I like my beer, and I like a good pub. By far my favourite in Ho Chi Minh City is the Winking Seal at 50 Đặng Thị Nhu in District 1.
I am not sure how I discovered this pub because its hidden away in a side street that I would never normally traverse. Anyway, I found it, was delighted and go there frequently.
A good pub must have decent beer, a pleasant ambience, good service and fair prices. The Winking Seal ticks all these boxes. It serves a range of tasty ‘craft beers, is beautifully decorated, has excellent bar staff and two happy hours – from 6pm until 8pm and from 10pm until midnight – when pints of beer are half price.
I go there between 6pm and 8pm to drink ‘Bohemian Bastard IPA. I doubt if the Vietnamese bar staff understand the meaning of this, or appreciate the alliterative plosives, but I think it is a great name. It is rather strong – 7.1% - but deliciously hoppy and flavoursome. I occasionally drink a beer named ‘Kosmonaut (perhaps so called because it takes you out of this dreary old world), which is 5.4%, but ‘Bohemian
Bastard is my favourite. Other tasty beers I have sampled are Cream Ale, Lemongrass and Dragon Fruit Pale Ale, purplish in colour. Oh, and there is the One Eye Imperial IPA, at 10.1% possibly the most powerful beer in HCMC. Its balanced taste makes it dangerously drinkable, but this stuff is outrageously potent. Overall, not a bad selection.
My one quibble with the Winking Seal is that the beers are, generally, too strong. In England I was very happy drinking Bathams bitter which is 4.3%. In a single long session I could handle five pints of Bathams, but with ‘Bohemian Bastard my absolute limit is three. I see no reason why a beer should be stronger that 4.5%, because it is surely the taste, not the alcohol content, that matters. Despite my reservations about its strength, Bohemian Bastard is infinitely preferable to the bland bottled lagers – Saigon Red and Green, Tiger, Heineken, Larue, Amstel – ubiquitous in HCMC.
As I say, I frequent The Winking Seal between the hours of 6pm and 8pm. My other grouse about craft beer, apart from its unnecessary strength, is its price. Throughout HCMC, craft beer sells at a ridiculous 140,000
VND (= £5 or $6) per pint. This is more than I would pay in England, and Vietnam is generally cheaper than my home country. A pint of Bohemian Bastard outside happy hours costs 140,000 VND to 13,000 VND for a bottle of Saigon Red. Therefore, I patronize The Winking Seal during happy hours when the price of a pint is an affordable 70,000 VND (= $3). As far as I know, the Winking Seal is the only craft beer outlet in HCMC that has happy hours.
Now let me describe the pub itself. It has two drinking spaces: on the ground floor and on the roof. I prefer the rooftop area because of the fresh air and the quiet. I always perch on a high stool, looking down at the street below, my beer resting on a wooden ledge. The downstairs bar, where most of the beer is poured, is much fancier than the unpretentious rooftop. It is beautifully decorated. The walls are white. The sides of the bar are covered in blue patterned tiles. Over the bar and against one wall hang copper light fittings. The pubs logo is a seal, whose image is
However, the piece de resistance, the crowning glory, of this aesthetically pleasing pub is the dumbwaiter. Dumbwaiter! How I love the metaphor! How I love to see this mechanism in operation! It is a blessing for the Winking Seal, connecting the ground floor with the rooftop three floors up. A human waiter would be hard pressed to run up and down the narrow staircase with trays of beer; instead, glasses of beer are poured downstairs and placed inside the dumb waiter which, using an electric motor, transports them heavenwards. But this is no mere piece of machinery; it is also a splendid objet dart.
