This year’s festival, organized by the HCMC Department of Tourism in collaboration with the Vietnam Tourism Association, will be held at the Youth Cultural House in District 1 near the iconic Saigon Notre Dame Cathedral and the Central Post Office.

Gourmets will have the opportunity to explore authentic Vietnamese street food, which has put Vietnam’s culinary culture on global tourism map, as well as cuisines from South Korea, Thailand, Japan, Thailand, China and India.

The highlight of the festival will be a two-day event on November 16 and 17 featuring chefs from five-star hotels worldwide. The chefs will "perform" on the stage, showcasing their their talent and experience. Game shows and bartender performances will also be part of the festival.

HCMC received more than six million foreign visitors in the first nine months of this year, up 14.3 percent from a year ago.

Vietnam’s largest city has garnered plaudits from global gourmets, beating many world-famous food hubs to break into the top five cities for street food, according to the Street Food City Index 2019 released last month by the U.S.’s leading business magazine CEOWorld.

Last year, Saigon was named among the world’s best food destinations by Caterwings, a site that offers online food ordering service in Europe.

Vietnamese ranked among the world’s 15 favorite cuisines in a survey released earlier this year by YouGov, a British online market research company.

Banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich.
Photo by Shutterstock/Andrea Nguyen.

Some of the dishes found on street corners here have made it to many corners of the world, like banh mi, a Vietnamese sandwich which has been listed in the top 20 street foods in the world by Fodor’s Travel, a U.S travel site
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