After two winters of stuffing my face around town, I thought I would put together a guide to Saigon street food, gathering some of the places I love in one place. These are not the absolute best of everything, but rather a cross-section of delicious, cheap and authentic foods that are also conveniently located. I tended to head to outer districts more often, on the hunt for that bun mam a friend told me about, or what was billed as “the best Peking duck in town” by my enthused landlady. While fun side trips to outer districts are great, I wanted to put together a post that would be more helpful for short-term trips. The restaurants and street stalls below are fairly central to where most travellers stay, meaning people can frequent them even if in town only briefly.
South Vietnam tours
Fasten your seatbelts, people: this post is close to 10,000 words long.
The focus is, of course, food. One specific soup, a sweet-and-sour canh chua (photo in the “street food” section below), was what initially led me to the city. I was lured in by the complicated tastes and unfamiliar sting of the rice paddy herb on my tongue. It might have been one soup that brought me to Saigon, but it was the rest of the food that kept me there, and keeps me coming back. It is not just taste of food that makes Saigon so enthralling, but the act of eating as well, and all of the craziness that eating comprises. The swirling noise, the families all sitting and enjoying a meal on the street, smiling at you fumbling with your condiments. The beauty of food being not just a necessity but also a sight in and of itself: a window into culture, and a source of endless wonder.
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Countless moments of me smiling as an old lady came over shaking her head at my terrible rice paper folding skills, correcting my technique as we sat at the edge of traffic. Or the bo la lot vendor who discovered my love of starfruit and made sure to have extra on hand when I returned. The beloved grandpa at the pho ga restaurant below, who ran over to my bowl repeatedly to ensure I added pickled garlic, lest I forget. The landladies that adopted me into their homes, feeding me, giving me hugs, teaching me how to cook.
HO CHI MINH CITY’S CENTRAL POST OFFICE, VIETNAM
There are hundreds of moments like these baked into the aggregate of my memories in Vietnam. Most of them derive from food. As Luke Nguyen says in The Songs of Sapa: Stories & Recipes from Vietnam,
Street food saigon
Streetside eating.
This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully it provides a good start. Yes, I know I could have offered this post as an e-book for sale (thank you to those suggesting this already), but I’d prefer to have it freely available. If you want to support the site, pick up my book about travel and food, or a t-shirt in the shop instead.
Or, for those of you who loved your time in Vietnam and want to commemorate it at home with something a bit more tangible, please see my hand-drawn, one-of-a-kind Vietnamese maps of food. They’re available in t-shirt and poster form.
Hand-drawn typographic food map of Vietnam
I also realize some of you would have preferred diacritical marks in lieu of plain Roman letters, but when typing into Google Maps to find these places, most travellers have indicated they prefer the non-Tieng Viet script. I’m happy to update the post if this is no longer the case.
I should also note that I’ve never gotten sick from eating street food in Saigon, and I’ve eaten at all sorts of places, dodgy or otherwise. The culture of food is so prevalent that fast turnover and fresh ingredients rule the roost. At 4pm when I want soup, there is usually a gaggle of other people also chowing down. I joke that I graze like a cow, eating mini meals every few hours, and Saigon is an ideal place to do so. One can eat through the country as a whole — foods from the North and South, the Central region and the Mekong Delta — all in one city.
Saigon is most definitely a magical place for your tastebuds. The balancing act between warming and cooling ingredients, between heavier meats and lighter rice-based carbs, fresh herbs to round out the taste, never get old. I’m no culinary anthropologist, but in learning through eating, and being corrected by others also passionate about food, I’ve hopefully created a crash course here that will help travellers discover more about the city. For celiacs like me, I have included tips for gluten-free eating. I’ve also added a long basics for navigating Saigon section at the end, in the vein of my other “crash courses“. Here you’ll find information about taxis, visas, foot massages and more.
I’ve tried to include as many photos of these foods as possible, since my descriptions might not do the trick but a photo usually does. These are all my pictures, except for the bun moc (thanks Tom!).
Finally, I plan to put these all onto a Google Map, but haven’t done so yet as I’m tethering to 3G in Greece. I’ll update the post when it is in map form.
Banh Beo
Banh beo from Nam Giao in Saigon
Part of the cuisine from central Vietnam, banh beo (literally “water fern cake”) are small round discs of rice flour, formed to look like lily flower pads found in the estates surrounding the old imperial city of Hue. Topped with crunchy pork rinds and toasted shrimp powder and served with fish sauce, they are a very rewarding dish to share as they usually come in multiples of 8 or 10.
Where: Nam Giao
136 Le Thanh Ton Street, in an alleyway behind Ben Thanh market. District 1
+84 (8) 3825 0261
Banh Da Xuc Hen
Banh Da Xuc Hen in all its delicious glory.
I have a list of foods that sound like other foods in the local language. For example, the word for water in Bahasa Indonesia or Bahasa Malaysia is “air” — and obviously air in English is not food. In Vietnamese, the word for baby clams is “hen” — quite confusing at first, since I ordered it expecting a rice and chicken bowl, not even thinking that obviously hen would not be an actual hen. My brain did not compute.
Banh da xuc hen is a lovely and satisfying snack. A large rice paper crisp with hints of sesame and coconut arrives on a plate. It looks bare, but then you lift up the rice cracker and peek underneath, finding a pile of teeny tiny clams fried in lemongrass, rau ram (Vietnamese coriander), chilli, onion and garlic. It is a simple dish in terms of ingredients but the taste is profoundly different than anything else I have tried. If you want a heavier version of this plate, opt for the com hen, rice topped with the same type of clams and served with a small bowl of clam broth on the side.
