“Charles Phan had more impact on Vietnamese food than any other chef in the country.” — Michael Bauer, San Francisco Chronicle.

Editor's note (Jan 2025): We’re deeply saddened to learn of Chef Charles Phan’s recent passing. For nearly 30 years, Charles played a pivotal role in introducing and elevating Vietnamese cuisine in the US.

When preparing for my upcoming move, I debated which of my many books would come along with me. One book that immediately went into the box was Charles Phan’s The Slanted Door: Modern Vietnamese Food, a cookbook featuring about a hundred recipes from the iconic San Francisco restaurant The Slanted Door, littered with curled neon pink bookmarks that I hastily made out of post-its and placed on the page of every recipe or story about its formation that caught my imagination.

Today Charles Phan is billed as the “inventor of modern Vietnamese cuisine in America” by Food Network and a recipient of the James Beard Foundation 2004 award for Best Chef: California, often fondly referred to as the “Oscars of the food world” and considered to be the highest honor in the culinary community.

His most well-known restaurant, The Slanted Door — recipient of the James Beard Foundation award for Outstanding Restaurant in 2014 — was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the first Asian restaurants to create a serious wine list and bar program using organic ingredients. Despite being around for over two decades, and having almost 300 seats in its waterfront Ferry Building location, the restaurant is always packed for lunch and dinner service.

But it wasn’t that long ago that Charles was lucky to even get the opportunity to bus tables at fine-dining establishments.

The Slanted Door’s space. Photos via Instagram page @slanteddoor.

Before bánh mì: coffee, architecture, and menswear

Charles Phan spent his childhood in 1960s Đà Lạt where his mother grew up, and where his father immigrated to; they both are of Chinese descent. Across from the steps leading down to the hilly city’s central market, his parents owned a general store. Behind, a mì xào giòn cart would set up shop, serving crunchy fried wheat noodles with a savory seafood gravy, while another cart would serve up hot, crispy, turmeric-tinged bánh xèo, forming the basis of some of Charles’ fondest food memories.

In 1971, his father bought a coffee farm nearby, only for them to have to abandon it four years later in 1975. “We left the very day of April 30, 1975. I actually saw the very tank that crushed the gate and went through the Presidential Palace,” Charles tells me, thinking back to when he was thirteen. In order to leave Vietnam that day in a cargo ship with 400 other people, “We got there before the sun set and waited by a nearby ship, and at midnight, we slipped in there. They pulled out at two in the morning,” he recounts in a Good Food podcast episode.

The cargo ship ended up getting lost and being picked up by Malaysian patrol boats that took them to Singapore. Charles recognizes how lucky they were for this to be the case, “When you’re at sea it’s very scary — an approaching ship could be pirates or other bad people.” But not everyone felt so grateful towards the Singaporeans. Laughing, Charles recounts to me, “They literally brought us food every day. I remember the first day [when] they just showed up and they didn’t have anything — they brought us fourteen loaves of bread for 400 people. And the Vietnamese were a little pissed off. They expect Singaporeans to come with a feast or something. [So they] threw one loaf back into the ocean, and once the boat left, a guy — half-naked — jumped into the water and grabbed the bread.” I guess some things never change; the Vietnamese will go to great lengths for their bánh mì.

From Singapore’s waters, there were seaworthy ships prepared with appropriate navigation and fuel (a luxury not all boats leaving Vietnam had) that enabled refugees to either return to Vietnam, immigrate to Taiwan, or immigrate to America by way of Guam. Charles playfully reminisces, “They made sure to park the ship far away enough so you can’t swim to Singapore. But everyone wanted to go there. [When] people got sick, they got an army escort to go see a doctor in Singapore. I remember there was an eye infection that spread across the whole ship, but I didn't get it. I would try to poke my eye out with salt water to make it red, in hopes that I could go on a field trip [to Singapore]...But I guess I didn't poke it hard enough!”

Charles’ mother pushed for America, so the family of ten — two parents, Charles, his five younger siblings, and an aunt and uncle — ended up on the Micronesian island of Guam as they waited for a sponsor in America. “You had the choice to get on a plane and they’ll take you wherever they drop you, or you get to stay in Guam. At the refugee camp, there were stories of people going to Minnesota with snow and ice, and you know, we’re from the Tropics so we didn’t want to go. My mom opted to stay in Guam. She was always very forward-thinking.”

