Trung Nguyen @ Le Loi Street, Ho Chi Minh

Trung Nguyen is like THE coffee brand in Vietnam. It's practically everywhere. In markets, departmental stores, its own cafe etc.

Visited one of the Trung Nguyen cafe that is quite near our hotel, somewhere along Le Loi Street. Exact location, if you ask me now, seriously, I have no idea!

First impression, the place was packed! Many tourists and locals enjoying their cuppa in the air-conditioned and small cosy cafe.

order here if you're taking away

Just find a seat and the service staff will give you the menu and take your order. They will also serve the drinks to you. Trung Nguyen coffee has beans that ranges from number 1 to 5. Probably its intensity level? Seems so. Ordered a number 3 iced-coffee without milk. One cuppa can set you back by VND45,000 thereabout. It's slightly more expensive if it's with milk.

After you've placed your order, the service staff brought us iced-tea (probably oolong or green tea unsweetened). So, instead of ice water, we got iced-tea in Ho Chi Minh. Cool, right?

iced-tea

still need to drip even if its iced coffee

The service staff was helpful. Knowing that we're tourists, he advised us to wait for 5 minutes for the coffee to drip finish. When the 5 minutes was about up, he came by to help us remove the coffee filter. So nice of him!

hot coffee with condensed milk

taking a peek!

done dripping, then add sugar

The sugar is added after the coffee had dripped finished and then its poured into the tall glass with ice.

ta dah, iced-coffee in front and iced-coffee with milk at the back

The taste is pretty intense. Very buttery and fragrant as well. Nice and smooth but can really feel the heatiness after drinking it.

Trung Nguyen Coffee

watch the world go by as you sip your coffee in comfort...

interior of the cafe

We also bought the coffee powder and the drip as well. The coffee powder and the drip costs about SGD6+.

makes a good souvenir, and its slightly cheaper than Ben Thanh market

Heard the staff guiding another tourist from Philippines with regards to the coffee milk ratio. He said 2 spoonfuls of coffee powder and 4 teaspoons of condensed milk. Coffee powder put it inside the drip, while the milk is onto the small cup. Hot water is poured into the drip and should be ready within 5 minutes.

Haven't tried it myself. Will experiment next time.

Awfully Chocolate @ Vivocity

Located at Level 1 of Vivocity. Had a craving for chocolate cake and was in the viccinity, so decided to drop-by. Its super stacked cake was listed at $6.50 per 100 gms. Ok, so proceeded to order for 100 gms of super stacked.

Was actually quite surprised when the girl suddenly squatted down and got a slice out from the cabinet below the display counter. The display counter had a perfect square of a new super stacked so presumably she was clearing the old stock. Maybe the impression would've been better if she could just take the tray out and take that slice in clear view.

Then, she proceeded to put that slice of cake into a box. Alas, that poor slice of cake was unceremoniously dumped into the box and it was laying there in an odd manner as it could not quite fit into it. Such a sad treatment for such a beautiful slice of cake. Wouldn't have minded if the girl had cut the slice into half so that it can be placed nicely into the box...

Never mind. Next, she proceeded to weigh the cake together with the box. On the receipt, the weight of the cake was listed as 130 gms. Just wondering if that included the weight of the box or not? If the weight of an empty box is say for example 20 gms, then it would've meant that the customer paid $1.30 for the box.

nice sticker

super stacked cake

nice plastic fork

poor cake was in this position

super stacked closer view

The super stacked cake was nice (mildly sweet, though not as rich/moist as imagined), but does it warrant the $8.45 price tag? That'll be up to you to decide.

Jaspas Wine & Grill @ Dong Khoi, Ho Chi Minh

Located downtown of Ho Chi Minh, this place is located at a cluster popular with Caucasians. Traffic was quite bad when heading towards downtown but that's understandable since it was Friday night when we headed out there.

this is the entrance towards the restaurants cluster

front of the restaurant

menu

The only item during Happy Hour on the day of our visit, was the 1-for-1 Tiger draught beer, from 5 to 7pm.

Tiger beer

For food, we started off with french fries.

shoestring french fries

It was quite addictive, eating those french fries. Served piping hot, right off from the fryer. Goes well with the ketchup dip.

My friends had Heineken mostly, since they don't fancy Tiger beer. Tried a local beer too; Saigon Red.

Saigon Red

Found the taste acceptable but my beer drinking friends thought otherwise. Some say it was quite tasteless.  The crowd started to trickle in after 9pm, and soon the place was quite crowded with expats and some locals. There's free wifi too. So, you're well connected even when out dining in this area.

Felt hungry, so decided to order a mixed platter to share.

mixed platter

tuna tataki

chicken skewer

minced lamb meat

duck springroll

The platter has deep fried calamari, duck springroll, chicken skewers, tuna tataki and lamb tacos, and costs about SGD20+ and good to be shared amongst 3-4 pax.

Liked everything on the platter. Unless if you're not a lamb person because the minced lamb meat in the lamb tacos has quite a strong taste. There are various dipping sauces provided and it was fun guessing which sauce is for which. There were wasabi mayo, peanut sauce similar to satay taste (for the chicken skewer?), hoisin sauce (for springroll) and the rest, kinda forgotten how they tasted like. But, we'd just mixed it around and dipped it in more than one sauce just to get a combi of flavours. Somehow, that worked. Hehe.

We stayed for quite a while, had somemore beer, and re-ordered the french fries to munch. Then we saw other tables ordered dessert, and so we followed suit. The menu had just about 3 types of dessert, so we chose chocolate sundae.

chocolate sundae

We enjoyed the cold sundae very much, although it was overdosed with sweetness of the sticky brownie like thingy that no one else wanted to eat.

Our service staff for the night was pretty realistic. She had on a not so pleasant expression on her face when we ordered just beer and french fries. Once when our beer was not arriving after a long while, and we enquired about it, she just barked at us saying that she had already placed the order and it's coming! But when we ordered the mixed platter, and somemore beer, she treated us to a small smile. Hahaa!

In total, we had 7 beers, 2 french fries, 1 mix platter and a chocolate sundae shared amongst the 4 of us. Paid about SGD25 per pax.