I saw "bún mì Phúc Kiến" on their 看板, so one day I went in and asked for it...
Nothing like Straits Hokkien mee, turns out, but that doesn't rule out the dish being really Hokkien in some way. The delta area south of Saigon was almost a Hokkien-Teochew outpost for many years. I've been doing some interesting reading in this vein off the link that Ah-bin gave.
So the first time I brought my Future Neo -- VN equiv. of the Wave 125 -- to the Honda dlrship in District 8 -- I was surprised when the mechanic (around 30 y.o.) was able to switch to fluent Cantonese. He even knew all the automotive terms in Canto.
D8 is across a canal from the part of Saigon that some call Chinatown. The section along the canal seems to be heavily Teochew and Cantonese, enough to initiate conversations in Canto. The Honda dlrship sits farther back in what seems to be an overwhelming Vietnamese neighborhood (although many of these would be Minh Hươngs from the Delta, with Chinese and/or Khmer blood).
Recently I brought my bike in for another servicing. I thought about asking for the same mechanic as last time, but decided against it. My Vietnamese has been improving, and I remember being tongue-tied in Canto last time anyway. They assigned my bike to another mechanic, but this guy spoke fluent Canto too! And for some reason -- practice, maybe -- my Canto has been in a much better state and we were both able to converse fluently.
As an aside, I went in again ystrdy on behalf of a friend, and as soon as I showed up, word must've travelled into the bowels of the shop b/c an older mechanic came out and started talking to me in Cantonese right away.
But the mechanic the 2nd time was actually Teochew. He was about 38, so I didn't expect him to be able to speak Teochew, but he did. I said I could understand much Teochew b/c of the similarities to Taiwanese. We tried talking in Hoklo, and I could understand his Teochew pretty well, but he couldn't understand anything I was saying in TWese. I hadn't had the presence of mind to switch into an Quemoy-type dialect. That was part of it. Also, though, it seemed that his vocabulary was deeper in Canto while his Teochew was limited to the home context.
I asked him if all Teochews in Saigon spoke Teochew. I hadn't met anybody his age who spoke it, but then they were all half Teochew half Viet, etc.
His reaction was kind of, "Are you crazy? Of course."
I said I'd been to Khleang (Sóc Trăng), down in the Delta, and there were lots of Teochews there who didn't speak Teochew, nor Cantonese. And, not understanding (? -- my Canto was pretty clear), he said, "Oh! It's b/c they speak another kind of Teochew, the 金辺 (Phnom Penh) kind."
I thought that was pretty interesting. So I guess there's a possibly lightly creolized type of Teochew spoken along the Mekong.
The similarities btw the Teochews and the Vietnamese is another interesting topic to explore. Living on long, narrow strips of seaboard may have something to do with it.
