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The first chase after food in its “natural state” – they want to eat under messy local conditions, they lose their heads over exotic meals and flavors in foreign countries, they are open to new things – sometimes to the point of taking personal risks. The second seek out fine things that come with the stamp of tradition. They crave the approval of official good taste – be it that of Michelin guides or food blogs. Culinary conventionalists want to eat what others say is good to eat.

I’ve always been on the romantic end of the spectrum – and I come from a city, Melbourne, where it’s possible to be a culinary adventurer in an international sense. Melbourne has Ethiopian and Mexican and Balinese and Szechuan and Afghan corners, where people from all those places cook wildly exotic dishes with flair. As soon as I was old enough, I went looking for them.

Further back in the past, my Italian grandmother had always cooked strong-smelling versions of provincial Italian dishes with powerful ingredients. In her kitchen, I learned that blue cheese, a little like Vietnamese fermented shrimp paste mam tom, is stinky IN A GOOD WAY. That pizza-bases can be infused with oil and parmesan and be two inches thick. That tripe has the same texture as pasta and, like pasta, can be eaten with lashings of fresh tomato sauce and cheese.

Nevertheless, nothing quite prepared me for what I was about to experience in Ho Chi Minh City when I first arrived in 2012 for a six-month study trip. Within an hour of getting off the plane, my hosts had introduced me to mi vit tiem (duck soup), within two days to banh xeo (seafood pancake) and chao long (rice soup with miscellaneous gore).

They picked up pretty quickly that I wasn’t afraid of strange ingredients or strong flavors. In fact, I think there may have been a tacit agreement among them and their friends – to see if they could find a local dish I wasn’t willing to try.

Thanks to my hosts and their friends, when I went back to Melbourne after six months in Saigon, I had eaten lots of stupendously good food – in the homes of local people, in a few up-market restaurants and almost daily in the street.

I had done THE Saigonese thing – I had shot the soft early morning breeze drinking thick black coffee. I had eaten with my new friends around aluminum tables, perched on low plastic stools around gas stoves on balmy evenings. I had drunk rice wine in the midday sun and regretted it. I had adjusted to beer drunk with ice.

I felt I appreciated the difference between northern- and southern-style pho, between regional varieties of shrimp paste (mam tom and mam ruoc), between the various types of sticky-rice eaten at New Year (banh chung and banh tet). I thought I knew the superior places near the Social Sciences University to buy bread rolls with fish cake (banh mi cha ca), and bread rolls with meatballs (banh mi xiu mai).

In other words, I’d reached a level of expertise a step or two above mere feeding. I thought of myself as a culinary romantic who knew a thing or two about the new thing – Vietnamese food – that he loved.

But because I’d been studying Vietnamese full-time, on my first trip to Vietnam I’d barely left the city. Hanoi, Hoi An, the Central Highlands, Fansipan and Ha Giang could wait till my next trip.

All the same, I felt I’d missed out going back to Melbourne having eaten so well, but seen so little of the rest of the country.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized I hadn’t needed to leave Saigon to go on culinary adventures that took in the whole of Vietnam.

What makes Saigon a great food city?

In answering the question, you’ll hear people talk about the simplicity or heartiness of the food on offer, others about hidden subtleties. Foreigners from places with strong currencies are impressed by cheap prices for obvious reasons.

For me, two of the biggest pleasures of living and eating in Saigon have always been the intense flavors and the diversity of the offerings. But probably more than that, there’s the joyous informality of the experience of eating itself.

Anthony Bourdain put it well when he said his favorite Vietnamese dishes were the ones he couldn’t imagine eating in a dining room with chairs and carpet. The Vietnamese food Bourdain loved was meant to be eaten on the street, in the gentle air of early morning, under a canvas sheet in hot or wet weather, under open skies after dark.

You can see why Bourdain loved Saigon particularly. Though sometimes scorching, there’s never a time of the year when it’s too cold to eat al fresco. And during the times of the day when the sun’s at its hottest, Saigon cuisine itself comes to the rescue. Not just with iced tea, but with a paradoxical Saigonese invention: hot soups served with fresh greens, maybe a twist of lemon or chilli sate, that actually feel refreshing.

