This is the coolest apartment block in a South-East Asia favourite

The building doesn’t look like much from the outside. It’s festooned with your usual jumble of powerlines and besieged by an armada of motorbikes. A few tourists check their phones to see if they’re in the right place and a street food vendor looks bored as she casually slaps together a meal that would be haute cuisine in any other part of the world but in Vietnam, you get it for less than a buck.

When I delve a little deeper into No. 14 Ton That Dam, I see that facades can be deceiving and I’ve wandered into one of the coolest spots in Ho Chi Minh City. It’s a French colonial ruin that has been commandeered by hipster bars and cafes, the kind of place where you can have a coffee in the afternoon, a cocktail in the evening, and get a tattoo, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The first cafe I visit is a gorgeous spot that is ruined by the not uncommon sight of tourists with their heads buried in their phones. Three of them monopolise the best seats in the house, sitting by a window that gazes out into the city.

Watching them makes me all the more grateful that I grew up travelling at a time before smartphones became a thing, otherwise it could be me sitting there, oblivious to the beauty that is right in front of me.

I pick my next stop based on it being filled with locals. It’s another (equally gorgeous) cafe that throws me a curly by not serving beer. The embarrassed smile of the girl behind the bar makes me feel like a mild degenerate so another coffee it is, then, despite it being five o’clock in the afternoon. I don’t usually partake in the black stuff at that hour but when in Vietnam, do as the Vietnamese do, and this cafe is one of the busiest places in the whole building.

The coffee is fantastic and it gives me all the energy I need to go bouncing off the crumbling walls in that ruin, climbing my way to the peak of this apartment block. Some of the venues here are almost hidden, and it’s easy to blow past if you’re not paying attention. Exploring it becomes a game of hide and seek that I take a little too seriously when, thinking something might be another cool bar, I inadvertently end up in the fire escape.

But when I finally make it to the pinnacle of the building, I arrive at Memento Saigon, a cocktail bar that makes my list of the top bars in Asia.

It’s like stepping into Narnia. The door is a bookshelf and pushing it open, I’m welcomed into a whole other world. Crooners are singing from the speakers, the decor makes me feel like I’m sitting in a 1920s garden party and, best of all, there is not a single tourist on their phone in sight.

It’s hard to go past a negroni here. They’re my go-to cocktail because they’re so damn hard to mess up but you’d be amazed how many bars I’ve been to that try their damnedest. Bars that take a classic equation of gin, vermouth and Campari, and turn it into something that tastes like orange-scented dish soap.

Memento Saigon is not one of them. The negroni is perfectly balanced and while it pains me to talk about cost in a place like Vietnam, the fact that it’s only $6 really speaks to the budget backpacker in me.

They have more inventive cocktails on their list and everything I try blows me away. And while I’d love to describe these drinks in more detail, my memories get blurry and my notes from that night appear to be written in hieroglyphics. There are a lot of underlines, exclamation marks(!), and what appears to be the sketch of a coconut.

There are too many bars in No. 14 Ton That Dam to experience them all in a week, let alone two nights. Just because I found my favourite, a night here is your adventure, and there is nothing stopping you from falling in love with yours.

DETAILS Memento Saigon is my favourite cocktail bar in Vietnam. The happy hour (5pm–8pm) is absurdly good value for classics, but make sure you try some of their signature creations. See instagram.com/memento.sgn

The writer travelled at their own expense