hungry for meaning — not just for taste.
*
And then there’s art. The real kind. The kind that pops up where you least expect it: a graffiti under a flyover, a concert in the courtyard of a former factory, an exhibition in a gallery named after a cocktail. Artists here don’t do theory — they do things. They cook up installations like soups, use food as canvas, mix Buddhist rituals with ’80s posters, and swap craft beers and lemongrass-flavored ideas. Saigon never had time for definitions. Here, art isn’t sacred — it’s shared, eaten, stained with chili sauce.
And yet, there’s no cheap romanticism. Saigon isn’t a postcard city, it doesn’t let itself be neatly wrapped. It reveals itself in fragments — in the roar of scooters and the poetry of a street vendor singing, between a steaming bowl and a rusted sign. It lives off fierce contradictions and sudden harmonies, and only those who truly get lost in it can find the thread.
Food is still the key. Always. Every dish is a palimpsest: it tells you what you were, what you’ve become, and what you’re trying to forget. People eat the way they live — urgently, with intermittent focus, with real hunger and a need to tell stories. It’s not nostalgia — it’s memory reinvented daily. Saigon doesn’t want to be liked. It wants to be there. It wants to surprise you just when you think you’ve figured it out — maybe while you’re biting into a bánh mì that tastes like colonial past and vegan future.
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And then there are the writers. The ones who show up with a notebook, stay just long enough to get lost in an alley or the wrong bed, and then leave behind a trail of crumpled words, damp with tropical rain and regrets filtered in black and white. The most famous remains Graham Greene, who found in Saigon the perfect setting for The Quiet American: a city tired of wars it didn’t choose, populated by idealists trying to change it and old men who no longer believe. Greene saw it clearly. He understood that Saigon is the kind of place where the good get bored, the bad blend in, and the lovers always knock on the wrong door.
But he wasn’t alone. Robert Stone, in Dog Soldiers, picked up the thread and added paranoia and opium to the cocktail. In that novel, Saigon is a feverish grey zone, where reality feels warped, and the war — more than fought — is endured, consumed, breathed in. Tim O’Brien, instead, reflects on it through his stories of those who were truly in Vietnam: soldiers who return with the scent of the Mekong still on their skin and memories in their heads that feel like dreams but aren’t. Even Larry Heinemann gave us a raw, dirty, visceral version of urban and rural Vietnam in Close Quarters.
But there’s also a Vietnamese voice — or rather, several — reclaiming that narrative. Viet Thanh Nguyen, with The Sympathizer, overturned the entire canon: a spy novel of fractured identity and corrosive sarcasm, where Saigon is the stage of collapse and constant performance. The author — born in Saigon and raised in the U.S. — tells a story of double betrayal: political and representational. And he does so with a fierce irony that cuts through rhetoric and restores complexity.
Alongside him, other Vietnamese diaspora authors — like Ocean Vuong, more poetic and intimate, or Monique Truong, with her sensual, diasporic prose — offer oblique yet complementary visions. In their work, Saigon is both ghost and root, trauma and home, a city that refuses to be locked into any definition or single memory.
And then there’s a whole minor literature, forgotten and overlooked, made up of failed spies, boozy journalists, deserters with a poetic streak, where the city is always a shifting backdrop — sometimes decadent, sometimes murky, but never neutral. Saigon is there, with its colonial boulevards and crowded markets, not just as a setting, but as a real character — silent, stubborn, with a secret sense of irony.
Cinema did the rest. Even when it wasn’t really her, it was still her. Saigon appeared sideways, more evoked than shown, recreated elsewhere for production reasons, but always present in the collective imagination. Kubrick, in Full Metal Jacket, used London to build Vietnam, but the feeling he was chasing was exactly that: heat, confusion, bar songs and violence simmering under the surface. Oliver Stone, in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, came closer, turning the landscape into a fevered conscience. In more recent films like The Lover or Indochine, the city’s colonial past is staged with painterly slowness, an aesthetic nostalgia that often doesn’t match the historical one — but works well on screen.
And how could anyone forget The Deer Hunter, with its Russian roulette scene set in a Saigon that feels more like a nightmare than a real city. Cimino wasn’t after realism — he was after a symbol. And Saigon, even rebuilt elsewhere, gave it to him. The bullets spin, the characters fall apart, and meanwhile the city — noisy, sticky, unreal — lingers in the background like a toxic mirage you never really escape. That too is noir: a despair so thick it no longer hurts — it just makes noise.
Even those who’ve never been seem to know Saigon. Because it’s a city that lends itself to misunderstanding, to dreams, to distortion. It’s an ideal container for any story that needs a place that’s ambiguous, seductive, dangerous just enough, but never truly hostile. Saigon doesn’t push you away — it lets you in. It watches you, welcomes you, tolerates you. And then, it changes you.