The first reason HCMC’s cuisine, like Vietnamese cuisine in general, fascinates culinary romantics like Bourdain is because of the way it fits into the interstices of urban space. To urban planners it seems obvious to say that urban life in HCMC is high-density and multi-usage. To locals it makes sense to pack as much life onto the pavements of busy streets in the hope of attracting passing custom. But to many Westerners, the sense of spaces-within-spaces in Vietnamese cities comes almost as a revelation. Like a sort of Russian doll, Vietnamese streets have corners and stretches that open out worlds-within-worlds. And often they’re devoted to eating and drinking in the open air.

The second reason the city and its food fascinate is because of a sense of flexibility and free-form invention. The mobile banh mi cart whose business is finished by lunchtime is replaced in the afternoon by a smoothie stall; one seller, and one set of sippers, makes way for another. Because it’s a city without a cold season, food is cooked all year round within arms length of busy streets and diners from restaurants spill out freely on to pavements. “Inside” constantly acts on “outside” and vice versa. And though efforts are being made to keep downtown pavements clear of street sellers, the rest of the city still “looks, feels and smells at times like one gigantic, open-air restaurant” as Luke Digweed once put it.

On this score, HCMC compares favorably with Melbourne, where diners are cordoned off from both streets and pavements and anyone who goes anywhere near a restaurant kitchen needs accreditation. In HCMC, not only are the tools of the food trade moveable, official requirements are moderate – expecting food sellers to get an OHS certificate before they start to work their magic wouldn’t just be impractical, it would go against the basic assumptions of Vietnamese culinary culture.

To sum it up, the Vietnamese way of muddling through, of making do, are on display on HCMC’s food scene in spades.

To explain what’s great about it in terms of simplicity is superficial. HCMC street food to its devotees is a standing imperative: to live well, and eat well, and not to be too finicky, amid the mess of an imperfect world.

Up and down the rankings

Space and acceptance of imperfection might seem like abstract reasons to rate the food culture of a city highly. For those who prefer more obvious criteria – there is a range of online surveys and awards that claim to use them, though how much of a sense they really give you of the attractions of a real human food scene is still debatable.

Life-style magazine Time Out lists “affordability” and a “lively street food scene” as two possible bases of urban culinary achievement, but weighs these criteria against the availability of fine-dining options.

“Culinary heritage” and “environmental sustainability” are also prized by the framers of international comparisons. On the first of these criteria, HCMC probably scores in the medium range, because its food scene is ever-changing. On sustainability the city probably scores low because its culinary culture is a take-away culture. Most street-sellers still use multiple layers of plastic to serve locals on motorbikes. That means plenty of litter in the street and, further down the “food chain”, vast and unsustainable amounts of landfill.

What surprised me when I looked into Time Out’s official measures of a city’s global food city status was that “taste” was just one item, well below “experimental cuisine” and “trendiness”.

What culinary romantics like Anthony Bourdain would have made of this is anyone’s guess.

Knowing that a city has a food avant garde might sound appetizing to some tourists, but compared to the action of flavors on the taste buds of normal diners it’s hardly important. And “trendiness”? Again, it might be nice to know you’re dining in a place has a certain cachet among fashionable food professionals. But whether normal diners come away from regular meals smacking their lips surely ought to count for much more.

VnExpress reported recently that HCMC had fallen out of Time Out’s top-10 world food cities in 2025 after placing fourth in 2024, but can this really have been because the local food scene has gone downhill? My guess is the foodies who contributed to the 2025 top-10 had shifted their attention to other places, rather than changed their opinions about the city’s food.

Making it into a global top 10 – especially a top 10 put together as loosely as Time Out’s – surely looks good in glossy tourism brochures. But it is no guarantee of a good meal on a regular city street.

It doesn’t take much critical thinking to see that rating the food offerings of different cities in different parts of the world at some point becomes meaningless. Which has the “better” food – Ho Chi Minh City or Melbourne? Hanoi or Houston? Which takes the prize – Hanoi pho or Saigon banh mi? Obviously they’re both great and in a basic sense impossible to compare…

The argument from authenticity

There’s one more measure of a great food city that doesn’t play much of a part in online food awards, but often features in online debates. Observers of the food scenes in different places, including many Vietnamese, sometimes argue about the level of “authenticity” of the food available in different places.

