Thao Le opened Saigonese Eatery on Phu Quoc in 2016. Two moves and a decade later, she talks about the Sydney chefs who shaped her, the mango tree she saved in the garden of the restaurant and the team that have stuck around.
Some things are worth protecting. Like this mango tree in the garden of Saigonese Eatery on Phu Quoc’s Tran Hung Dao Street. Chef and owner Thao Le had been warned off the plot that became the third location of her restaurant. People told her it had too many trees. She went to look anyway. Afterwards, the owner came to her. He wanted her as his tenant and no one else. “The land picked me – I didn’t pick the land,” she says, squinting up at the tree.
“The Land Picked Me”
The owner had inherited the plot from his grandmother, who grew mangoes on it. His family owns most of the block, and most of their tenants cut the trees down. But he told Thao that this tree was older than him. “Try to protect it,” he said. And so she built the restaurant around it.
Tran Hung Dao is the island’s main road. It starts in Duong Dong town and runs south for about 10 km to the airport, parallel to Long Beach the whole stretch. The restaurant is hidden, along the way, in the shade of the trees she kept.
The Other Five Days
Thao learned to look after things in Sydney. She went there for a master’s degree that needed her in class two days a week. She spent the rest of the week in kitchens and often skipped class as well. “Sometimes it was just more interesting to work than to go to school,” she says with a shrug.
At Regatta, on the harbor, she met chef Claudio Morales. He butchered and cured his own fish and made his own sausages. And his flavors were bold. He would later run the kitchen at Saint Peter, Josh Niland’s celebrated fish restaurant in Paddington.
It was the height of molecular gastronomy – foams, smoke and spheres. But Claudio wanted none of it. “He didn’t try to bend food or change its form.”
The hours were brutal. Thao worked 90 a week. And she was a young woman in a foreign country, in a kitchen run brigade-style. Still, she didn’t complain. “I was a workaholic.”
The next chef she worked under was the opposite of Claudio. At Moxhe in Bronte, Belgian-born chef David Coumont cooked simple, seafood-led cuisine and kept a relaxed kitchen. He picked Thao up most mornings to go see what catch had landed at the Sydney Fish Market.
Just Enough
“Some days,” she remembers, “the menu was still undecided at 5pm, an hour before service.” Oregano grew out the back, and nobody picked it ahead of time. So, when an order came in for squid with oregano, Thao would run outside and pick just enough for that one plate.
Asked which chef she feels she’s turned out like, she picks Claudio. “He’s like my second dad.” Ten years later, he came to Saigon and stood beside her again at Tí Nỵ, her bar in Thao Dien. Guests kept assuming he was the chef. “No, that’s my daughter,” he told them, looking across at Thao.
That night, he ate her cured cobia. “I never taught you how to cook fish like this,” he said. Thao told him he had, in a roundabout way.
In reality, both chefs remain an influence. She tries to grow her own herbs, for example, but on Phu Quoc, the salt air can kill them after one crop. Even so, the mango tree has lasted decades in that salt air. And Saigonese Eatery has lasted 10 years.
Still With Me
She named it after home. “I called this place the Saigonese Eatery because that’s where we come from, after all,” she told us back in 2022. It opened in 2016 with a menu of whatever Thao wanted to make. She cooked miso and shoyu ramen from David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook, with steamed bao and chicken wings on the side. But the work was time-consuming and the margins were thin.
Slowly, the ramen came off the menu and the cooking moved toward the plates Thao serves now. She added burgers, pizza and pasta, but made them her way, baking the burger buns and grinding the beef for the patties in house. The pizza is a sourdough pizzetta, small enough for guests to have room for the rest of the menu.
The restaurant has moved twice. The first building was falling apart. Then, after COVID, the second landlord sold the land the relocated restaurant was son. COVID itself was the low point. “That was rock bottom,” she says. “But I survived it, and the team is still with me.”
Most of her staff have been with her for more than five years. Some have been there eight or nine. Her pastry chef joined seven years ago, “when neither of us could make a proper sourdough,” she confesses. Today the bakery supplies some of the island’s resorts. “Some of the team arrived single – now they have kids,” she smiles.
The day starts early. The bakers begin at 3 or 4am, and the oven in the middle of the house stays on all day – baking sourdough first, then croissants, cheesecake, brownies and buns. The sourdough is “our rock,” Thao says.
Breakfast and brunches lead on to afternoon cake and coffee. The beans are roasted on site, so the smell of coffee mixes with the bread from the oven and fills the space. There’s fine Robusta for cà phê sữa đá, and Arabica from Sơn La and Da Lat for espresso. “We’re serious about coffee,” she nods.
No Other Kitchen Here Cooks Like This
By evening, the menu is more focused on the sea – shimmering over there somewhere, across Tran Hung Dao and a couple of hundred meters away, between beachfront resorts like La Veranda and Cassia Cottage.
Almost everything comes from Phu Quoc. She takes the island’s herring, pickles it, then chars it. She dry-ages her fish until the skin is taut, so it pops when it hits the grill. She doesn’t know another kitchen on the island that does this. There’s the cobia again, mackerel and prawns, a ceviche and an uni pâté. Plus, there’s duck breast that they cure in-house.
A lot of the local catch is dredged, reef and all, so she relies on a long-term supplier she trusts. “If your source isn’t good, no amount of technique can cover it,” she says. “The guest eats and knows right away.”
Then there’s wine. Saigonese Eatery acts as the island distributor for Vino Beer and Wine Embassy. Over 1,000 bottles are in the cellar at any time, so the list runs deep.
Thao knows what she’d order. “Right now, I feel like a cold Sauvignon Blanc, the ceviche and the uni pâté. And maybe the grilled fish and the crab fried rice if I was sharing.”
For anyone staying along Long Beach, it’s an easy escape from the hotel buffet line – and the best way to eat the island’s seafood.
A Familiar Face
Inside Saigonese Eatery Phu Quoc, the ceiling is high and the room is built like a warehouse. Where there are partitions, they’re made of glass, so guests can watch the bakers shaping dough and the cooks at work, and so the garden is always in view.
And there’s a familiar face watching over the room. It’s the Vietnamese woman reproduced on sugarcane juice carts. “I like that lady,” Thao says, but she wanted to modernize her. So she had her painted prettier and cooler, with tattoos and big hoop earrings.
She was first painted at the old Saigonese Eatery site, on a metal board, “to hide the ugly wall next door.” Because she wasn’t painted straight onto the wall, she could come along when the restaurant moved.
The staff have their own story about her.
Not long after the move, some of them thought they saw a woman with long hair in the restaurant at night. The builders said they had seen her too. The woman they described looked like the one in the painting. Thao invited a monk to hold a ceremony, and the sightings stopped.
The team now thinks of her as the restaurant’s guardian – the perfect spirit to watch over the place, because, Thao says, Saigonese Eatery “looks like a mother too – it’s very caring because it’s open all day, so you can come in any time and still belong.”
Under The Mango Tree
Between services, Thao pops out into the garden for a cigarette under the mango tree. Next year, she plans to move the dinner tables out here and fill the warehouse with her bread, coffee and wine to take home.
The tree will still be standing. She’ll made sure of it.
