“When I left Hong Kong, I essentially lost everything,” Peter Cuong Franklin recalled one recent evening in Ho Chi Minh City, sipping a glass of sparkling water at the third-floor bar of his latest venture, Ănăn Saigon, which has been called one of the best restaurants in Asia. Ănăn (“Eat, eat” in Vietnamese) serves between 100 and 150 meals a night at small tables packed together cheek by jowl, and occupies a narrow six-story building, a classic Saigon “tube house” located inside a teeming wet market. “I came back here basically with nothing,” he said. “I had to rebuild everything from scratch.” Franklin did just that and then some. This summer, he’s a judge on Top Chef Vietnam. And on June 6, during The Michelin Guide’s first-ever awards ceremony in Vietnam, Ănăn Saigon received a coveted Michelin star, the sole restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City and one of only four restaurants in a nation of nearly 100 million people to be given this honor for culinary excellence. The Michelin judges lauded Franklin’s application of “modern cooking techniques to authentic street food recipes,” and declared that “Every dish is a masterclass of well-balanced flavors and textures.” —Lloyd Grove