On this way of thinking (one which makes authenticity the key to real culinary achievement) – it’s as if a city’s food were to be judged in terms of the number, quality and concentration of the place’s ORIGINAL food creations. Applied to Vietnam, the argument would be that pho is quintessentially Hanoian – that bun bo Hue is inseparably from or of Hue – that banh mi is a distillation of the essence of Saigon – and that eating the three dishes in their respective places of origin somehow fills you with the vital spirits of the towns and places they come from.

This view, I’d say, is mainly nonsense. In fact, it’s a kind of culinary conventionalism gone mad.

Cameron Shingleton at Do Do, a restaurant specialized in central Vietnamese dishes in HCMC. Photo courtesy of Cameron Shingleton

Of course pho, bun bo Hue and Saigon-style banh mi were first perfected in Hanoi, Hue and Saigon. And there’s no doubt there are excellent versions of them on offer in their respective culinary homes. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that anyone who has a decent recipe and the requisite skills and devotion can make all three dishes any place they like, as long as they have access to the right ingredients. Nor does it change the fact that HCMC is the main place in Vietnam where such people have congregated in large numbers – as of 1975 from every corner of the Vietnamese world.

Individual Vietnamese regions of course produce regional cuisines. But Vietnamese regions intersect and interact nowadays and have done so for a long time. And nowhere have they done so more dynamically than in Saigon.

Consider what’s happening from a social rather than a culinary perspective for a moment. In the Vietnam of 2025, people travel for fun and for business, and many shift permanently from one end of the country to the other, as do the products and produce that people want to buy or sell. The same, or a very similar, media landscape exists from one end of the country to the other too – wherever people have access to the internet and TV.

With the movement of people go the recipes, the cooking skills and the cooking magic. With the movement of goods go all the special ingredients to make the food that was once local. With the movement of ideas and images via the media go culinary tidbits from the four points of the Vietnamese compass.

And it isn’t just eating tips or cooking skills that get transmitted, but the impulse to try new foods, to re-create dishes from different places. The possibility of culinary exchange is visible everywhere, from TV cooking shows to swaggering Facebook posts.

I would argue that we shouldn’t measure the interest of a food city by the number of “authentic” local dishes available, especially not in a nationally interconnected world like this. And especially not amid that confluence of all things Vietnamese called Saigon.

Although there are plenty of Saigonese dishes that are particularly well cooked in Saigon itself, the city isn’t a great food metropolis because the food available reflects something authentically southern Vietnamese or Saigonese. It’s a great food city because of the way it brings together great examples of the food of all three regions of Vietnam and, increasingly, good examples of international cuisine.

Saigon is, and always has been, a city of migration – a place where Vietnamese from all over the country have cooked and gathered round and eaten heartily. For me, it’s a great food city because it’s a truly national and international city, not because its cuisine somehow embodies an “eternal” or “essential” Saigon.

“Some like it sweet”

Apart from plastic waste, Saigon-style food does pose one or two problems for outsiders – both for expats like me, and Vietnamese visitors from other places. Once you’ve been in Vietnam for a while and started to appreciate the regional diversity of Vietnamese food, the first home truth you wake up to as a visitor is that the Saigonese REALLY LIKE IT SWEET.

Like most home truths, this one’s inapplicable as a guide to practical action, because there are just so many exceptions. But nonetheless, in culinary terms, Saigon does have a general weakness. Savory flavors in the city get displaced by sugary ones. And sweet dishes get sugared to the max.

Options at a sweet soup stall in Ben Thanh Market, HCMC. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

Sometimes, depending on the individual dish or chef, the result is a change of emphasis. When done well, Saigon-style pho, with its side-serving of greens, is well worth eating, unless you’re a strict Hanoian traditionalist. Sometimes the result though is a culinary write-off. Once you’ve picked the sugar crystals out of your bowl of “Saigon-style” sticky rice (xoi), you’ll still walk away feeling like you’ve eaten a bag of candy.

There are plenty of examples of northern and central Vietnamese dishes that take a cloying turn in moving south. And something similar could be said for “native” Saigonese dishes themselves: they’re often disconcertingly sweet.

