Today With You

Thảo Điền and the Rise of the Considered Dining Room

Ho Chi Minh City's dining scene has spent the last decade sorting itself into tiers more legible than at any point in its modern history. The district of Thảo Điền, now administratively part of Thủ Đức City, sits at the sharp end of that process. What began as an expatriate-facing neighbourhood of brunch cafés and Italian restaurants has matured into something more complex: a zone where Vietnamese-inflected tasting menus, design-conscious interiors, and serious beverage programs operate alongside the street stalls and local pho shops that preceded them. Today With You, at 99 Thảo Điền, is part of this newer layer, a restaurant that positions itself against a comparable set defined less by cuisine category than by atmosphere and intentionality of experience.

That context matters because Thảo Điền now functions as a genuine competitive arena. Akuna operates at the top of the innovative tier with a price point and format discipline that places it alongside the city's most serious tasting-menu addresses. Coco Dining occupies the mid-range innovative bracket, and Anan Saigon approaches the city's street-food inheritance from a more composed, refined-format angle. Within that spread, a restaurant that leads with setting and emotional register, as Today With You's name implies, is making a distinct bet: that the arc of an evening matters as much as the technical rigour of any single dish.

The Setting as First Course

In multi-course dining, sequencing is everything. The same logic applies to how a room lands before food arrives. Thảo Điền's streetscape, tree-lined lanes, older French-colonial villas sitting beside newer low-rise commercial builds, provides a particular kind of approach. At 99 Thảo Điền, the address is residential in character, part of the district's tendency to house its better restaurants in spaces that feel discovered rather than announced. This is a neighbourhood where the leading dining rooms do not advertise themselves with signage scaled for traffic; they rely on word of mouth, social reach, and the kind of repeat custom that comes from a good first experience.

That first impression sets the narrative arc of the meal. Across Ho Chi Minh City's design-led tier, from the structured progression at CieL to the banquet-hall classicism of Long Trieu, the most consistent signal of a restaurant operating at a considered level is the coherence between its physical environment and the pace at which it feeds you. A room that reads as warm and intimate before a single dish has arrived has already shaped how the guest will receive what follows.

Reading the Meal as a Sequence

The editorial angle most useful for understanding a restaurant like Today With You is not the single signature dish but the progression: how an opening course frames appetite, how middle courses build or shift register, and how a final plate or drink sends the guest back into the street with a particular feeling. This is the logic behind the tasting-menu format's dominance in the city's more ambitious rooms, and it is a logic that bleeds into à la carte restaurants that still understand pacing as craft.

Vietnam's dining culture already contains a native understanding of sequence, the way a meal moves from soup to shared proteins to rice, the way tea or fresh herb plates punctuate rather than interrupt. Restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City that absorb that native logic into a more contemporary format tend to read more coherently than those that import Western tasting-menu structure wholesale. The city's most referenced examples of this synthesis, such as Gia in Hanoi and La Maison 1888 in Da Nang, demonstrate that the Vietnamese dining sequence is a resource, not a constraint.

Today With You serves Korean-Style Italian Pasta & Pizza in a smart casual setting. What the address and neighbourhood context do confirm is the company the restaurant keeps and the register it operates within.

How It Compares in the City's Mid-to-Upper Tier

For a useful sense of scale: Anan Saigon prices at ₫₫, accessible by the standards of the international dining circuit. Akuna and Long Trieu both operate at ₫₫₫₫, the city's upper bracket. Coco Dining sits at ₫₫₫, the middle tier of serious dining. Today With You is priced in the affordable range, with an estimated cost of about $20 per person.

For comparison points further afield, the kind of meal-as-narrative thinking that shapes the leading rooms in this tier is visible at global addresses like Atomix in New York City, where the tasting progression is treated as a complete compositional act, or at Le Bernardin, where the sequencing of a seafood-led menu has been refined over decades. Ho Chi Minh City's better restaurants are increasingly literate in that tradition while remaining grounded in local ingredient logic.

Planning a Visit

Today With You is located at 99 Thảo Điền in Thủ Đức, reachable from central Ho Chi Minh City by taxi or ride-hailing app in roughly 20 to 30 minutes depending on traffic, with Thu Duc Bridge crossings adding time during peak hours. Opening hours are daily from 11 AM to 3 PM and 5 PM to 10 PM, and reservations are recommended. Given the neighbourhood's trajectory and the density of good options nearby, building the visit as part of a broader Thảo Điền evening, arriving early, exploring the district, and then sitting down, makes practical sense.

Elsewhere in Vietnam, dining options across the country's price spectrum range from the approachable comfort of White Rose in Hoi An to the seafood-forward format at Bien 14 in Ha Long, and the national chain reach of venues like GoGi House in Bac Lieu and King BBQ in Rach Gia. Vietnam's dining range runs from Jollibee in Kon Tum and Dookki in Minh Xuan to Big Bowl in Cam Ranh and BIG CHILL in Phan Thiet, which makes Thảo Điền a clear dining district within the city.