Q was the question she asked

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The first thing I knew about Q Bar was that I didn’t know where it was. The year was 1996, and I had been living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam—the former Saigon—for a couple of months. I’d made a couple of friends, though no one I was close to yet, but I’d heard them mention Q Bar in passing. They didn’t really describe it, because how could you and why would you describe a bar that was obviously the place to be? All the words of approval we use—cool, hot, hip—were insufficient. Q Bar was simply Q Bar, and I did not know how to get there.

Eventually, I realized I had been regularly flying right past it on my 70cc moped, and I understood why I’d overlooked it: Q Bar was tucked into the side of the Saigon opera house. Of all places! This Beaux-Arts edifice, built by the French colonial powers and opened in 1900, this 500-seat hulk that anchored key streets at the core of District 1, had a warren of dark little rooms off to the right, and a tiny patio and a strip of grass. This was Q Bar. I simply had never passed by at the correct hour to note that, as the sun began to descend, this small patch began to fill up with expatriates, with returning Vietnamese from France, Canada, the United States, and beyond, and even with some locals who, perhaps earlier than others, understood that Q Bar was not just the best bar in Saigon but among the best bars in the world.

Q Bar had a look. It alluded to France, to Rome, to New York, but most of all to a Vietnam that was simultaneously real and illusory. “The reminder of place,” wrote Andrew Ranard in the International Herald Tribune in 1993, “may be in the ironwork — a handful of lights around the bar that look like ‘black suns.’ Their bulbs are made from motor-scooter headlights — an apt touch, for scooter traffic dominates Ho Chi Minh City — with flames of black iron curling from their centers. Or it could be in the painting above the bar, which is somehow sensuous, tender, dangerous and tragic all at once. It is a solid black canvas with eight images in color arranged in two rows — a pointed screw in a hand, a spool, a flower, a severed hand, an avocado perhaps, a Q, something that is unidentifiable and a cone.”

Q Bar had solid drinks: a seemingly unending supply of high-quality liquor, at fairly reasonable prices, at a time when, say, single-malt scotch was not a drink you could expect to find everywhere. (I remember, somehow, a Q Bar night of too many Laphroaigs and some excellent French fries.) To sip a gin-and-tonic in one of the wrought-iron chairs on the patio, while motorbikes swarmed past in the dark and the lights of downtown Saigon sparkled, was to feel you were at the center of the universe.

Q Bar’s music was excellent. “It was always chill. It was always perfect,” the photographer Catherine Karnow, who discovered it in 1994, told me. “It was a certain kind of cool music that you certainly didn't hear in Vietnam. But you didn't really even hear it elsewhere, you know? It had that tone of chill with a little sexiness, with a little Latin sometimes—I mean, the kind of playlist you can find in five minutes on Spotify now. But then it was just right.”

Q Bar had the vibe and the people who vibed. You didn’t know who you were going to run into there. Maybe Matt Dillon or a Beastie Boy. Maybe your next girlfriend or your next investor. Maybe an artist with a solo show opening in San Francisco next spring, or a backpacker splurging on a fancy cocktail, or the overworked architects planning a new city center, or just the friends you knew from work or from the mini-hotel you happened to live in. Q Bar was a nexus that drew in anyone who looked at the frenetic sprawl of Saigon—the whirl of noise and action, the scents of fruit and noodles, the nonstop action and interaction—and decided to put on a goddamn good outfit and have a serious drink.

For roughly a decade after its opening in 1991, Q Bar represented not just what “the New Vietnam,” as every press outlet called it, was at the moment but what Vietnam, or more specifically Saigon, could be, maybe, who knows. It was a vision of the future, informed by the past and the ever-shifting present, and that look, that music, that vibe were predominantly the work of one woman, Q Bar’s co-owner, a Vietnamese-American named Phuong Anh Nguyen, who died earlier this month at the age of 60.

As far as I can remember, I never met Phuong Anh. This was my failing, not hers. I was easy to overlook—a terminally awkward 22-year-old in ill-fitting clothes. But Phuong Anh was not.

To the writer Andrew Lam, Phuong Anh was ”a beautiful, petite woman with a sad, sweet smile punctuated by a beauty mark above her lips.” In Catherine Karnow’s iconic photo, she’s in denim shorts and a red gingham bikini top, wearing sunglasses and dangly earrings, sitting on a vintage Vespa and holding a live chicken by its neck. On the cover of the New York Times Magazine, she’s in a chic black dress, clutching a glass of red wine, and nestled into a Q Bar nook with David Jacobson, her partner in the bar. Always, always, always, she looked incredible. “She was impossibly stylish and had a dauntingly cool remove,” the writer Peter Jon Lindberg wrote me in an email.

