When, on a Vietnam trip, you think \u201cI've already had pho and fresh spring rolls\u2014now for something different,\u201d a single shop right in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City's District 1 enters the running. Its name is CCCP (the Cyrillic abbreviation for the Soviet Union). Red-and-white checked curtains, the Russian folk doll Nevalyashka, floral wallpaper. In a space that feels like stepping into \u201cgrandma's house\u201d from the old Soviet bloc, it's an Eastern European restaurant serving borscht and shashlik (skewers). Why Soviet food in Vietnam, and how should a Japanese traveler enjoy it? We dig in starting from a local-media feature.<\/p>\n
What the English-language outlet Saigoneer introduced is CCCP, a Soviet\/Eastern European restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City's District 1. The co-owner who runs the shop, Nguy\u1ec5n Duy Th\u00e0nh, has experience studying, working, and living in Russia, and his mother-in-law is the Ukrainian chef Svetlana Nguyen. The recipes were assembled by this mother-in-law, bringing the home cooking straight into the restaurant.<\/p>\n
The interior intentionally stages \u201cnostalgia.\u201d A wooden dining set with picnic benches on casters, mismatched tablecloths, floral wallpaper. The selling point is a relaxed atmosphere, as if invited to a relative's house in the old Soviet bloc. This is a comfort with a lived-in feel\u2014a little different from the tourist-polished \u201cInstagrammable.\u201d<\/p>\n
It may seem surprising, but the ties between Vietnam and Russia (the former Soviet Union) run deep, and there's ample ground for food to cross borders. From the 1950s on, the Soviet Union continued educational support for Vietnam, and a cumulative total said to exceed 50,000 Vietnamese studied in the USSR and Russia. In the 1980s, there was a period when some 200,000 workers went to factories across the Soviet Union. The presence of Vietnamese who spent their youth in Russia, and of people from the former Soviet bloc married to Vietnamese, is an extension of this history.<\/p>\n
The CCCP brand itself didn't originate in Ho Chi Minh City. It began with a shop the Ukrainian chef Svetlana opened in Hanoi in 2005, later expanding to Ho Chi Minh City. A family with long ties to Russia recreated the flavors and spaces of their own memories in a southern city\u2014that's how this shop came to be. For travelers, it can be called a place to taste the \u201cmany layers of Vietnam,\u201d one step off the standard guidebook track.<\/p>\n
The signature dishes are, after all, meat. Lamb and pork shashlik (skewers) are central, alongside Eastern European classics: rye bread topped with butter and salted pork fat (salo), a platter of salt-cured fish such as beet-cured salmon and smoked mackerel, kotleta (breaded fried pork), and borscht. For dessert there's medovik layered with honey, Napoleon (a millefeuille-style cake), and smetana (fermented cream). It's a lineup that lets you experience a full run of Russian and Ukrainian home cooking.<\/p>\n
As a budget guide, Saigoneer's reporting puts it at roughly 300,000 VND per person. At 1 yen \u2248 170 VND, that's roughly a little under 2,000 yen per person (rates fluctuate, so check the rate at the time of your visit). Another local review notes that, setting aside the fish-roe, salt-fish\/smoked-fish platters, and meat combos, many single dishes are in the 100,000\u2013200,000 VND range, so the budget moves up or down depending on how you order. With a small group, the safe approach is to share a few dishes and see how it goes.<\/p>\n