Tokyo to Saigon — The Back Alleys of Saigon and the People I Won't Forget

In 2023, I set up a small company — Goldrush Studio — in Ho Chi Minh City, the city so many people still call Saigon. I started it with my friend and CTO, Hector.

Company registration, an investment license, a business license, a bank account. Those early days were an endless run of hundreds of procedures and documents. And yet, when I close my eyes now, it isn’t the paperwork I remember. It’s the alleys of this city, and the people I met in them.

The people of Ho Chi Minh City smile without even trying.

Every time I opened the office door, the same faces were there to greet me, smiling — and that smile saved me more times than I can count.

The Whisky Man

At the end of a narrow alley — in Vietnam they call it a hem — running directly across from our office stood an old-ish hotel. The reception, lined with antiques and old furniture, felt like the Vietnam of long ago, and I liked it enough that I stayed there on every trip.

While I was checking in, the owner poured Jack Daniel’s into a shot glass and pushed it toward me: “Here, have one.” I took it for a welcome drink — but it turned out to be a nightly ritual. From the next day on, whenever he spotted me, he’d come out from the back beaming, “Ahh! Whicky?!” and press whisky on me.

The Whisky Man doesn’t speak English, and his whole vocabulary came down to four things: “Ahh!”, “Whicky,” a booming “Gahaha!” laugh, and a clenched-fist thumbs-up. Even so, night after night, he had me empty three shots. Look closely and the liquid in the bottle was somehow more than the day before — he was topping up the Jack Daniel’s bottle with some other whisky.

On a later stay, a tall young man who looked exactly like the Whisky Man was at the door, running my check-in in flawless English. Framed in the most prominent spot at reception was a master’s diploma from an American university. The Whisky Man, it turned out, was a father with deep enough roots to send his son all the way through graduate school in the States. Behind that booming laugh was a story like that.

A Bus from Twenty-Five Years Ago

Mornings in Saigon come early. By six the streets are already loud. Jet-lagged and awake too soon, I often went out for a morning walk.

In front of one hotel, Westerners were climbing into a tour pickup van. On its side it read “Kim Travel.” — Kim Travel. An old memory stirred.

Twenty-five years ago, at eighteen, I came to this Saigon alone with a backpack. Back then another backpacker told me “Kim Travel is the most trustworthy,” and I rode it. It’s still here, I thought, and something warmed in my chest.

Later I mentioned it to V, the director of a hotel I’d come to rely on, and got an unexpected reply. “Kim Travel — it’s a bit pricey, but the guides are all veterans and the reputation is great. COVID hit them hard, though, so the boss is out guiding tours himself now.” The boss is in his forties. The boss from my day, he said, would have been that man’s father. “After COVID, the boss went around to every hotel in the area himself just to say hello.”

From father to son. Twenty-five years, carried on the same spirit. A single van on the street quietly connected 1998, when I first came to Saigon, with 2023, when I built my company. Having learned since going independent just how hard it is to keep a business alive, I feel nothing but respect for something that endures this long.

The Healing Bar

The evening the hardest task of all — opening a bank account — was finally behind me, I walked alone down a street I’d never taken. On a small alley to my left, I spotted a sign: CRAFT BEER.

Down the alley was a quiet place where three older men were drinking. The menu they handed me was heavy and thick, page after page of beers I’d never seen. The IPA I ordered was a Vietnamese local brew, and it was astonishingly good. The fries came with what I took for salt but turned out to be sugar and butter — which, oddly, worked.

A man in glasses came over, beer in hand. I assumed he was a customer; he was the owner. We clinked bottles, and out of nowhere he asked, “Want some pork offal?” “I got it fresh this morning. I only put it out when I can get something good.” I couldn’t refuse that beaming face, and when I nervously tried it, every piece was delicious. Whenever my glass emptied, the owner and the lady of the house took turns coming to refill it, and we’d toast together. It was the very same style as a Showa-era tavern I used to go to as a student — and here it was, in Saigon.

The Friday I’d finished everything I’d come to do, I headed back down that alley. When I reached the shop, none of the familiar faces were there. I was starting to worry when, after a while, the master came back. He remembered me too. “You haven’t been around,” he said, smiling, coming over.

He’d been a tour guide, once. He’d traveled all over Vietnam, learning regional home cooking along the way, and now he served it here. “I put the shop deep in this back alley because once you’re this far in, you can’t hear the motorbikes or the horns. I wanted to make a place where people could drink slowly and unwind after work.” Maybe the reason I’d felt “this is the one” the moment I first walked in was that his philosophy lived in every corner of it.

A Café, Five Years On

On my last day, I went back to a café a designer named C had taken me to five years earlier. I’d wanted to return the whole time, but never found the hours to sit still.

You pass through the dim entrance of a building in District 1 and climb a spiral staircase all the way to the top, and pleasant music starts to reach you. Open the door and a high-ceilinged, open space spreads out. In Japan, where ceilings run low, a place like this would be hard to build. Retro and yet modern, standing exactly as it had — I was relieved it was still there.

For coffee, you pick the bean, then choose from four brewing methods: paper drip, French press, siphon, and Aero Brew. I chose Aero Brew, whatever it was, and went with a Vietnamese bean. The iced coffee arrived in a beautiful carafe — light on body, but with a roasted fragrance that rose through the nose.

The air conditioning was gentle, the music low, and you could stay for hours. Just the right amount of style and elegance, at just the right pitch. That is the Saigon way. After a frantic week, I opened the book I’d been meaning to read and let the afternoon go slow.

A Saigon Wedding

When Hector got married, I flew to Saigon to be at his wedding. In Japanese terms I was (nominally) his boss, so I checked that I wouldn’t be in the way, and let myself attend.

On the morning of the wedding, at a still-dark 5:30, I gathered at Hector’s home in District 7. The table was covered with offerings to be carried to the bride’s house. In Vietnamese tradition, on the morning of a wedding the groom’s unmarried friends shoulder the offerings and carry them all the way to the bride’s family. This time the rule was relaxed, and married as I am, I was handed the role too. The large wooden tray I carried was stacked with bottles of whisky and other liquor, and it was heavier than I’d expected.

More than thirty years ago, traveling through a village in the Mekong Delta, I saw this ceremony once. In a village threaded with canals and little bridges, a line of men walked carrying offerings piled high — a scene straight out of a storybook. That I would one day join it myself.

At a call the six of us, offerings in our arms, filed into the alley in a single line. Down a narrow lane hemmed in by colorful low houses, in the distance young women in ao dai stood waiting in a row. The bride, in a red ao dai, was truly beautiful. Every time a motorbike came through the ceremony paused and we re-formed our line. Not solemn so much as unfolding amid a little cheerful chaos — which was Saigon all over.

At the lunch that followed, they served enormous prawns boiled in coconut water. Rich prawn tomalley, with the faint creaminess of coconut layered over it. A wedding lets you feel a country’s culture, its families, its bonds between people, all at once. That long day, begun before dawn, is one I’ll never forget.

The Warmth of Saigon

The mountain of paperwork, the worry over cash flow, the days that never quite went to plan. What still made me look forward to coming back to this city was that in every single alley, there were people like these. Saigon didn’t only give me a place to do business. It reminded me, all over again, how rich it is simply to meet people.

I want to go back to those alleys, soon.