Phuong Anh was not, however, just her looks. She had presence, her friends told me, and an uncanny ability to forge new connections. Lam, for example, met her at a luau while visiting his college roommate in La Jolla, California.

“She's walking down this mansion 'cause they were living in a mansion,” he said, “and she was [wearing] a lei and looking beautiful and greeted me as if we've been friends forever.” And that was that—they were friends forever.

For Irene Khin Wong, a chef and caterer in New York, the connection to Phuong Anh was through food. Wong was living in Saigon in the early 1990s, and throwing dinner parties featuring everything from beet salad to food from her native Myanmar—and, naturally, Phuong Anh, who had rented a villa nearby, showed up. Before long, Wong was helping Phuong Anh design menu items for Q Bar—tater tots!—and they were traveling to Yangon to see (or try to see) Aung San Suu Kyi. Again, friends forever.

“With her champagne or bourbon in her hand, she talks to everybody, you know?” Wong told me. “And she makes everybody, like, so comfortable, and her presence and her persona just liven up the place.”

At Q Bar, this earned her a long list of famous admirers, from Robert DeNiro to Norman Mailer to JFK Jr. to Daryl Hannah, according to Andrew Lam. In 2025, to be honest, that seems like an odd and somewhat banal way to measure a person’s success, but in the mid-1990s it was stunning: All these celebrities were flying halfway around the world, to a country still recovering from a catastrophic war, in order to visit a bar and become smitten with its co-owner.

And it’s even more amazing when you consider that Phuong Anh was herself a product of that war: She and her family fled Vietnam three years after the fighting ended, enduring attacks at sea that killed two of her siblings before making it to California, where she grew up in Los Angeles. Her return to Vietnam in 1990–1, as one of the first wave of Viet Kieu, was seen as an act of bravery, or folly.

“I thought she was crazy,” said Andrew Lam, adding that his own parents thought he was crazy, too, since his father had been a general in the South Vietnamese army. “I imagine everyone else was telling Phuong Anh that: ‘You’re nuts to go into Vietnam when the country barely opened up.’”

At the time, Vietnam was nothing like it is now. In Hanoi, Lam told me, “the city barely had any electricity. And it felt like I’d gone into a city of ghosts because all you see is shadows.” Saigon was not much more advanced, he said—no taxis, lots of beggars, nothing to do at night. And it was in that environment that Phuong Anh and David¹ decided to create Q Bar. When Lam arrived, they were still working on the tiled floor.

This is the moment I wish I could have been there for—those first, earliest days of Q Bar. What kind of sense did it make in what Lam called “this cocoon of communist ideology”? Who were their first customers? How did they land that remarkable, unique location? (One story says it was haunted or cursed, therefore a bargain.) By the time I arrived, Q Bar was already established, and Vietnam was becoming established, too: My parents and professors might have thought me intrepid, but I was part of a trend. As was Q Bar, eventually.

“Within a few years, you start seeing bars similar to Phuong Anh's,” said Lam. “You know, gilded tables and gilded mirrors and warm lighting and expensive drinks. But clearly everyone who was anybody was showing up there [at Q Bar] to be seen, you know? 'Cause if you don't mind paying $6 or $7 for a drink, it shows that you've moved up in status, you know?”

As Phuong Anh’s friends tell it, the celeb-tastic capitalist elements of running a bar did not change her.

“Her strength has always been that she was always so personal. She knows you. She remembers details about you,” said Lam. “You walk in after six months’ hiatus and she’d say, ‘How was Bali? You know, last time you were here, you said you would go to Bali. Did you have a good time?’ It’s that kind of detail that made people love her.”

And so maybe this, as much as the material success, was what built her legend: The idea that you could flee your homeland, endure horrors, find sanctuary abroad, and then return to that homeland to make a life while maintaining a level of poise and kindness that many less-traumatized people struggle to achieve—this was inspiration in its warmest, loveliest form. If Q Bar represented one possible path for Vietnam, Phuong Anh represented one for humanity.

“That's what people saw in her, which is that: the potential of themselves,” said Lam. She was “someone who left with nothing, you know, and came back with the world.”

🪨

Q Bar was not perfect, not for everyone. Like I said, I was an outsider there, an unknown semi-regular. My friend Susan Hammond said she hung out at Q Bar mostly because “there were few bars female expats went to in the mid 90s,” and that she’d move on to somewhere cheaper after just one drink. Another friend, Hanh Bui, wrote me, “I never really felt like I belonged there, or was only there because of other people.” She recalled one night there, talking to a gorgeous woman, that made her feel out of place: “She was a model, half Vietnamese, half white American. Cannot remember what she was doing in Saigon, or anything about our conversation. Only that when I asked her, ‘Where are you from?,’ she answered, ‘Soho.’”

