Shellfish boil at M-Saigon Restaurant

Having completed significant renovations at its Shelburne Road storefront earlier this fall, Burlington’s M-Saigon Restaurant (formerly M-Saigon Vietnamese Noodle House) has added Cajun seafood to its bill of fare.

On high-top tables fitted with butcher-paper rolls and buckets, guests can now crack into bayou-style shellfish boils built on crawfish, shrimp, crabs and clams; and lobsters sided with boiled potatoes, corn and andouille sausage. Other new additions include fried soft-shell crab and Cajun fries.

M-Saigon manager Alex Nguyen became familiar with the coastal fare while living in the Gulf South. When he returned to Vermont earlier this year, he convinced his brother, M-Saigon owner Khoi Nguyen, to add shellfish to the menu. “We just figured there’s nowhere [serving] this [kind of food] in Vermont,” Alex says. “So we wanted to bring that to Burlington.”

Fans of the shop’s banh mi and noodle bowls need not worry: M-Saigon’s Vietnamese menu is unaffected by the changes.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Crumbs”

Hannah Palmer Egan was a Seven Days food writer from 2014-2019. She was a 2017 James Beard Journalism Award finalist for her coverage of Vermont's food and agriculture industries, and received food writing awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. She lives in northeast Pennsylvania with her family, where she works in the outdoor lifestyle and adventure tourism industry.