I’ve already written about a few people who I believe have a pulse on the city. Anh, owner of Bluish and Mowe, is one. Tung, who runs Neo-, is another. In my opinion, Matt is the first foreigner I’ve spoken to so far who sits in the same category as the other two. I met him way back when I first moved to Saigon. I was living in Đa Kao at the time and Indika, a spot that used to be a mainstay in Saigon’s nightlife scene, was right down the street. It wasn’t long before I’d met Matt. He was friendly, talkative, and seemed to know everybody, had very much built out a community through Indika which he stood in the middle of. Soon I learned that besides Indika, he also ran Union Jack’s and that he’d built out a larger, even more substantial community there. It’s my belief that being able to make a home of the world is one of the most impressive and uniquely human achievements anybody can spend a life in pursuit of. By this I mean leaving that area you were born and raised in and discovering what else is out there, coming into contact with all the many people, places, and perspectives that make up the world and recognising within them not the differences that separate us but the similarities that connect us. Matt has made a home of the world. More than that, he makes homes for others, too.
Born in Camberley, a town not far from London, Matt’s life was steeped in F&B from the start. His granddad ran one of the town’s main pubs and though Matt never got a chance to see the pub before it closed, growing up he’d heard plenty of stories about the place and of his grandfather himself. He was something of a man of the people, which, seeing how deeply involved Matt is in Saigon’s expat community, goes to show that the apple rarely falls far from the tree. Aside from his granddad’s pub, Matt’s first real foray into F&B was thanks to his dad, who ran a kebab van and sandwich shop. It’s impossible to overstate the influence your parents and the environment they create have on you as a child. My dad’s a journalist and mum a translator, which meant home was always filled with books and why I developed a love of reading and writing early on. As for Matt, he grew up exposed to life in the service industry and the various ways it positively affected those it served. Though Matt never got a chance to work in either the kebab van or sandwich shop due to his age, he was very much destined to be in this sort of business. When he was a teen and his older sister moved to Spain for university, Matt’s family considered opening a business in Fuengirola, a town on the coast of Costa del Sol. Though they never ended up finding a spot, the experience gave Matt his first taste of the stereotype of the “Brits abroad”. He recalls one especially racist remark made by another Englishman and vowed to never operate in a similar way if he ever opened up a business overseas himself. Seeing the way in which he worked with his staff at Indika and continues to do so with his staff at Union Jack’s, you can be sure he’s held this to heart.
Starting when he was eighteen began a period in Matt’s life characterised by adventure and finding his place in the world. After a lads holiday in Thailand he got a taste of Southeast Asia, a place that stuck with him even after he’d left. It was on that same lads holiday he even consulted a fortune teller regarding his future. He made it clear that he’s fifty-fifty on fortune tellers, believes what they say could be true but the outcome of your life is also self-determined. In any case, he was told he’d be rich, own a business, and have a family somewhere in Asia. For the teenaged Matt, the prediction was as much something to joke about with his buddies as it was something he could ponder on when he was alone: who knew, perhaps one day he would be rich, own a business, and have a family somewhere in Asia? Even if that were to happen, it wouldn’t happen anytime soon, as after leaving Thailand, Matt would go on to live in places like Barbados, Fuengirola, and Zante. It was a period of non-stop partying and debauchery. At one point he was touting at a club in Zante but the work didn’t last long. The club was sat right next to one of the more popular clubs on the Greek island, which meant that no matter how convincing or charming he could be, it was impossible to get people from going to the more well-known spot next door. Nonetheless, these experiences would come in handy down the line when he found himself working on a street in Vietnam known as Bùi Viện. Before that, however, Cambodia. His friends were opening a club in the country and he decided to go pay them a visit. Southeast Asia called once more.
Cambodia was two more weeks of partying. It was fun while it lasted but it wasn’t exactly what Matt was looking for. He met a guy there who was on holiday from his teaching job in Vietnam and given that he had no plans, Matt figured why not head on over to Saigon? Upon arrival, he was sick from all the travelling and ended up spending a night bedridden. The next morning he woke up and stepped outside his hostel on Bùi Viện. I didn’t ask what kind of impression the place made upon first sight, but I imagine it must’ve been striking. After all, Bùi Viện is, for better or worse, striking. Coming from the relative tranquility of Europe to suddenly being in a city like Saigon would naturally make an impression in a way that’s difficult to put into words. Hungry for a taste of home in a new land, Matt found two options for breakfast: Chi Cafe and Asian Kitchen. The former was more expensive whereas the latter offered a full English breakfast and a Lipton tea (beggars can’t be choosers) for thirty-seven thousand dong. Opting for Asian Kitchen, little did he know how that one English breakfast would affect his life so greatly.
Matt ended up getting to know the family who ran Asian Kitchen well. They were a kind-hearted, quirky bunch, and one of the sisters was married to a guy who was from a place ten minutes away from where Matt was born in Camberley. Asian Kitchen itself was already established in Saigon as one of the main expat hangouts at the time, and it wasn’t long before Matt started helping out. Eventually the elder of the four sisters and young matriarch of the family asked Matt whether he’d be interested in opening up a bar with one of the younger sisters, Dung, whom everyone called Zoom. As fate would have it, there was a bar sitting vacant right upstairs. The place was called AK Hideaway. With walls painted a bright lime green, AK used to be owned by an Englishman called Limey, a Brit who’d served in the Marines who’d been something of a legendary rabblerouser in Saigon. The decision was made. Matt became AK Hideaway’s owner. Twenty-two at the time, there was a high chance he was the youngest expat bar owner in the city at the time.
