La vie en Nam
Aiii House Saigon – Season 1 Tasting Menu (July–November 2024)
La Vie en Nam, the first tasting menu at Aiii House Saigon, unfolded from July to November 2024 as a quiet, introspective beginning - one rooted in memory rather than declaration.
Conceived as a seasonal narrative, Season I did not aim to establish a signature or showcase technical virtuosity. Instead, it traced a personal geography: the everyday life of southern Vietnam, remembered through fragments of sound, scent, and gesture. The title La Vie en Nam emerged instinctively, deliberately ungrammatical, echoing emotion rather than language - a way of seeing life shaped by place and experience.
The menu’s narrative drew from the intimate landscape of a Saigon alleyway: weathered electricity poles layered with old notices, tangled wires, the calls of street vendors drifting through narrow passages, the aroma of grilled food lingering in the morning air. These elements did not appear as literal references, but as an emotional framework - familiar, dense, and quietly alive.
“I only wanted this to be a familiar beginning,” Alain Pham reflects.
“There are no elevated techniques, no luxury ingredients, no abstract ideas. This menu is about rebuilding structure and flavor — familiar flavors, my flavors.”
In La Vie en Nam, childhood memory becomes method. Simple gestures - games once played, street sounds once overheard, textures once touched - are reassembled with restraint. Techniques remain intentionally discreet, allowing composition and sensory recall to guide the experience rather than reinterpretation.
The menu does not romanticize the past. It acknowledges distance - the act of leaving, of growing older, of realizing that life extends beyond the narrow frame of early comfort. What remains are fragments: impressions that, when revisited, become a quiet form of happiness.
As the opening chapter of Aiii House Saigon, Season I established the foundation of Alain Pham’s culinary approach today - cuisine as narrative, memory as structure, and emotion as a legitimate point of departure.
