← All articles · Vietnam · 14 December 2025

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Bui Vien before the neon comes on

Bui Vien Walking Street in Ho Chi Minh City on a December 2025 afternoon: an empty strip, a banquet table laid for twenty, and coffee on tiny pavement chairs.

We walked onto Bui Vien in the middle of a December afternoon, which is the wrong time to see it and quite possibly the best time to walk it. District 1's famous backpacker strip was almost completely empty: bar chairs set out on the pavement for a crowd that hadn't turned up yet, lanterns strung overhead doing nothing in particular, and a road wide enough to stand in the middle of and take a photo.

The gold Bui Vien Walking Street archway spanning an almost empty District 1 street, a woman in a conical hat crossing beneath it and red and blue lanterns strung above the bars on the right — Pho di bo Bui Vien, the walking street, at an hour when nobody's walking it.

Turn your head and the street keeps going: hotel signs stacked six high, flags hanging off the balconies, a man having a sit down on his scooter because there's nowhere he urgently needs to be. It's a strip that's built for volume and it was running on about a tenth of it.

Looking down Bui Vien street past parked scooters and stacked hotel signs, Vietnamese flags hanging from the balconies and a man resting on a red motorbike in the foreground — Flags, neon waiting to be switched on, and a yellow Vespa doing the only moving.

Lunch happened just off the arch, in a room with fish tanks down one wall and a banquet table laid for about twenty. There were two of us. Nobody seemed to mind, and we didn't either.

Dileep in a bucket hat and Inga seated at opposite sides of a long white banquet table in a Vietnamese restaurant, a black clay pot and rice in front of them and fish tanks along the back wall — Twenty place settings, two of us, and a clay pot doing the heavy lifting. The tanks along the back wall tell you what to order.

An hour later, a few streets over, we found where everyone actually was. Pavement cà phê: a green shopfront, low canvas chairs and tiny wooden stools spilling out across the tiles, every single one turned to face the street. It took us a minute to realise the low chairs aren't a shortage of furniture, they're the whole idea.

Inga sitting on a low canvas chair on the pavement outside a green-fronted ca phe holding an iced green drink, surrounded by young locals on stools with their own iced coffees — Low chairs, iced drinks, everyone facing outward. This is the version of the city we'd come back for.

By the time we left, Bui Vien still hadn't woken up, and that suited us fine. Come after dark if you want the strip at full volume. Come at four if you want the city.

We filmed the lounge on the way out too, if that's your sort of thing: the Jasmine Lounge at Tan Son Nhat, honestly reviewed.