“Guam was [sic] 400,000 people and you live in big army tents. When there was a monsoon, water was running through your feet. As time goes by, it gets smaller and smaller and they move you to an army barrack,” Charles recounts. “We were the last family. There were ten of us and no one wanted to sponsor us. They’ll sponsor two or four people, but when there’s ten of you, no one wants to adopt that many people in the household.” So, after two years in Guam, his aunt and uncle split off as their own family.

Photo via Wikipedia.

So on July 7, 1977, two years and two months after leaving Vietnam, Charles and his family flew Pan-Am to San Francisco. “We had friends in San Francisco and they said they rented two beautiful apartments — turned out they got us two studios in the Tenderloin for ten people,” laughed Charles, referring to apartments that didn't even have a door separating the bedroom from the common area, in a neighborhood that had 40% of the city's drug overdoses and a quarter of its homicides in the 1970s. The notorious neighborhood became Charles’ first impression of San Francisco: “Coming from a small town [in Vietnam], and Guam was pitch dark, the Tenderloin was very colorful — lights, prostitutes. It was just mind-boggling when I first got here.”

As a sign of what was to come in his career, “My dad got a job, somehow, in Chinatown as a janitor in a restaurant, and I started working in the restaurant a year later, bussing tables when I was 16. That’s how I got into the restaurant business.” Charles worked at a range of food and beverage joints from British pubs to nightclubs. “Back then [at predominately white restaurants], it was rare that they even had me [a Vietnamese person] as a busser,” he recalls. “Everyone asked me, ‘Where are you from? Why are you here? Are you supposed to be here?’ like I came from Mars.”

At the end of high school, Charles found himself with acceptance letters from a couple of art schools (due to his skills in pottery), as well as Berkeley. Well, I’m sure you can guess which school his father pushed him to choose. After studying architecture at Berkeley for three years (he dropped out as a protest to steep tuition hikes), he went home and ran his mom’s sewing shop, creating a men’s clothing line, named Fin du Siècle, along the way.

Funny enough, it was his clothing, not his culinary experience, that brought him back to Vietnam after seventeen years away. In 1992, he returned to the motherland to help with sourcing for a local sewing shop. “I got emotional the minute I landed at Tân Sơn Nhất. Leaving the taxi to go into the city — the smell. It had just rained, and the street smell...the dirt...the smoke... It was just like I had remembered. There’s nothing romantic about it, but it got me emotional.”

Once that job ended, Charles went back to California where he worked at a software company for two years before it folded. It was at this time that he started to look at new career options.

The fish heads can’t hurt you

“I’m very entrepreneurial, just like my father and mother. And part of me was really annoyed in Berkeley that people just didn’t take Asian designers seriously. They thought that I should have been in the engineering or math department,” Charles continues. “So I had this idea in my head for 10 years. I wanted to show [that] Vietnamese restaurants could have great designs. We already have great food, so I don’t need to reinvent that.”

Slanted Door in the Mission District on Opening Day. Photo courtesy of The Slanted Door.

Originally envisioned as a bánh xèo shop, The Slanted Door opened with a six-item menu in 1995 in the Mission District. At that time, the Mission was a predominantly working-class Hispanic neighborhood, though today it is a gentrified neighborhood with artisanal ice cream shops and commissioned street art to serve as a backdrop for your Instagram photos. Charles kept the menu simple: phở, bún, and the like. “But,” Charles adds, “because I came from fine dining, I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t do phở or bún at night, I focused on other entrées. Who eats phở at night anyways?”

Like many other immigrant chefs, Charles worked to find a balance in his menu. “It’s a constant question, as a chef, where your voice is. For years I struggled... Will people buy this? Is this too white? Is this too Vietnamese?” He recalls of his early years: “It was hard [then] because you don’t know. I remember selling four whole fish, and two of them came back. People didn’t want to pay for it. They got upset; they cried; they saw the head. I think Vietnamese and Chinese kids are trained to be adventurous, but here [in America], it’s the opposite.”

But he must have eventually gotten it right because in less than a decade, he received the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef: California in 2004 and within another decade, The Slanted Door was named the nation’s most Outstanding Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation.

“I was floored when we won. I thought, ‘This’d better not be a joke because I’ll be very upset.’ I came home, and the internet crashed. Our site got so crushed. And that’s when I found out that I have a very cheap [Internet] hosting company,” Charles reminisces. To understand the significance of the award, you have to remember that it was 2014, and Asian food didn’t enjoy the same interest and recognition it does today.

Charles and The Slanted Door’s first dishwasher, Daniel. Photo courtesy of The Slanted Door.

