Chapter 01
The unmarked door
Getting into Emme takes knowing: up the block's internal stairs, find the dark-green door with no sign and ring the bell. Part of the experience is the feeling of having found it.
Story
Truc's room upstairs
70 Ham Nghi is a block from the 1960s. Upstairs, behind an unmarked door, interior designer Lai Chinh Truc opened Emme — the bar he designed himself, with a menu written like a love letter.
Chapter 02
The menu is a love story
Truc wrote the menu in four E-M-M-E chapters — meeting, dating and marrying, a lifetime together, the toast — and invited poet Tran Dinh Tin to rotate poems across its covers. Few Saigon bars print poetry on their menus.
Chapter 03
The people
Dung runs the counter — the menu's Something's Burning is Truc's dedication to him. On the same floor sits a.dau Kitchen, the house's sibling kitchen. The room is small, and everything in it carries a person's name.