The Street

Saigon Hẻm Gems

Hẻm Gems: Making Good Life Decisions With Midday Rice Wine and Hanoi Deep-Fried Food

The Subcommittee for Sustainable Fishing? The Office of Dipterocarp Record-Keeping? The Directorate of Synthetic Rubber Quality Control? Ride-Share Hygiene Board? It was difficult to assess who exactly our fellow lunch diners were. Were they filling their table with empty beer bottles to escape the monotony of work or fuel creative ideas for more efficiently managing the allocation of hand sanitizer for cable cars? Unclear. What was certain, however, was the Saigoneer team had scampered up Pasteur Street to enjoy a few glasses of rice wine accompanied by northern fare with the hopes that we’d return to the office not too buzzed to actively report on the nation’s latest developments in cracking down on illegal seahorse smuggling .