Miet Thu
Tasting Menu Season 4 at Aiii House Saigon
A journey through Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, river culture, folk memory and local ingredients.
Miet Thu, Aiii House Saigon’s fourth tasting menu, opens a journey toward Vietnam’s Mekong Delta - a world shaped by rivers, alluvial soil, folk memory and everyday rituals.
After tracing the alleyways of Saigon, the attic rooms of Paris, and the waterborne imagination of Northern Vietnamese puppetry, Season Four turns toward a different geography: the floating, fertile landscapes of the South-West. It is a menu rooted in childhood recollections - gatherings in front of the house, improvised games, coconut ladles, river vegetables, tiny shrimp, and handwoven Kà Tum cakes.
Rather than treating these references as nostalgic decoration, Chef Alain Pham and the Aiii kitchen team approach them as cultural material. The menu draws from the textures and flavors of the Mekong Delta: river produce, wild herbs, fermented notes, native fruits, and ingredients shaped by the rhythm of water and land. Suggestions of lap xuong, mam ban, cà na, rau móp and Kà Tum appear not only as flavors, but as fragments of a larger sensory landscape.
At Aiii, the Mekong Delta is not presented through spectacle. Miet Thu favors a more instinctive language - playful, direct and deeply grounded. Guests are invited to loosen the formal codes of dining and return, for a moment, to the curiosity of childhood: tasting, discovering and remembering without too much distance.
The menu was first introduced through a private opening dinner, where its cultural atmosphere was brought to life with the participation of performer Năm Chà, winner of “Cuoi Xuyen Viet 2023”. Through folk songs, spoken rhythms and traditional games, the evening extended the spirit of Miet Thu beyond the plate, creating a fuller sense of the Mekong Delta’s communal and performative culture.
More than a menu about the Mekong Delta, Miet Thu is an exploration of how a region’s memory can be translated into taste. It preserves the generosity, spontaneity and emotional warmth of a riverine culture through a contemporary culinary lens, marking a new chapter in Aiii House Saigon’s evolving tasting menu series.
