Saigon’s First ‘Food Street’ Opens

This morning city officials opened the first of several planned ‘food streets,’ where vendors displaced by the ongoing sidewalk-clearing campaign (which I covered for Saigoneer earlier in the year) can sell food and drinks.

The campaign has garnered plenty of controversy, with detractors lamenting the loss of street vendors and stalls that some see as part of Saigon’s appeal. Local officials have presented food streets like this one, located on Nguyen Van Chiem behind Diamond Plaza, as a solution.

They championed the fact that prices would be posted, thus deterring rip-offs; CCTV cameras would ensure safety; and that vendors would have to clean their areas, thus creating more (hopefully) more hygienic conditions.

However, there were many problems with this plan from the get-go:

1. The stalls are only open from 6–9am and 11am-2pm. This means no dinner will be served on the street, and this is prime-time for street food gatherings. Also, one of the main conveniences of street food is that you can get something at any time of day. Restricting it to just a six-hour window almost defeats the purpose.
2. There are only 20 stalls, while countless vendors have been impacted by the campaign (it’s impossible to know how many).
3. They only offer takeaway, which erases the communal, convivial nature of eating street food.

Granted, it’s only the first day, and I assume there will be adjustments, but I swung by the street during the lunch hour, when workers from nearby office buildings would presumably be packing in, and it was a sad sight.

Half of the stalls, at most, were occupied, and they were painfully bland. There were no distinguishing characteristics, and more members of the media or security guards were milling around than actual customers. For anyone who loves the chatty chaos of popular street food carts, this was a vision of hell.

For the sake of the vendors utilizing these stalls, I do hope the food street works out. The setting is nice, with tall trees shading the relatively quite roadway, and they need somewhere to work legally without constantly facing the threat of being booted off the sidewalk. At first glance, though, this doesn’t look promising.

In my view, if local authorities want to change the way street vendors operate here, they might as well go the full Singapore/Kuala Lumpur route and build hawker centers that are open all day. I’ve enjoyed those places on my visits to both cities, and since Saigon apparently isn’t giving up on clearing its sidewalks (of vendors, if not motorbikes and cars), they should go big on it.