I awoke to our first full day in Vietnam to a sense of peace I hadn't felt in some time. The whirlwind sprint to get everything prepared and the world set for a month-long absence had been an exhausting task. Payments scheduled, confirmations for coverage at work, transportation, and lodging in place for the next 20-plus days, it all takes its toll. But here we were, arrived, alive, and eager to get moving.
The sun comes up insanely early in Vietnam. With the entirety of the country below the Tropic of Cancer, and much of it lying between 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator, there is very little deviation between daylight hours in summer and winter. The longest day in Saigon is June 21, and it has around 12 and a half hours of daylight. The shortest day, December 21, is around 11 and a half hours. There is no clock adjustment during the year, and the daylight hours, as you can see, stay pretty consistent, fluctuating only by about half an hour for sunrise and sunset. For a little perspective, Atlanta, Georgia, sees over a 4-hour fluctuation of daylight hours between winter and summer.
Sunrise typically occurs around a quarter after 5 am, and sunset around half past 6 in the evening. This means to catch a full sunrise, one must be up long before five to grab the first slivers of morning light. This creates a strange scenario where 9 am can feel like noon or later to someone more in tune with the North American day. It's always a shocking revelation at first. And so it was, barely seven, and the world was as bright as midday when we ventured out for breakfast.
Mi Quang
One of my favorite Vietnamese dishes and a Da Nang special, though we are still in Saigon. The delicious, turmeric noodle-based Mì Quảng. We came to a place we have eaten at before. A spot in District 12 specializing in the delicious bowl. However, the last time I ate here, I received a nasty muffler burn and a flat tire. This experience was much kinder to me.
I’ve tried Mì Quảng from Ha Noi to Can Tho, and this is a delicious version. Mì Quảng, literally "Quảng noodles", is a Vietnamese noodle dish that originated in Quảng Nam Province in central Vietnam. The former home of Da Nang, though, as cities in Vietnam grow so large as to dominate provincial politics, they are divested from their provinces to become autonomous political regions in their own right. Governed directly by the central government. Mì Quảng is one of the region's most popular and well-recognized food items. It is served on any occasion and eaten at any time of the day. I prefer it for breakfast or lunch.
Flavorful, rich broth of pork and shrimp, including anything from chunks of stewed chicken, quail eggs, peanuts, whole head-on shrimp, the garden that accompanies any proper Vietnamese meal, various accoutrements such as nước mắm, chili, and pickled vegetables. And of course, no bowl of Mì Quảng would be proper without the crispy sesame rice crackers. Diem enjoyed a nice bowl of turmeric stewed whole frog while I dug into my bowl of turmeric-tinted noodles.
After breakfast, we headed to coffee. Coffee culture in Vietnam is unrivaled in the world of coffee. I've written a detailed article about the topic, and will place that here. Let's just say that after the French introduced the bean to the mountainous growing regions of Vietnam, it quickly became a staple cash crop. And today, Vietnam is one of the world's largest exporters of the planet's wake-up cup.
We arrived at Du Mien Garden Cafe around nine, and the place was abuzz with morning coffee traffic. Though some restaurants are indoor and air conditioned, the vast majority are not. Restaurants and coffee shops across Vietnam are outdoor spaces that are very green and wholly organic. Water always flows, and plants and trees create a canopy to escape the often oppressive heat. It gives the outdoor spaces an organic feel that is more reminiscent of a tree house than a restaurant. We explored the various sections dispersed throughout the expansive cafe and tucked into a table overlooking the pond and fountain that sat as the centerpiece of the establishment.
