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Best New Bars of 2010
Category: General Published on Monday, 20 December 2010 17:16 Written by Nick Ross Hits: 838
With the staff greeting you with the words, ‘welcome home,’ there is something surreal and yet surprisingly alluring about Ala Mezon. A restobar where France meets Japan, an uncanny collaboration at the best of times, here is a place that genuinely mixes Gallic flair with all the nuances of the Land of the Rising Sun.
Take the food menu, for example. Beef carpaccio sits side by side with Japanese-style risotto balls, Japanese beef curry, maguro salada, ika kappa maki and baked clams gratinee. Based on my last visit, the cuisine tastes good, too, although I was more taken with my carpaccio than my sushi rolls.
Then there’s the interior. The décor incorporates lime green in the stairwells, bold maroon on the ground floor and orange moving up to the subtly lit top-floor terrace. There are two games rooms for playing board games, Wii and X-Box. And in between there are bar areas, a dining space and sofas aplenty, all surrounded by Japanese imagery and artwork. It’s quite a mix and in places very impressionistic. A bit of something for everyone or, as man behind the scenes Albin Deforges may tell you, a home away from home. Even the slightly more chilled out lounge-style music seems to fit the mood.
It is for all these reasons that Ala Mezon is, in our opinion, the best new bar of the year. What really makes it stand out is that it’s unique. In The Word we often complain about the lack of variety in Saigon. Here’s a testament to what you can do if you try and be a little different. Let’s hope more bar owners and restaurateurs follow suit. This city craves originality.
Boston Sports Bar
In the year that Lucky Café closed down, new pretenders have come along to take its place in the Pham sports bar firmament. The Spotted Cow is without doubt a good addition to the area, its simple but decent menu, clean but easy design and reasonable prices make it a great alternative for sports and non-sports lovers alike. But, Boston Sports Bar has to take the honours for best newcomer when it comes to genuine sports bars.
Set on three levels with an upstairs pool table and two outdoor terrace areas, the lifeblood of this watering hole has to be the square bar semi-basement space downstairs. Two darts boards fill up a pre-allotted playing area on the far side of the room while high, bar-style wooden tables and semi bare-brick walls give the place a rustic authenticity often lacking elsewhere in The Pham.
The key here, though, is that this place is quite genuinely a watering hole and a busy one, too. And, by being a well laid-out venue, with punters propping up the stone-topped bar and loud but not overly obtrusive music playing in the background, atmosphere also comes in to play.
So, Boston, for The Word you are one of the best newcomers to the bar scene this year. You may not fill the enigmatic shoes of Lucky, which gave us nominally Japanese fare, sizzling griddled rice dishes and California rolls at the weekends to provide something a little unique. But, with your pizza, pasta, grill, sandwiches and Asian food aand spirits by the bottle, you’re doing a pretty good job here.
2 Lam Son
Known alternatively as the Martini Bar and the Park Hyatt Bar, for contemporary yet Asian-style décor, design and the simple fact that it has made the transition simply from being another bar into a busy nightspot (albeit as a place to go late), 2 Lam Son has to be one of the best new bars of the year. It also lays claim to being the first, 100 percent no smoking bar in town.
Key here is not only the downtown, street level location but the kind of people this place attracts — a good mixture of wealthy Vietnamese, Asian businessmen, expats and overseas Vietnamese. It’s a fairly fashionable, moneyed mix, and with the five-star prices here, it needs to be. But you’re paying for quality and when it comes to the cocktails, except perhaps for Cepage, there is nowhere in town to match the offerings here.
Key on the menu are the various drinks made with Martini. Running the gamut from the dirty Martini through to the likes of the rambutan Martini, the chocotini and the cosmopolitan, our favourite here is without doubt the blue lychee Martini. An orgasmic mix of lychee fruit, blue caracao and, of course, Martini, this is the kind of liquid refreshment you could drink all night. Just be prepared for the price. With most of the drinks going for over VND200,000++ a go, you need to make sure you’ve got a full wallet. Our only gripe is that service here can be a touch slow.
Otherwise, 2 Lam Son is an excellent addition to the city’s bar scene.