Start from 64 curated places around Ho Chi Minh City, VN, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Anan Saigon
Saigon's first Michelin-starred restaurant and still its most exciting — a creative Vietnamese kitchen built on market ingredients from the Cho Cu below, reinterpreting street food through French technique. The pho foie gras and banh mi variations are the kind of dishes you talk about afterward.
Long Trieu
A Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant inside The Reverie Saigon, serving traditional dim sum at lunch and classic Guangdong preparations in the evening — fried prawns with XO sauce, steamed whole fish, and carefully sourced roast duck. A genuine fine dining experience for Cantonese cuisine outside of Hong Kong.
Trails & outdoors
Tao Dan Park Morning Circuit
A 10-hectare park in central District 3 with shaded pathways under century-old trees — the most important green corridor in the city center, where locals do tai chi, yoga, and badminton in the early hours. The birdcage market at the northeast entrance, where owners bring their birds to sing, is one of Saigon's great small rituals.
September 23 Park Walking Loop
The park at the backpacker district's edge, bordered by Le Lai, Nguyen Thi Nghia, and Pham Ngu Lao streets — a flattish loop where local residents do their morning exercise before the area's foot traffic picks up. Good for watching the neighborhood's dawn rhythm before the city accelerates.
Things to do
A O Show at Saigon Opera House
A 60-minute Vietnamese bamboo circus performance at the 1897 French colonial opera house — acrobatics, aerial work, contemporary dance, and live folk music that tells the story of Vietnam's rural-to-urban migration. The best-produced cultural performance in the city and genuinely moving despite no dialogue.
Ben Thanh Night Market
The street market that sets up outside Ben Thanh Market gates at dusk — a more atmospheric and less curated alternative to the day market, with food carts cooking fresh dishes, vendors bargaining loudly, and a nighttime energy that captures the district at its most alive. The street food alone justifies the visit.
Landmarks & sights
Reunification Palace
The modernist 1960s seat of the former South Vietnamese government, frozen in time with its original furniture, war-era communications bunkers, and rooftop helipad still intact. Walking through the underground command rooms gives a visceral sense of how the war ended here.
War Remnants Museum
The most confronting museum in Southeast Asia, housing war photography, confiscated military hardware, and exhibits on Agent Orange's generational effects. Its power is in the unflinching documentary record; the third-floor photography galleries are among the most important in the world.