One example. Last week, at the bottom of De Tham Street, I found myself in a renovated colonial building trying the newest com tam (broken rice) in the Co Giang area. What arrived at my table was a juicy pork chop, well-cooked rice, a little side of piquant kim chi.

“Fantastic” I thought, digging in. But too good to be true, I fast discovered.

After two mouthfuls, I tipped the side-serving of fish sauce and chilli over the food, only to realize too late how heavily sugared it was. The rest of my pork chop tasted like pancakes with maple syrup. Whoever had prepared the side sauce needed to be kept away from the sugar bowl.

How to convince local chefs to cut back on sugar is a tricky question. Moving the city’s overall palate from saccharine to somewhere near the middle of the savory–sweet spectrum might help secure HCMC’s future place in the list of top 10 world food cities. But given that many people in Saigon already have a sweet tooth, it’s unlikely that winning online awards is going to give locals enough motivation to change.

Maybe the city’s visitors would walk away from dinner with a smile on their faces more often if high sugar content were an option rather a compulsory part of their broken rice or sticky rice experience? Could a sugar-rating come on menus as a chilli-rating comes on lists of Indian curries? Could a little side-serve of sugar maybe come as an accompaniment to Saigon sticky rice so non-Saigonese could choose whether we want the main course to taste like dessert??

The epitome of Vietnamese food

Twelve years after moving to Vietnam for good, I’m still in HCMC. I’ve seen most of the country from north to south, I’ve sampled the pho (and the salty attitude of the owners) of Pho Tinh in Hanoi, I’ve eaten the cao lau of Hoi An on a daily basis, the goi ca trich (sardine salad) and bun quay (stirred noodle soup) of Phu Quoc on and off for years. But living as I do now in the Co Giang area of downtown Saigon, I have locally made versions of all these regional dishes within walking distance of my flat. I’m the ongoing beneficiary, that is, of the interconnected national attitude of Saigonese to the joys of eating well.

Still a culinary romantic, I prefer to crouch low and eat within eyeshot of the whole street rather than in a dining room with big furniture and heavy carpet.

In Co Giang, I’m constantly exercising that key ability of the culinary romantic that I developed when I first came to Vietnam: to see beyond the messy surfaces – past the cluttered pavements, the grimy surfaces, the scrimmage of passing bikes – to the … food itself.

A rough list of the places to eat that are a short distance from where I live gives an indication of the depth of the food world that opens out for those who have eyes to see.

Southern Vietnamese food is obviously well-represented. In Co Giang Street itself, there is a broken rice place without a name run by several generations of one family whose older female members will serve you up your meal within a minute of your backside hitting a plastic seat.

Round the corner in De Tham is my favorite hu tieu (thick noodles soup) place run by a slightly dourer family. They’ve obviously seen plenty of non-Vietnamese visitors. None of them have ever shown any surprise to see me chewing a steaming hot pork knuckle (xi quach), or trying to get their slippery, absorbent, delicately sweet hu tieu noodles in to my mouth.

A little further away on Tran Hung Dao is a place selling bun rieu (crab noodle soup) run by a nice central Vietnamese couple; they’re always thrilled that I add mam tom to my bowl. A little further away still is the well-named Oc Noc on Nguyen Bieu. The restaurant feels like a dugout with a view of a motorbike speedway. But all’s made good by the rau muong oc mong tay (morning glory stif-fried with razor shells) and the creamy oc len xao dua (obtuse horn shells stir-fried with cononut juice) that soon arrive at the table.

Bowls of different snail dishes at a street stall in HCMC. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

My go-to place for central Vietnamese food is writer Nguyen Nhat Anh’s happy creation, Do Do, named after the location of one of the author’s most bitter-sweet novels. I never really change my order at Do Do, so all the waiters have to do is point me to my favorite table. Out come the rice with clams (com hen) and long heo xao nghe (stir-fried sweetmeats in tumeric) no questions asked.

Next come the local variations on northern Vietnamese themes. On Co Bac Street, parallel to Co Giang, a Chinese-Vietnamese family does an effective southern Vietnamese version of pho – not too sweet, with fragrant rare beef. Nowadays the daughter of the mum and pop owners has a baby strapped to her back. The kid happily hands you your change once you’ve finished dinner.

