At its best, Vietnamese food is fresh and delicate, with raw and cooked ingredients meeting at the table -- like petals of rare beef cooking in a bowl of pho -- or even in the mouth, as when a crunchy slice of spring roll is wrapped in lettuce with cucumber and basil.
A minute's walk from the MRT's Wanfang Hospital station, Saigon, Saigon delivers a long and authentic menu of Vietnamese favorites. The prices too are refreshing, with substantial dishes starting from NT$80 and plenty of side dishes, salads and desserts all under NT$100. Diners would be hard-pressed to spend more than NT$500 for a lavish lunch for two. Also, the set lunch is a special bargain, with strong Vietnamese coffee, choice of beef or wonton soup, and barbecued pork with rice noodles and vegetables for only NT$150.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SAIGON SAIGON
A favorite snack is ban xeo, a pancake of rice flour and coconut milk, stuffed with vegetables, sliced shrimp and pork for NT$80. It's lacy and light in this restaurant's version, so it's better to dip bites in the sauce so it doesn't dissolve into mush on the plate.
The spring rolls (NT$60) are unusual, spongy and crumbly with meat rather than the usual chewy stuffing of clear noodles and shredded carrots. They're served with lettuce, cucumbers and rice noodles to be wrapped together and dipped in sauce. More unusual are the "fresh warm rolls" stuffed with pork for NT$60 (or shrimp for NT$70), slippery parcels of rice noodles with oily but savory chopped pork.
The raw "salad rolls" for NT$55 are a healthier item, though the rice-paper skin was slightly tough. A sinus-clearing green papaya salad for NT$80 and chicken salad for NT$50 and NT$80 were both excellent.
These items were only a sampling of the first two menu pages, followed by pages of rice, noodles and soups. All the soups I tried were great except for the bun rieu or seafood with vermicelli, a strangely crimson broth of too-soft noodles in a bland broth with small fishcake balls for NT$80. The pho (beef soup with rice noodles) was fragrant with cinnamon and ranged from NT$80 to NT$150. Fresh coconut juice is NT$60, and there's salty lemon drink and Vietnamese beer for traditionalists. Desserts are various fruits (NT$45) or mung beans ($35) served over rice with coconut milk.
Owner Ted Yeh says his place is offers authentic Vietnamese food because it's a family enterprise. A trip to the city's south side is a lot cheaper than a ticket to Ho Chi Min City, and Saigon, Saigon delivers its exotica in unpretentious comfort.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
Jan. 12 to Jan. 18 At the start of an Indigenous heritage tour of Beitou District (北投) in Taipei, I was handed a sheet of paper titled Ritual Song for the Various Peoples of Tamsui (淡水各社祭祀歌). The lyrics were in Chinese with no literal meaning, accompanied by romanized pronunciation that sounded closer to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) than any Indigenous language. The translation explained that the song offered food and drink to one’s ancestors and wished for a bountiful harvest and deer hunting season. The program moved through sites related to the Ketagalan, a collective term for the
RSS