“That was just unheard of [then]. It’s always been very Euro-centric with these awards. And now it’s good that people aren’t treating these foods like some cheap hole-in-the-wall place — which we all love. Now people are a little bit more adventurous. Now no one returns a fish because it has a head. You don’t realize how far we’ve come in terms of food and what we expect of food.”

Where are the pickles?

Today, Charles isn’t afraid of cooking the dishes he wants and editing them to his liking. Since opening The Slanted Door, the chef and restaurateur has opened up many different concepts, including his newest venture: Chuck’s Takeaway.

This takeaway bánh mì shop features classic combinations like pâté and chả with mayonnaise, cucumbers, jalepeño, and a crush of herbs in his stuffed C.P.’s No. 3, as well as more location-inspired sandwiches like Jo Jo’s Bollito which swaps out the baguette with a toasted bun and is filled with tender braised beef belly smothered in tangy, spicy salsa verde.

The CP No. 3 from Chuck’s Takeaway.

And in a Charles twist, he serves his pickled seasonal vegetables (think more Romanesco broccoli, Fresno chiles, and radishes, and less shredded carrots and daikon) on the side, not in the sandwich — a move a pickle hater like me is very happy to hear.

“There’s a small segment of people who are mad about it. They ask, ‘Where are the pickles?’,” he tells me. “People don’t say that to chefs who are doing a new type of food, but when it’s traditional dishes, if people have certain memories with traditional dishes, they just react and don’t think straight. I’m not here to take you on a trip down memory lane.”

At US$16, the sandwich is bound to get some haters, as seen in Yelp reviews. One reviewer writes "I wouldn't call this an everyday lunch spot bc $$$," while on the other hand, another reviewer comments, "I will admit that the baguette is really nice and soft (probably the best baguette I've had), [...] I really wish it had the traditional pickled daikon and carrots." Charles reflects: “This latest round with Chuck’s has been amazing — it’s the best praise we’ve had from Vietnamese people. The tides have really turned.”

Jo Jo’s Bollito from Chuck’s Takeaway.

When you learn about the effort Charles puts into his sandwiches, the price makes sense. He spent years perfecting his bánh mì baguettes. He tracked down a guy in Vietnam and paid to learn from him. After that, he had to change the baguette recipe to meet his standard of bread conditioner and achieve the perfect, yet almost impossible to combine, texture: crunchy and light on the outside with density and a chewy pull on the inside, mimicking a good sourdough. He elaborates: “Ten to fifteen years ago, the food was expected to be a certain price. And yes my food is expensive, and I make no qualms about it. I’ve got to take care of myself, my farmers, my staff, buy sustainable ingredients and make my own pâté, chả... I actually make less money this way since it’s not super efficient since I have to make everything small-batch.”

Charles 4.0

Currently, Charles is working on renovating the San Francisco Ferry Building location of The Slanted Door and its takeaway offshoot Out the Door, as well as opening up a new concept, Moonset, a small shop which will focus on his love of noodles.

“I have to think of the next version of me: Charles 4.0. I should retire, but it’s more scary now because it’s not just my name I’m protecting, but it’s everyone’s job. I know I have to change to stay successful.”

When asked about his version of the future, Charles answered: “I hope with my cooking, if anything, that the next generation will carry the baton that I’m carrying, promoting culture and heritage, taking care of the farmers, making beautiful food. Passing down these things are [sic] important because food is not just about flavor. It’s history, a way of thinking...”

Photo via sfgate.com.

“I was just in Seattle and I saw more Vietnamese chefs starting to put Vietnamese food in a different context. Some do it with a tweezer, and more power to them. I would never cook with a tweezer, but that doesn’t mean there’s a real right or wrong [way]. The fact that you’re paying homage to a culture you love, that’s your own, and you’re exploring it. I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

To Charles, the promotion of Vietnamese food, in any way, shape, or form, is deserving of support: “You’re actually putting this culture on a pedestal, and you’re trying to broadcast this way of thinking, way of eating, the way of Vietnamese people, and I think that’s wonderful. Whatever medium you want to use is fine, you’re still preaching the Vietnamese gospel, and I’m all for that.”

Graphic by Hannah Hoàng, Phan Nhi and Hương Đỗ.

“We’re going to Taipei on VietJet Air,” an acquaintance said to me. An international flight on Vietnam’s notoriously delayed airline didn’t sound like the best idea ever. But who would expect that I was set to fly to Tainan, a city on the island's southwest coast, just a few hours after the brief conversation with her. The reality was that I found it excruciatingly difficult to reject a cheap flight deal.

