Wine Thursdays at The Refinery: Where Saigon’s Best Wines Meet the City’s Finest Sounds

Every Thursday | 6PM – 10PM | The Refinery Saigon Terrace

There are evenings in Saigon that stay with you. The kind where the air is warm but not stifling, where a glass of something well-chosen sits in your hand, and where the music drifting in from somewhere nearby feels like it was made exactly for this moment. Wine Thursdays at The Refinery is that evening — and it happens every single week.

For those who haven’t yet discovered it, Wine Thursdays is a weekly outdoor event held on The Refinery’s iconic terrace, running from 6PM to 10PM every Thursday. Two guest DJs take turns behind the decks, curating a soundtrack that moves seamlessly from mellow afternoon grooves into something a little deeper and more hypnotic as the night builds. Meanwhile, the wine list does what The Refinery has always done best: it surprises you, satisfies you, and makes you want to stay for one more glass.

A 20-Year Tradition of Feeding More Than Just Your Appetite

The Refinery Saigon has never been just a restaurant. Since opening its doors over two decades ago inside the storied French-colonial compound on Hai Ba Trung, it has been something rarer and more valuable: a genuine cultural anchor for the city. Twenty years of gastronomy. Twenty years of gathering people who care about quality — about what’s on the plate, what’s in the glass, and yes, what’s coming out of the speakers.

In a city that changes as fast as Ho Chi Minh City does, The Refinery’s consistency is its superpower. The same warm colonial architecture. The same commitment to sourcing and craft. The same belief that a great evening out should engage every sense. Wine Thursdays is not a new idea bolted onto the brand — it is the brand, fully expressed. Food for your taste, music for your ears, and a terrace that simply refuses to be ordinary.

That philosophy of multi-sensory hospitality stretches back through the restaurant’s entire history. Long before the current wave of rooftop bars and DJ-driven dinner concepts swept through Saigon, The Refinery was already doing it — with more substance, more soul, and a significantly better wine list.

What to Expect at Wine Thursdays

The Setting: Saigon’s Most Atmospheric Terrace

Step through the gates on Hai Ba Trung and the city immediately recedes. The Refinery’s outdoor terrace is the kind of space that takes ten years of history to build — mature tropical greenery, warm ambient lighting, colonial-era architectural details that no new-build can replicate. As the sun drops and the string lights come up, it becomes one of the best outdoor drinking spots in all of Ho Chi Minh City.

This is not a venue trying to look like something. It simply is something.

The Music: Two Guest DJs, Live on the Terrace

Each Wine Thursday features two live guest DJ sets performed directly on the terrace. The programming leans towards selections that complement the experience rather than compete with it — think deep house, Balearic grooves, nu-jazz, and soulful electronic music that lets conversation flow without ever disappearing into background noise.

The DJs rotate weekly, which means the vibe is always slightly different, always fresh. Some weeks lean jazzy and slow. Others build toward something more percussive and propulsive. What stays constant is the quality of curation and the understanding that music, like wine, is about balance and timing.

Can’t make it every week? The Refinery’s YouTube channel regularly posts live sets recorded directly from Wine Thursdays, so you can carry the atmosphere home with you, or get a taste of what you’ve been missing before your first visit. The channel is building into a genuinely excellent archive of Saigon’s Thursday night soundtrack — subscribe and let it run on a Friday morning and you’ll understand exactly what we mean.

🎵 Listen to a recent Wine Thursdays live set here

The Wine: A List Worth Exploring

This is, after all, Wine Thursdays — and the wine deserves its own moment.

The Refinery has always maintained one of the stronger wine programs among restaurants in Saigon. The list is thoughtfully curated with a bias toward accessibility and discovery: bottles you’ve heard of sitting alongside producers you haven’t, at prices that reflect genuine hospitality rather than import markup theater.

For Wine Thursdays specifically, the focus is on wines that drink well in the open air — lighter reds served slightly cool, crisp whites and skin-contact wines that come alive in the heat, sparkling options for those who like to mark the beginning of a Thursday evening with something effervescent.

Whether you’re a seasoned wine enthusiast in Ho Chi Minh City looking for your next discovery, or someone who simply wants a reliably excellent glass in a great setting, the Wine Thursdays list has you covered.

Why Wine Thursdays Is the Best Wine Event in Saigon

It Bridges the Gap Between Wine Bar and Music Venue

Ho Chi Minh City has wine bars. It has music venues. It has restaurants with good sound systems. What it rarely has is all three converging in a single outdoor space with twenty years of institutional knowledge behind it. Wine Thursdays fills that gap effortlessly, which is why it has become a fixture in the calendars of Saigon’s creative and hospitality communities.

The Thursday Timing Is Genuinely Perfect

There’s an argument to be made that Thursday is the best night of the week. The week’s work is nearly done, the weekend hasn’t yet arrived to scatter everyone across the city, and there’s still enough of a weekday feeling to keep things from getting too rowdy. Wine Thursdays leans into this perfectly — it’s a gathering of people who know how to have a good time without losing the thread of the week.

It’s a Living Archive of Saigon’s Cultural Scene

Through its YouTube channel, The Refinery is quietly building something significant: a record of what Thursday nights in Saigon sound like right now. Future residents of this city will look back on these sets the way people look back at recordings of legendary club nights in other cities. If that sounds grandiose, spend a Thursday evening on the terrace and then re-evaluate.

Practical Information

Wine Thursdays at The Refinery Saigon

The Refinery and Music: A Story That Goes Back Further Than You Think

It would be easy to frame Wine Thursdays as a recent innovation — a smart response to Saigon’s increasingly competitive F&B landscape. But that would miss the point entirely. The Refinery’s relationship with music is not a marketing strategy. It’s a disposition.

From the earliest days of the venue, music was understood as an essential component of hospitality. Not as entertainment in the background-noise sense, but as something that shapes mood, extends an evening, and transforms a meal into a memory. The guest DJ format of Wine Thursdays is the current expression of that understanding — but the roots go back two decades, to a time when Saigon’s dining scene was a fraction of its current size and The Refinery was already thinking about the full sensory architecture of an evening out.

Wine events in Saigon come and go. Brands sponsor tastings, hotels run promotions, pop-ups appear and disappear. What The Refinery offers with Wine Thursdays is something these events structurally cannot replicate: continuity. The knowledge that this same terrace, with this same care and this same commitment to quality wine and live music, will be here next Thursday and the Thursday after that.

Join the Thursday Ritual

Wine Thursdays at The Refinery is not an event you attend once and move on from. It’s a weekly ritual you find yourself returning to, bringing different people each time, watching the DJ change, watching the seasons shift slightly (even Saigon’s seasons), and watching your own relationship with the space deepen over time.

That is what twenty years of gastronomy actually produces: not just a restaurant, but a place. And Wine Thursdays is the best weekly reason to be in that place, glass in hand, as Thursday evening unfolds on one of the finest terraces in Ho Chi Minh City.

See you at 6.

📍 The Refinery Saigon — 74 Hai Ba Trung, Ben Nghe Ward, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City 🎵 Watch live sets on our YouTube channel 🗓 Wine Thursdays — Every Thursday, 6PM to 10PM