A shipping container serving Vietnamese food just popped up in a Riverside laneway

Thanh Thai and his fiancée visit Vietnam at least once a year, spending their days whizzing through laneways on scooters, hopping from food stall to food stall. Back in Toronto, however, Thai felt like there was a serious lack of street-food culture, so he decided to open a new casual restaurant as an ode to his travels. He’d call it Com Nuoc, a direct translation of the Vietnamese words for “rice” and “water” that, when used colloquially, asks the question, “Have you eaten?”

Related: The Toronto location of Vietnam’s Michelin-starred Lunch Lady is now open

In the spring of 2025, Thai started looking for brick-and-mortar restaurant spaces with a realtor, but every spot he saw was at least $8,000 per month—which wouldn’t make sense for the kind of small-scale project he had in mind. Scrolling through Facebook one night, he spotted a bright-red shipping container in a Riverside laneway. It had already been outfitted as a kitchen, and with a price tag of just $2,500 a month, it seemed meant to be. “Instantly it felt like the perfect representation of Vietnamese street-food culture,” says Thai.

Thai got the keys in early June and took over the container along with its two patios—eight seats out front and another 12 on the rooftop. Before opening on July 2, he spent a month figuring out the logistics and the menu, which includes a short list of homestyle Vietnamese rice, noodle and side dishes. A highlight is the com thit nuong, chargrilled pork chop over rice with a fried egg, salad greens, lightly pickled carrot and cucumber, and a thick slice of cha trung hap (a meatloaf made with ground pork, shrimp, eggs and mung bean noodles). “A lot of Vietnamese restaurants make pork chop rice as more of a side, but it’s so comforting that I’ve decided to make it a main,” says Thai. “And the marinade is a combination of recipes from my family and my fiancée’s family.”

Related: Pho Ngoc Yen, a hopping Vietnamese restaurant tucked away in a Mississauga industrial park

Drinking an ice-cold beer on the shipping container’s patio as Vietnamese tunes blare below sounds like a perfect afternoon, but Thai may not pursue a liquor licence given the high cost and red tape. Instead, he’s thinking of filling out the current drink menu with a pennywort smoothie—a tangy, grassy concoction that’s everywhere on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

For anyone in the west end looking to skip the trip to Riverside, Com Nuoc can come to you via Ritual, DoorDash and Uber Eats.