I get it: Q Bar could be intimidating. I am surely not the only one who spent many nights there without befriending either Phuong Anh or David Jacobson. Thinking objectively, I probably did not belong there. But then I didn’t belong anywhere—certainly not at the girlie bars, or the pubs for British alcoholics, or at Apocalypse Now, the big, loud party bar a few blocks away. (If Q Bar was acid jazz and trip-hop, Apocalypse Now was Oasis.) Now, however, from a distance of nearly 30 years, I can appreciate how lucky I was to experience Q Bar at all, even if I never became an insider. Feeling out of place has taught me as much or more than feeling at home.

In the late 1990s, Q Bar ran into a series of troubles. The Vietnamese government, always wary of foreign-run businesses, shut it down in, I believe, 1998, and David, apparently now wary himself, moved to Bangkok to launch a branch there a year later. Phuong Anh managed to reopen the Saigon Q Bar around the same time, but it may have been shut down again in 2001 or 2002. (The timeline is hard to establish.) For a while, she stayed with Irene Khin Wong in New York, but returned again to Vietnam, where she brought Q Bar back once more.

But from there, Q Bar’s existence was more tenuous. In 2011, one friend tells me, it seemed to have definitively closed in Ho Chi Minh City, and at some point Phuong Anh opened it in Hoi An, a coastal town almost halfway to Hanoi; I can’t quite tell if that one is still in business² . In any case, Q Bar had already begun to lose its relevance: A decade after everyone started talking about “the new Vietnam,” there finally was a new Vietnam, with new types of bars, cafes, restaurants, and clubs to appeal to new waves of expats, Viet Kieu, and newly hip (and affluent) locals. The world Q Bar created had overtaken it.

And then, sometime within the last ten years, Phuong Anh recreated Q Bar in Ho Chi Minh City, in the Thao Dien neighborhood, which the writer Connla Stokes described to me as “the original family-friendly expat bubble, which had had a second layer of gentrification with galleries, cocktail bars, boutiques, craft beer bars, etc, etc., all powered by young Vietnamese and bearded expat entrepreneurs.”

It’s where Phuong Anh was living, along with her husband, an Englishman, and when Stokes asked Phuong Anh why she’d chosen to open there, she told him, “All of our friends live around here and they never bother going anywhere else.”

To me, this feels like prophecy. If Phuong Anh and Q Bar had once represented Vietnam’s future, well, then this was that very future: a cozy existence in the near suburbs running a bar for pals. (I bet even babies were welcome there.) It might not have been what we all expected from Q Bar back in the 1990s—or from ourselves—but this is where many of us wound up.

At this point, I feel like I have to tell you what I know of how Phuong Anh died, although I feel weird doing so. But here it is as it was told to me: Late last summer, while visiting Paris, she had a seizure. Doctors discovered a tumor, and eventually removed it, but the cancer had spread, and she died. That’s it. It’s tragic, but it’s hard to see in those details an ending that suits her story. It’s a death that’s far, far smaller than the life she lived.

And that, I suppose, is why I’ve written all of this about a woman I never met: because she used a portion of her life to create a place that meant something to me in my youth, and to a whole generation of people who passed in and out of Saigon in the 1990s, and now that she’s gone, as are so many others these days, her contribution deserves to be remembered. I am clearly still processing that era of my life, trying to figure out what I saw and what I missed, what I understood and misunderstood and still don’t quite understand about a world I was present for but am slowly forgetting. And while I don’t want to let nostalgia overcome me, I do want to remember that time as in some way fundamentally good, because I think maybe it was, and I feel sure that Q Bar, whether I belonged there or not, was a part of that happiness.

Okay, maybe, just this once, I will allow myself a moment of nostalgia, and I’ll imagine myself back at Q Bar, sitting outside on a chair in the not quite cool enough Saigon evening, the ice melting in my gin. I’m here with a friend or three, and we’re wondering what the night will bring—dancing at Nghê Sĩ? riding our bikes at high speed through Cholon? grilled scallops in that converted garage near the river?—but for now we wait and drink and sweat a little. We’re here in the right place with the right vibe, and none of us knows what will happen next or who’ll wander through Q Bar and into our lives. A Hollywood starlet? A local gangster? Or maybe Phuong Anh herself—she’s got to be around here somewhere, right? In any case, we’re not going anywhere, not yet, because this is where it all begins. 🪨🪨🪨

Check it out: Andrew Lam’s new book of short stories

Read a Previous Attempt: I went to a concert

1  I emailed him for this story, but never heard back.

2  There’s now a Q Bar in Hanoi, but it appears to be unrelated.