Taiwan is famous worldwide for being the birthplace of milk tea. I have never been a fan of the drink, but my to-do list included trying Taiwan’s very first boba milk tea shop. That called for a brief train ride to Taichung, Taiwan’s second-most populous city. This article, however, has nothing to do with Chun Shui Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural trà sữa joint, but a much more distinctively Vietnamese item.

Signs of a bustling Vietnamese community surround Taichung’s recently revitalized and modern train station: numerous phở joints, a street shack serving both bún thịt bò xào and bánh xèo, and, believe it or not, a full-fledged restaurant that specializes in Hanoi's culinary crown jewel — bún đậu mắm tôm.

In an attempt to not be caught in Taiwan’s relentless rainy season, what finally caught my eye was a bakery that touched the culturally Vietnamese part of my soul: Lò Bánh Mì Pasteur. “Lò bánh mì” means bakery in Vietnamese, and its two owners were focused on their craft when I paid them a visit at 8am.

Nương's bakery serves Vietnam's iconic bánh mì thịt, though with a few subtle local adaptations.

Nương, originally from Cần Thơ, in the Mekong Delta, started the business less than a year ago, certainly not without numerous challenges. Taiwan’s strict laws on imported produce meant that almost everything crucial to the making of bánh mì thịt, such as bánh mì, chả, chả bò, pâté and char siu, has to be made from scratch. Most recently, a host of countries, including Taiwan, banned pork products from Vietnam in fear of furthering the spread of African swine fever.

“When I [was] first married in Taiwan, I worked in a Vietnamese restaurant. Naturally, [it was] something that most of us [Vietnamese ladies in Taiwan] could easily adapt to,” she tells Saigoneer. Nương was among one of the first Vietnamese brides who arrived in Taiwan shortly after the devastating Jiji earthquake in 1999.

My first bite into Nương's bánh mì thịt evoked in me a sensation that could only be described as “same same, but different” in comparison with bánh mì in Vietnam. It was delicious, especially the perfect firmness of the Vietnamese ham. In a way, the sandwich was very similar to a typical bánh mì in Saigon, yet quite different. For starters, the pickles had a different tanginess to them, owing to the use of non-Vietnamese vinegar, which is similar to the condiment you might add to your hủ tiếu somewhere in District 5. The unorthodox addition of authentic Vietnamese-style char siu made the combination pleasantly sweet and chewier. But the starkest differences were in its main components.

A brush of vegetable oil on the bánh mì gives them a nice sheen and crispiness.

“Taiwanese flour is so different. It’s sweeter and chewier,” she explains. Her “baguettes” are coated with vegetable oil almost immediately after baking — the secret to their crunchiness after being toasted a second time. Different varieties of bánh mì are made to order when customers appear.

Lò Bánh Mì Pasteur's homemade pâté is several shades darker than those in Vietnam. “The Taiwanese like eating jiànkāng [healthy], [so] we don’t use preservatives. That’s what makes the commercial pâté so pinkish,” she adds.

As Nương's trusted bánh mì assembler, Tuyết swiftly tossed every last essential condiment onto a near-complete sandwich. A brief chat with her made me realize that the presence of Vietnamese restaurants and bakeries in Taichung was worthy of a story of its own.

Tuyết puts the finishing touches on bánh mì thịt.

“The first batch [of brides] were more innocent. We came for a better life. If you were lucky [and met] a good husband, [you had] no problems,” she says. For her, however, it was the opposite, as life in Taichung proved to be more difficult than back in the fatherland. “I was willing to drag my luggage all the way from District 8 to Taiwan, yet I was equally willing to drag it all back home,” she laments, adding that her life was tougher than back home — “khổ hơn Việt Nam em ơi.”

Still, now that Nương's children have grown up, her life has gotten more comfortable, with the exception of a few things. “At the end of the day, what we really miss is Vietnamese food,” she says, as I wash my last bite of bánh mì down with the help of cà phê sữa đá.

We couldn’t help but laugh. That one thing that has made Vietnam my second home? Definitely the food.

Lò Bánh Mì Pasteur is open from 8am to 8pm. Visit the bakery's Facebook page here.

This article was originally published in 2019.

“I don’t like the term ‘fusion,’” Vinh Lê, the chef of Cicada Coffee Bar, tells me. “You need to adapt. You need to adapt to the new environment, new life, when you move from Vietnam to the US. And to do that, food is one of the important elements.”