So began Matt’s journey in F&B. He hit the ground running and wasn’t afraid to put himself out there. He recalls how back then, no one really handed out coloured flyers on the streets of Bùi Viện. Bar staff tended to stay outside their designated ‘zone’, calling and shouting to passerbys in often futile attempts at getting them to enter. Leveraging the experiences he’d had as a club touter on Zante, Matt disregarded the rules in the brash and brazen manner to be expected of a twenty-two year old, and instead chose to walk around Bùi Viện gathering people to come with him to AK. Though good for business, this didn’t make him popular with other bars. There were more than a few occasions in which fights would break out and he even recalled—with a laugh at the memory—how he once had a chair hit over his head. It was a wonderful time, despite the fights and chairs. But only ten months later, AK was shut down. The party ended.
With AK finished, Matt dabbled in a few other ventures. There was the Reggae Lounge, a spot he’d been running while AK was still open and where Matt learned just how tough running a business in Vietnam could be. For one, the roof of the Reggae Lounge caved in after only a few weeks. Adding onto that the differences in how he and his partner wanted to run the place, Matt walked away from the business after a grinding few months made up of sixteen hour days. Then there was The Alleycat, a restaurant he got involved in with the family from Asian Kitchen and ran for a year while Huyen, his wife who he’d met at Reggae Lounge, was pregnant with their daughter. After that came Ryan’s Pub Banterbar, which sat above an Italian restaurant called Stella. Everything was going well with Ryan’s Pub until a fateful night when a retired American pilot who frequented the bar died from a drug overdose. It was the kind of event to fracture not only his life but the lives of the people who were with him when it happened. This was as real as it got. While his journey in F&B might’ve started as something of a happy-go-lucky adventure, circumstances had shifted and now he was left to contend with the reality of what could happen in his line of business. The fact was, the party doesn’t always end with a hangover. Sometimes it just ends.
A period followed where Matt worked as an English teacher. It was a good break from the madness of operating a bar or restaurant, and he enjoyed the work. One night he went to a bar called Emergency Room. It had a great feel to it, with barmaids in nurses outfits, a good number of expats enjoying themselves, and a nice range of hip-hop playing on the speakers. When he returned a while later the atmosphere was night and day—there was no manager and after a talk with the owners Thao & Phuong, Matt hopped on as bar manager. He was back in the game. Over a period of four years Matt returned Emergency Room to its previous state of glory and then took it even further. It went from fifteen people on a weekend night to between two-fifty and three hundred. Besides the great parties and the fact that he could introduce UK garage nights to Saigon’s nightlife while swinging the scene back to a more hiphop focus, one of his favourite things about Emergency Room was how safe it made people feel. Girls would dance the night away while Matt remarked how he loved watching guys come in and seeing their faces go from expressions of shock and confusion to pure, ecstatic joy. Then, in 2016, while he was still working at Emergency Room, Matt invested in the start of Indika with partners Morgan and Calvin. He credits them with the concept and the more creative sides of the business whereas he provided his input on customer service and curated some of the bigger parties. It was a good time. Matt had his hands on two vastly different operations: Emergency Room as a much more wild, party destination whereas Indika had a calmer, more artistic vibe to it. Eventually he left Emergency Room to focus on running Indika as well as opening up something of a life-long dream: his very own fish & chip shop.
Union Jack’s pays homage to a chippy Matt used to frequent as a child. The place was called Jack’s Fish & Chips and he always visited with his grandparents when he was younger and once he got a little older, with his friends. For Matt, Jack’s Fish & Chips was a place—like his grandad’s pub—that was a mainstay in the community. It was the type of place that held host to numerous memories he holds dear to this day. This is why once he started tinkering with the idea of opening a chippy in Saigon, there was nothing Matt wanted to pay tribute to more than Jack’s. Partnering with a chef friend he’d met at Indika called Josh, Union Jack’s first opened at a hole-in-the-wall across from Bitexco Tower in District 1. At the time customers had to scale a steep flight of stairs just to get inside, but word quickly spread about the food given that Matt and the team at Union Jack’s never cut any corners, resulting in accolades such as Top 3 Overseas in the UK’s National Fish and Chip Awards in 2024. This reputation, alongside the tireless and always-smiling presence of Huyen, who Matt credits as being the real boss of Union Jack’s, has kept them afloat through brutal rainy seasons, a global pandemic, and an ever growing number of competitors in F&B. It’s no wonder why they remain as popular as ever at their Thảo Điền outlet.
Matt’s come a long way since first landing in Saigon as a twenty-two year old. I wonder whether he knew—that first morning as he looked around at Bùi Viện—how far he would go. Businesses have opened, burned bright, closed, but through it all, Matt has kept a hold of something infinitely more valuable than any amount of cash he could’ve made: that of a sense of home. To go from a small town outside of London to the mad, erratic streets of Saigon is no simple, straightforward journey, but to then build communities for people to feel as if they belong—even if they’re far from home—is something else entirely. I suppose then, the only way to end this is by revisiting what that fortune teller once told him. That he’d be rich, own a business, and have a family somewhere in Asia. Like Matt, I don’t really believe in these things, but when I read back on the story he shared with me, I suppose you can’t really argue. That fortune teller had known all along.
In November, a crowdfunding campaign for an upcoming documentary called ‘Finding Home in HCMC: The Union Jack’s Story’ is starting. It’s a personal, character-led documentary about food, love, identity, and belonging in a fast-changing city — starting with the story of Union Jack’s. The team behind the documentary will be using Comicola for Vietnam-based supporters (MoMo, ZaloPay, local cards) and Kickstarter for international backers. You can follow the journey on Facebook and Instagram.
- Find Union Jack’s
- Join the Union Jack’s Fish & Chips Group
- Follow Union Jack’s on Facebook & Instagram
