The demolition of Number 19 Ngo Duc Ke St, Saigon

The demolition of the small building that was 15 - 19 Ngo Duc Ke St near the Saigon River won’t be remembered as one of Saigon’s many recent heritage tragedies. It wasn’t a building that left any lasting impression. Still, I felt a little pang of nostalgia as I wandered by last week and saw a gaping hole where a popular little Saigon eatery once stood. Restaurant 19, like Number 13 next door, was a favourite little Vietnamese restaurant through the 1990s and the early 2000s as we were building Travel Indochina. It was popular with most of the major small group adventure travel companies operating in Vietnam at that time too - including Intrepid, Peregrine and others. Over the course of the 90s and early 2000s, thousands of western tourists sampled Number 19’s take on Vietnamese cuisine when the tourism industry was in its infancy. It wasn’t the city’s finest restaurant by any means, but many great times were had there - the oily but tasty fried fish with lemongrass and chilli was a favourite. And we joked that no matter how much we ate and drank, and irrespective of how many of us there were, the bill always seemed to come in at 70,000 Dong per person. 19 Ngo Duc Ke had a Vietnam War history too - that few of the diners were ever aware of. In the 1960s, it was the office of UPI - United Press International. Many of the big names of international journalism during the Vietnam War era passed through the building. Neil Sheehan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Bright Shining Lie, one of the finest books about the Vietnam War, was based there as UPI's Saigon Bureau Chief in the early 1960s. Farewell 19 Ngo Duc Ke.