Take the example of nước mắm, he says; even if the sauce exists in both Vietnam and the US, its fermentation and curing processes necessarily vary between countries. “You cannot expect that the food in the US is exactly the same as the food in Vietnam, because of different environments,” Vinh explains. 

Cicada Coffee Bar is a Vietnamese café by day and restaurant by night that’s been operating in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2020. Behind the fogged-up windows of its one-room, one-story building, patrons chat over Sai Gon lattes and cured salmon bánh mì; Sea Salt Shaker coffees and phở noodle salads. Vinh Lê and Dương Huỳnh — life partners and co-owners — preside over the bustling operation. 

Vinh Lê (right) and Dương Huỳnh (left) are the minds behind Cicada.

Far from a hub of Vietnamese culture, Cambridge is best known for its universities and proximity to Boston. Beneath this New England backdrop, Cicada’s innovative take on Vietnamese dishes could easily be categorized as a kind of “fusion.” How else can you describe sushi-grade salmon nestled in the crackly baguette of a bánh mì? 

But Vinh resists the very concept of fusion. To him, it implies a cuisine borne out of discrete and definable parts: there’s a part from Vietnam and a part from New England, and the end result is a mix of the two. But, as he emphasizes, Vietnamese food isn’t a stagnant, bounded entity. It adapts and changes, porous to a bevy of influences while still retaining its core “spirit.” This is, uncoincidentally, much like Vinh himself. He repeats that Cicada is a reflection of his own life trajectory — one that winds through a range of places and careers.

Vinh went to college for architecture, and met Dương when she interned for his firm.

Born and raised in northern Vietnam’s Bắc Ninh Province, Vinh moved to Saigon in 2014 to attend architecture college. “My young [sic] and my youth, it was in Saigon,” he says. “Saigon is the whole world for me.” During this period, he served as a tour guide throughout Vietnam and Cambodia. He met Dương — also a trained architect, with a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — when she interned at his architecture firm. In 2013, he came to Cambridge to join her. He had never lived in the US before. 

Since then, Vinh has cooked at an Asian gastropub in Boston, received his master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University, and worked at several urban design firms in New England. All the while, he’s run a Vietnamese pop-up restaurant, taught cooking classes to Cambridge residents, and even returned to Vietnam for a bit to open a wine bar. All of these experiences led him, finally, to Cicada, a vessel that embodies Vinh’s journey, from its vibe to its menu.

Cicada’s honey mousse espresso is a take on the famous Hanoian egg coffee, made with local honey.

“I cannot define [our food]. I cannot define where it’s from,” Vinh says. The café’s smooth, perfectly sweet Sai Gon latte — which he refers to as his “heart” — is a variation on Saigonese bạc xỉu; the Sea Salt Shaker, meanwhile, is like Hanoi’s cà phê nâu đá, inflected with the saltiness of central Vietnam’s version of cà phê sữa đá. 

“It’s me. Can you define me now? No, I don't think you can define me,” he continues. “I grew up in the north, I moved to Saigon, I lived in places. So it's very sophisticated, it's complicated, but also simple. It's me.”

The chirp of cicadas reminds Vinh of summer as a child, when he could walk around outside without thinking about anything at all. That sense of peace and presence is what he hopes to cultivate in the space of the café.

Cicada is intended to be a place of relaxation after work.

He and Dương were among the brave souls to open a business during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when most businesses were struggling to survive. But to Vinh, the isolating effects of the pandemic heightened the need for sanctuaries like Cicada. “I tried really hard because I knew that the pandemic would be over. I believed it,” says Vinh. “And people still need space to gather, a space to hang out, spend time, or cool down after the long day. Our life is not easy — life is difficult. So Cicada is the space where I want people to calm down, enjoy the drink and food.”

Unlike most cafes in student-heavy Cambridge, Cicada doesn’t have free Wi-Fi and sets limits on when laptops can be used. It nudges customers towards relaxation and connectivity through its carefully curated vibe.

Eclectic furniture, lush potted plants, and a serene backyard garden beckon guests to unplug and stay awhile. During brutal New England winters, the cafe felt like a cozy, caffeinating refuge; during spring and summer, sipping a Sai Gon latte in the garden felt like a celebration of things coming alive again.

“Cicada’s vibe builds up over time. We see people react and enjoy the space, and we put more elements and redesign,” Vinh says. “We love the vintage style. We travel all over New England, collecting chairs and tables because we love something old but stylish, stable, and elegant.” 

