Soup, rice, noodles – Hum Vegetarian has a delicious selection of authentic Vietnamese cuisine but for a vegetarian diet. Eating vegetarian in Vietnam is supposedly quite easy. Apparently, all you need to do is say “chay” and point to yourself, the food, or add it to the end of the name of the dish you want and they’ll make it vegetarian for you. Though saying vegetarian is dangerous here, because somehow they consider pork to be vegetarian.

Hum Vegetarian Ho Chi Minh City

Chay All the Way

But “chay” is the way to go, or “Buddhist”.  Some dishes however, just can’t be made vegetarian unless they are intended to be from the start – such as Pho – and others just plain out can’t – Bun Bo Hue. Briana hasn’t felt brave enough to attempt to order vegetarian versions of any meals here though. So we have been left to looking for restaurants that specifically cater to vegetarians – generally the restaurants will specify this by saying “chay”.

A highly esteemed vegetarian restaurant in Ho Chi Minh is “Hum Vegetarian”. It’s located just a few dozen feet down from the War Remnants Museum, and is a great place to get a bite after seeing the museum – which is what we did.

Cross a Garden to Enter

You enter the restaurant from the street over a little bridge over a pond, and enter into an interior garden with many trees, buddhas, and ponds. You can choose to eat here if you’d like. We chose to sit inside, though it’s still mostly open air. The decor in general is very nice.

The restaurant as a whole is a little classier, though still within the range of casual. We started off with drinks: lemon water for Briana and fresh coconut water straight from the coconut for me.

Deciding upon what meal to eat though took a little bit longer to figure out, they have a lot of options. The menu also had a neat feature of telling you the benefits of some of the dishes.

Ultimately, Briana decided upon a pineapple fried rice, which came served inside a hollowed out pineapple. I settled upon a pad thai which I was quite happy with as well. It was a little bit different than usual though – a little drier and smokier in flavor than typical.

Good Meal and a Nice Place to Visit

The meal was quite good and we certainly would deem it a success. If you’re in the area, we would recommend it as a place to try out, especially if you’re looking for some vegetarian fare. But, as I said a bit earlier, it is a bit classier – so the prices are steeper than your typical Vietnamese place, but with that being said, it’s all relative and will still come out to cheaper than a typical meal in the US. We considered it to be our Valentine’s Day meal outing.