I ordered a Cà phê muối, or coffee with frothed salted cream. The family sat enjoying each other's company, and my mind spun off, as it often does here, into our surroundings. Once the conversations get wound up, I get beyond lost in translation, and often take the opportunity to do a little exploring. I walked with Quan, Duong, Jennie, and Lisa to explore the expansive facility to coffee and commerce. Complete with a spot to take Instagram-worthy photos, and a rusty, seldom-used playground that looked like it was pieced together with used equipment from the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“The Funk and the Flesh, A Morning at Pham Van Hai”
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
There’s a scent that hits you before anything else does. It comes in hot and high, something between low tide and the back of a forgotten refrigerator, and then settles into the kind of olfactory memory that gets branded onto your soul. Mắm nêm is fermented anchovies in its rawest, funkiest form, the kind of thing that once smelled forever rewires your definition of "umami." Years ago Diem and I lived in the Son Tra district of Da Nang, near the old fishing village. The fishermen would come in early morning, and during the anchovy season, they would cover tarps on the sidewalks across from the beach, pile them with tiny, whole fresh anchovies, cover with sea salt, and leave them to ferment for several weeks in the intense Indochina sun. As we cruised our old neighborhood in the summer, the scent of ripening anchovies would often float in the air, tickling the nasal hairs. I guess that's why I grew to love it so much. It reminds me of that time.
That was how our visit to Pham Van Hai Market in Tân Bình began, with a nasal uppercut and not with a sign or a welcome or a guide. And I mean that as praise. Pham Van Hai isn’t the lacquered, tourist-polished sort of market you find on postcards. It’s a market for the people who live here. Locals drift through on motorbikes like they’re shopping at 35 miles an hour. The clothes stalls are jammed with branded knockoffs, frilly crop tops and endless racks of dubious polos. One man in a cracked pink tee surveyed the scene with suspicion, or maybe just the heat.
The deeper you go the wetter it gets. The tiled floors shimmer with runoff, a slurry of fish water, hose streams and vegetable guts. Vendors hunch low behind plastic baskets of greens, stripping stalks or scraping scales with silent industry. There’s a woman with a cleaver and a pile of meat the color of old cinema curtains, sitting cross-legged behind her own stall.
And then there’s him.
A man in ripped acid-washed jeans, shirtless and with a cigarette clinging to his lip, is perched on a footstool, wrist-deep in a blue basin of mystery flesh. His posture is something between a monk in meditation and a mechanic elbow-deep in a transmission. He wears no gloves and ignores every conceivable health code. He looks up at us with eyes half-lidded and indifferent and then, without breaking rhythm, flicks ash into a plastic bucket beside the squid. It’s the kind of tableau that would give an American food inspector a coronary.
We wandered the aisles for nearly an hour, past walls of dried shrimp with their tiny curved backs glowing orange under fluorescent light and past pyramids of pomelos and bananas. We passed rows of packaged seasonings, medicinal roots and wood ear mushrooms in plastic sacks the size of laundry bags. It’s the kind of market where you see Vietnam and also smell it, step in it and occasionally get lightly splashed by it.
Eventually Quan, his friend and I sat at one of those famous Vietnamese sidewalk tableaus, a low red plastic table with even lower red stools. A stack of spring rolls was delivered without ceremony, fat translucent cylinders packed with herbs, rice noodles and a crispy center of pork skin that shattered under the tooth. But it was the sauce, that infamous mắm nêm, that stole the show. It was fermented anchovy paste, garlic, sugar, lime and chili, with the flavors brawling like drunk uncles at a family reunion.
I took a bite and then another. The heat was building from both the sauce and the sky, but the complexity of it all kept me going. It was funky, yes, but also sweet, tangy, pungent and addictive. It’s the kind of thing that dares you not to love it. And somewhere between the chew of rice paper and the acid bite of lime I realized I’d stopped noticing the smell. It had become flavor, context and even comfort. Pham Van Hai isn’t a destination on any Top 10 list, and it won’t show up on Instagram reels with moody filters and hashtags about wanderlust. But in its humid, sticky sprawl, in the fluorescent flicker and the fly-buzzed funk, there is something human, and meals come with both flavor and story. And sometimes that story includes a shirtless man, a cigarette and a bowl of squid.
“Marked Up at Ben Thanh”
District 1, Ho Chi Minh City
At Pham Van Hai Market in Tân Bình it rolls out thick and unapologetic, fermented fish, wilted herbs, sweat and life, the smell of commerce with its sleeves rolled up. Mắm nêm in particular announces itself, pungent and complex. It is funk distilled. This is a market for the people who live here, with no curated displays, no matching signage and no filtered influencer reels, just narrow walkways slick with hose water and fish blood and stalls bursting with dried squid, plastic buckets of mushrooms and vegetables fresh from someone’s backyard. If you want to know what a city truly eats, you start there.
