Yesterday’s post was all about the inconspicuous entrance and passageway leading to L’Usine. L’Usine means factory in French, and L’Usine here is an old factory loft space in downtown Saigon that could be in NY’s Soho or the Marais in Paris. It is an ultra hip restaurant, gallery, fashion outlet and gathering place.
As I said yesterday you’d never find the place if you didn’t have insider information. You enter a covered alley off the main shopping street and pass through a dark passageway lined with stalls selling traditional Vietnamese paintings of women in conical hats. At the end of the stalls you turn right into a motorbike parking passage that leads to a stairway where the only clue to something more is a sign with a finger pointing up the stairs. The entrance to L’Usine itself is off a tile hallway on the second floor and is open to the outside with a view of the galvanized tin roofs that cover the inner courtyard. There are many secret spaces like this in Saigon. You often catch a glimpse of some wonderful French colonial villa or garden court through an open gate or door on a dingy street.
