CINÉ Saigon Turned a 60-Year-Old Cinema Into One of DJ Mag's Top 100 Clubs

For sixty-some years, 148 Cống Quỳnh Street sold tickets to melodrama and kung fu double bills under the name Thăng Long. The screen is gone now. In its place is an 800-capacity room wrapped in LED panels and a 360-degree lighting rig, and in November DJ Mag told the world it belongs on a very short list: CINÉ Saigon debuted at #68 on the magazine's Top 100 Clubs poll for 2026, a new entry in a category Vietnam has barely touched before.

From Cinema to Club, Without Gutting the Room

What makes CINÉ Saigon worth a second look isn't just the ranking, it's what the operators kept. DJ Mag's own club profile describes a single high-ceilinged main room that preserves the old theatre's raked architecture and proportions, built around rather than over. That's rarer than it sounds in a city where most big rooms start from a warehouse shell. The booking policy leans house, techno and hip-hop with what DJ Mag calls a strong regional-artist emphasis, and 2025 saw international headline sets from Paul van Dyk and Markus Schulz, the kind of trance-adjacent big-room names that fill an 800-cap floor on a Saturday. A gallery of official photos on the venue's own site backs up the description: a packed room under fanned LED panels, a disco ball hanging dead center where a cinema chandelier might once have been, phones up during a Schulz set with his name still lit on the screen behind the decks.

CINÉ runs Wednesdays 21:00 to 04:00 according to its own listing, with the rest of the week given over to bigger weekend production nights and periodic international bookings, a Ravex show with special guest Minh Tri was on the calendar for this September. It sits in the old Phạm Ngũ Lão backpacker quarter, now folded into Bến Thành ward under Ho Chi Minh City's 2025 administrative reshuffle, a five-minute walk from the guesthouses and bánh mì stalls that have fed generations of budget travelers before they ever found the club scene.

It's Not Alone

Here's the part that turns one good venue into a trend. CINÉ Saigon isn't the only Vietnamese club on DJ Mag's 2026 list. APLUS SAIGON, which soft-opened in January with Vietnam's first L-Acoustics L Series rig and sets from Dombresky and Argy, landed at #59. Its older sibling APLUS HANOI sits higher still at #43, having already made the list the year before. Three Vietnamese rooms on a global top 100 in the same cycle is not something this magazine has had reason to write before, and it's not something Ho Chi Minh City's clubs have needed to lean on until now.

Worth saying plainly: none of this is house or techno in the purist sense the genre police prefer. CINÉ's own programming description leans hip-hop and big-room trance names as much as house and techno, and APLUS Saigon's opening bill (Dombresky, Tungevaag) reads more festival-mainstage than warehouse. Thailand's Illuzion and Club Seen made the same list this year on a more house-forward booking policy, so the comparison isn't flattering in every direction. But DJ Mag's poll measures rooms people actually travel for, not genre purity, and on that measure Saigon just out-produced most of the region in a single cycle.

The Same City Just Lost Its Oldest Techno Room

The timing cuts both ways. This same city watched its longest-running techno club announce a closure for October, a room built on residencies and a rooftop rather than LED walls and international headline fees. Two very different models of what a Saigon night out looks like are trading places within weeks of each other: one intimate and homegrown, closing; one produced, branded and backed by real capital, expanding. Neither cancels the other out as a story, but a reader who only sees the DJ Mag headline would miss that CINÉ's rise and the older room's exit are happening in the same city, in the same season.

What isn't public yet: CINÉ Saigon hasn't published an exact opening date, capacity beyond the 800 DJ Mag cites, or its sound system brand, unusual gaps for a venue that just went global. Ask at the door and you'll probably get a straighter answer than the website gives. Either way, a sixty-year-old movie house that used to sell melodrama now sells techno at 4am, and DJ Mag just told the world it's one of a hundred rooms worth the trip. Saigon's nightlife has had worse plot twists.

Cover and interior photos: CINÉ Saigon, via cinesaigon.vn.