On Nguyen Cu Trinh there is fish noodle soup (bun ca Hai Phong) made and served by another group of “northern southerners”. If the succulent bo la lot (beef in vine leaves) in my fish soup don’t get me, then the sight of one of the cooks in gum-boots and leopard-print leisureware certainly does.

The crispy tofu with shrimp paste (bun dau mam tom) available down the street near the Nguyen Trai corner is not to be sniffed at either.

Admittedly, bun dau Saigon is not quite the offal extravaganza that you get in the backstreets of Hanoi. But listen for the accents of those around you: there will probably be as many northern as southern voices. If their owners are not already eating, they’ll be cutting their chillis with scissors and whipping their shrimp paste into a lather in preparation for the feast that’s about to start.

Saigon International

But my little sector of the HCMC food epitome has yet more to give. Also within walking distance of my flat, there’s a Syrian restaurant (El Sham) and a Pizza 4Ps. For a few years there have been more sushi places than I know how to pick from. Plus in the heart of city, next to the French Institute, there is my favorite international eatery of them all: Le Jardin.

Apart from serving good shawarma, El Sham doubles as a Middle Eastern grocery store (and as a place for the buddies of the owner to play chequers). Pizza 4Ps, by contrast, is a model of slick service, rich toppings and organic ingredients. I go for the culinary theater as much as the flavors. At 4P’s, take a seat overlooking the pizza ovens and you have a ringside view of flying dough and fast-moving tomato paste.

Saigon doesn’t yet do much hole-in-the-wall style Japanese eating – so eating sushi or sashimi usually comes with a price tag in the millions. But for anyone looking for muted North Asian flavors that contrast strongly with local food, Japanese dining in Saigon is a reliable option.

Most French restaurants the world over want to remind you that you’re eating the food of a nation of gourmets – and it’s reflected in the prices. Not so at Le Jardin. For me, this is simply the best “average everyday” French restaurant I’ve eaten at outside of France: superior bistro food, served with no fuss in a convivial setting. Try the mussels in cream sauce. And make sure you ask for extra bread to mop up.

I’m just picking international restaurants I know well which do very edible versions of meals from right round the world. There are probably many others I’ve never been to. And probably many more that will open up as HCMC continues to draw foreigners and food from distant places.

The rest of the world’s interest in local cuisine seems to be increasing in proportion to Saigonese’s appetite for things foreign. The longer I live downtown, the more I notice tall Westerners walking south from the backpacker area into the worlds-within-worlds of Co Giang. Some of them maybe even get used to the fact that the best street-side eateries often don’t exist on Google Maps or Yelp.

People walk past a Cambodian-style grilled beef eatery in HCMC. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran

For their part, Vietnamese are bringing knowledge of foreign food, or an appreciation of cosmopolitan mixture, back with them from their own foreign travels. In turn, they’re making more demands of local chefs trying to cater to international tastes. Nowadays, Saigonese seem to know it: if a pizza tastes sticky and sweet but isn’t on the dessert menu, then the chef is pulling their leg.

Nor is the culinary adventurism limited to eating out. Saigonese who want to try to recreate international dishes at home can find most of the ingredients online or in specialist shops.

Though I’m too spoilt by what’s on offer just outside my door to do much cooking myself, there’s one thing I know from experience in the kitchen: that the trade in high-grade parmesan in Saigon is growing by the year. Though I’ve never managed to get my hands on the sort of strong-smelling stuff my grandma once cooked with, what local importers deliver to District 1 is as sharp and flaky as real parmesan ought to be.

Good parmesan is to Italian cuisine what fish sauce is to Vietnamese cuisine – something that makes everyday food yummy and really good food even better. When fine versions of both these essential ingredients are freely available to professionals and amateurs, you know you’re living in a place with a serious culinary culture. An epitome of Vietnamese and, nowadays, increasingly, even world food. A food city, in other words, that is really hitting its straps.

*Cameron Shingleton is the author of “Nhung dieu ban chua viet ve trai Tay” (Everthing you ever wanted to know about Western men), which was written in Vietnamese and published by Tre Publishing House in 2017. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and earned a Ph.D from the University of Melbourne before moving to Ho Chi Minh City.