Bến Thành is a different beast entirely. Located in the heart of District 1, it is both icon and cliché. The façade is grand, colonial and weathered, and the traffic outside is a near-constant churn of horns, tourists and Grab drivers. Inside, the market feels more like a maze built by someone who’d never been in one. It was already hot when we arrived, the kind of wet heat that settles into your collar and doesn’t let go. Outside the western gate of Bến Thành Market, traffic churned in that familiar Ho Chi Minh City way, half ballet and half battle. Grab drivers swerved with grace, tourists bumbled mid-crosswalk and street vendors slipped between them all, balancing fruit baskets.
I’d come for sunglasses. My latest pair of knockoff Ray-Bans had succumbed to a tragic trunk melt, and I needed replacements. Diem had a list of her own, something between shopping and snacking, but we didn’t spell it all out. There’s a quiet language to these outings, a general direction and a mutual understanding. Now normally, I let Diem do the actual buying. That is not because I’m lazy, though I am, but because her presence unaccompanied keeps the prices human. The moment the vendors spot a foreign husband the zeros start multiplying like bacteria on unrefrigerated shrimp. So our usual system is that I scout and she swoops in solo for the bargain.
But today, I had Quan with me. He is Diem’s brother and equal parts bodyguard, translator and good-natured co-conspirator, the kind of person who always makes sure I’m hydrated, upright and pointed in the right direction, even if I don’t always deserve it. We ducked into the shaded corridors of the market, weaving past stalls selling lacquerware, dragon figurines, fridge magnets and suspiciously branded handbags. I found the sunglasses I was looking for, glossy black and maybe-polarized, boldly proclaiming “Ray-Ban” across the arms in a font just off enough to dodge legal trouble. I lifted them for a photo, planning to send it to Diem so she could return incognito for the final negotiation.
But before I could snap the shot, Quan leaned in and asked a question, then yelled back to Diem a few stalls away, innocent and casual but just loud enough for the vendor to catch. And with that the jig was up and the American husband was confirmed. The price nudged upward, not a gouge, just a gentle reminder of who was really in charge. I paid and smiled, and we moved on. The thing is, Quan wasn’t trying to sabotage the operation, far from it. He’s the one who keeps me from wandering into potholes or trying to eat things that might kill me. He watches my back, and occasionally my front, in places where it helps to have a local in your corner. If a few extra đồng is the price of that protection, I’ll gladly pay it.
We drifted toward the food stalls, where the smell of grilled pork, overripe fruit and frying oil thickened the air. Fans spun lazily overhead and plastic stools creaked under shifting tourists. We found a metal table with just enough space to escape the press of the crowd and ordered what felt like salvation, an ice-cold Huda and a bánh mì that made the whole day worthwhile. The sandwich held pork liver pâté, BBQ pork, mayonnaise, cilantro, pickled vegetables and a splash of soy-like sauce, all crammed into a crusty baguette that crackled when I bit in. It was messy, glorious and unapologetic, the kind of food that demands your full attention and both hands. Quan grinned and tore into his, and I followed. Around us the market buzzed with tourists haggling, vendors shouting and a woman balancing bananas and rice cakes on a bamboo pole that swayed through the chaos.
I sat back with the Huda sweating in my hand, the heat finally giving way to something almost cool. I thought about the sunglasses in my bag, a little more expensive than planned. But I also thought about Quan making sure I got there, got fed and didn’t do anything stupid. And suddenly, they didn’t seem overpriced at all.
After our shopping excursion we returned to my other brother-in-law, Luan's, house and settled in for an early night. Jet-lag would be a constant companion in the coming days, and sleep would spring around every corner. I slept much of the afternoon and early evening away, emerging from the room well after dark. I sat in the warm evening watching the geckos dart in the corners of the property looking for an easy meal, or croaking for a potential mate. It was our first full day back in Vietnam. It was already an amazing return.
I sat in the warm evening watching the geckos dart in the corners of the property looking for an easy meal, or croaking for a potential mate.