Good noir writers figured this out. You don’t need complicated plots here — you just have to stand still, with a glass in your hand, and wait. Something always happens. It could be a coup d’état or just a bowl of soup that’s too salty — but something will come. And when it does, if you’ve got a bit of sensitivity, you take notes.
*
In the end, Saigon is more screenplay than set, more whispered dialogue than cinematic tracking shot. It doesn’t try to please you — and that’s exactly why it stays with you. It’s the kind of city where you might find yourself sipping a craft espresso with notes of durian and caramel, while an old French expat tells you a story you can’t verify but that, somehow, feels true. And you listen. Because in Saigon, even lies taste like truth — as long as you simmer them slowly, the way you would a good broth.
It’s the perfect container for any story that needs a place that’s ambiguous, seductive, dangerous just enough, but never truly hostile. Saigon doesn’t push you away — it lets you in. It watches you, welcomes you, tolerates you. And then, it changes you.
In the end, maybe the only choice is to accept it as it is. A city that doesn’t ask to be understood — only to be lived. A city where chaos is just the background noise of a deeper order, where sweetness hides in salty dishes, and where, truly, all you need is to sit down, listen — and eat. Because Saigon can’t be conquered. It must be tasted. One bite at a time.
Imagining Saigon
Between novels, films, and steaming bowls
Forget the map: for many, Saigon is first and foremost an idea — a tropical mirage, a mental film set, a blurred frame of fog and coriander.
Here’s a list (not exhaustive, but evocative) of those who have tried to tell its story — with varying degrees of truth, nostalgia, fiction, and signature dishes:
Novels
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American
The classic. Political intrigue, colonial melancholy, and a sense of slow decline. It all starts at the Hôtel Continental. - Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers
Paranoia, drugs, and parallel wars. A feverish, hallucinatory Saigon, where reality melts along with morality. - Larry Heinemann, Close Quarters
Dirty, visceral Vietnam. The front line and the rear base blend together, and Saigon pulses beneath the surface. - Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Fragmented stories, more memory than geography. The city is evoked as a threshold between trauma and myth. - Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Corrosive irony, fractured identity, and a deconstruction of the Western gaze. Saigon is both the stage and the illusion of a tragic farce. - Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Poetic prose and diaspora longing. Saigon is more absence than presence, but remains an emotional backdrop. - Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
Colonialism, cuisine, and queer intimacy. Saigon is only hinted at, but leaves behind the scent of the past in every room.
Cinema
- The Deer Hunter (1978, M. Cimino)
The Russian roulette in Saigon: claustrophobia, trauma, fatalism. Probably not shot there — but impossible to imagine elsewhere. - Saigon (Off Limits, 1988, C. Thomas Howell)
Willem Dafoe in a noir thriller of brothels, military bases, and buried secrets. Saigon as terminal city, where nothing is what it seems, and everyone’s hiding something. - Indochine (1992, R. Wargnier)
Colonial epic, sunsets over porches, aesthetic sweetness. A postcard Saigon, but well staged. - The Lover (1992, J.-J. Annaud)
A sensual, forbidden Saigon, seen through the hazy lens of colonial desire. Iconic — and controversial. - Full Metal Jacket (1987, S. Kubrick)
Saigon evoked but never shown. Yet its ghost lingers through drills and alienation. - The Quiet American (2002, P. Noyce)
A modern, sleeker adaptation — but true to spirit. Michael Caine at his finest.
Iconic Dishes
- Bánh mì (the Saigon sandwich):
A crusty baguette filled with pâté, cold cuts, pickled veggies, coriander, and chili. Each version is its own universe — from classic to grilled pork to vegetarian spring roll. - Cơm tấm Sài Gòn (broken rice):
Served with grilled pork chop, crispy pork skin, Vietnamese omelet, pickled vegetables, and sweet-salty fish sauce. The ultimate urban comfort food and symbol of southern cuisine. - Phở (Saigon-style):
The national soup, but in its Saigonese form it becomes a light broth, thin noodles, slices of beef or chicken, and a floral-spicy kick — usually served with fresh herbs and lime. - Bò lá lốt (betel leaf beef):
Grilled beef rolls wrapped in betel leaves, served with peanuts and spicy sauce — a crossroads of street food and rustic ritual. - Bánh xèo (crispy pancake):
A thin, crunchy skillet pancake filled with shrimp, pork, and bean sprouts, rolled and eaten with fresh herbs and nước chấm. A balancing act of fragrance and freshness. - Gỏi cuốn (fresh rolls):
Rice paper rolls with shrimp, pork, noodles, and herbs — dipped in peanut or fish sauce. Vietnam in its most raw, light, contemplative form. - Bánh tráng trộn (rice paper salad):
A street snack made from shredded rice paper, herbs, quail eggs, green mango, dried shrimp, and spicy salt — an explosive mix of textures and contrasts.