For years, Saigon on Broughton Street was one of my favorite downtown restaurants.
The flavorful Vietnamese and Thai dishes, the moderate prices, the solid service and a variety of other factors made Saigon a staple of the downtown scene.
Saigon closed more than two years ago, but now owner Rachel Tran is back with Lady Saigon Cuisine.
Lady Saigon operates at Boomys, the establishment at 409 West Congress St. Boomys feels like a neighborhood bar for much of the day and often turns into a lively music venue at night.
It’s an unconventional arrangement, for sure, but a wonderful one, too.
Boomys might look like the type of place where you could order burgers, nachos and wings, but instead you can get dishes like Panang Curry ($11.99) and various stir fry entrees such as Cashew Chicken ($11.99). I enjoyed both of those on recent trips.
In fact, Tran has brought back the entire Saigon menu, plus new items. On future trips I hope to revisit some of the dishes I used to order regularly, including the Bahn Xeo ($8.99), a wonderful mix of ingredients built upon a Vietnamese “pancake,” and the Goi Cuon ($5.99), Vietnamese summer rolls.
On my second trip to Lady Saigon, owner Tran spotted me and shared her joy at being back in the restaurant business.
For a few years, Tran also ran Tantra Lounge on Broughton Street, which might have had the most diverse clientele of any downtown bar or restaurant. She certainly knows something about Savannah’s late-night scene, so it’s no surprise that Lady Saigon is serving a special menu after 11 p.m. on weeknights and after midnight on Friday and Saturday.
Tran said she eventually hopes to keep serving the whole menu all night.
Lady Saigon is also open for lunch, with specials from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. The restaurant plans to be open Sundays beginning Feb. 8. For more info, check out http://www.ladysaigoncuisine.com or Lady Saigon Cuisine on Facebook.
Boomys opened less than a year ago in the space previously occupied by Murphy’s Law Irish Pub. The busy live music calendar includes Savannah’s blues master Eric Culberson performing regularly on Wednesday nights. Boomys attracts a wide range of folks on busy nights on West Congress.
Is the police merger better off dead?
If I lived in unincorporated Chatham County, I’d probably be happy to see the dissolution of the merger that created the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department.
As a city resident who has been following the travails of the department and who has become accustomed to an institutional policy to ignore much of the street crime in my neighborhood, I don’t have particularly strong feelings either way about maintaining the merger.
If the department is well-managed, there are obvious benefits to keeping the merger in place. Surely, it’s easier for one department to facilitate the sharing of information, the purchasing of materials and other basic tasks, even if the city and the county had separate precincts.
With the negotiations between city and county officials now entering the endgame, I’ll ask in a slightly different way the same question I asked in this space a few weeks ago:
Will citizens, both of the city and the county, be better off if the merger continues under terms that give county officials more power? Or will we be better off if we revert to having two separate police departments?
If we retain the merger under a different structure, future negotiations can refine the issues of costs and control. If we end the merger, it’s over, and it won’t be coming back any time soon.
Also, it’s worth noting that a new merger agreement might involve the redrawing of some precinct boundaries. The merger’s failure would obviously result in the redrawing of boundaries. As we continue to see population shifts, the precinct lines will likely need to be adjusted in the coming decades.
All three scenarios reveal the weakness of the city of Savannah’s argument that a new sub-station requires a sprawling 1.6 acres on the extreme northern edge of the Central Precinct’s current boundaries.
So there’s another reason to oppose the city’s chosen site for the new Central Precinct site, aside from the fact that the new station has necessitated moving dozens of low-income residents from a neighborhood that is already gentrifying and that is on the cusp of more rapid gentrification.
It’s also aside from the fact that the city’s decision to destroy the homes of Meldrim Row between Montgomery Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard is a grievous blow to history, as Tim Coy eloquently argued in a letter to the editor last month. (See http://savannahnow.com/opinion/2014-12-27/sunday-letters-editor.)
City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 East 32nd St., Savannah, Ga. 31401.