During college, you could often find me sandwiched in the line that reliably poured out of Cicada on weekends. Even more so than its intimacy, what most drew me to the cafe’s atmosphere was how — despite seamlessly fitting into Cambridge — it was also unmistakably Vietnamese. According to Vinh, these two qualities overlap more than one might think. 

Like Cambridge, Bắc Ninh is “a small town, funky and a little bit hippie—a different style,” Vinh says. “So Dương and I have lived here for long enough, so we know the vibe. We want to do something that’s Indochina, but a cross with New England vintage.”

When I first visited Cicada, I was struck by the bureau in the dining area. On it were bottles of a Massachusetts liquor brand, next to a plate of apples and a vase that held a stick of burned incense. This setup was immediately recognizable to me as it's the same altar arrangement that occupied my own home on ancestors’ birthdays, or during Tết. I excitedly took a picture and sent it to my parents. By rendering popular vintage aesthetics in a distinctly Vietnamese style, Cicada was unlike any other Vietnamese restaurant I’d been to.

Vinh and Dương with friends of the cafe during Tết.

This is a strength that Vinh and Dương are well aware of. They know they’ve cultivated an environment that uniquely resonates with young Vietnamese Americans, like me.

“It’s somewhere that [young people] feel confident in and very proud. Like, ‘This is our style,’” says Vinh. “Most Vietnamese restaurants are mom-and-pop[s]. They don't have the time and skill to care about the vibe, decor, style. They sell delicious food, but they don't have the imagination of design. So we’re lucky because we went to design school. And we have huge support from the young Vietnamese generation.” 

One night, I dropped into Cicada for dinner alone, celebrating a personal accomplishment with cured salmon phở noodle salad at the bar. It’s my favorite dish there, a refreshing, texturally rich medley of cold noodles, cucumbers, and herbs, flavored with cilantro pesto and nước mắm. I was ending the meal with Vinh’s tangy, homemade yogurt when he asked me if I was Vietnamese. I responded that I was.

“You should’ve told me!” he exclaimed. “I would’ve let you try stuff for free!” 

Green papaya salad is one of the few Cicada dishes that can be easily found on the streets of Saigon.

This offer revealed not only Vinh’s generosity, but also a fervent passion for sharing Vietnamese cuisine with his community. While the space of Cicada attempts to distinguish itself from “mom and pop” Vietnamese restaurants, Vinh’s food menu — and, in fact, his very presence in the food industry at all — is driven by a desire to preserve and continue their legacies.

After the American War, the first generation of Vietnamese Americans opened restaurants purely as a means of survival, he says. Now, “We want to carry those lessons, legacy, impact to the new generation. We’re not selling only coffee and food. We’re selling culture.” He believes that Americans homogenize Vietnam, reducing it all to Saigon and the south. “But Vietnam’s very diverse. Vietnam’s big. We have a middle, we have a north, we have different cultures.”

Phở salad with cured salmon, cashew herb pesto, and nước chấm.

Phở noodle salad with roasted eggplants, tofu, cashew pesto and crispy shallots.

For Vinh, the urgency of spreading Vietnam’s varied culture made entering the restaurant industry a simple, intuitive choice. When I ask whether there was a key moment that crystallized his career pivot, he responds by explaining this imperative — which doubles as his food philosophy, of sorts. 

“I used to be an urban designer. I loved my job, but at the same time, I love food,” he tells me. “Food and drink is the best way to introduce culture. It's so directly [sic] into the stomach, into the soul. Food and drink is the most significant thing in life. You cannot live without drink and food, you know? It's the foundation of human beings.”

Of course, achieving Vinh’s goal of cultural transmission requires the food and drink in question to be good. Luckily, Cicada’s offerings are — so much so that Vinh was a semifinalist for the prestigious James Beard Emerging Chef Award this year. Hailed as the Oscars of the culinary world, the awards recognize industry leaders from across the US.

At Cicada, every lunchtime dish falls into the category of bánh mì, black rice, or phở noodle salad, with a few variations on each. There’s charred eggplant and tofu phở noodle salad, for example, or baked salmon bánh mì — complete with avocado pate, pickled green papaya, and a baguette from a local Vietnamese-Chinese bakery. If a noodle soup special is on the menu, it’ll probably feature duck; the soothing, almost medicinal bún măng vịt often appears in the rotation.

Cicada’s ever-changing dinner menu has a bit more variation, including spring rolls and papaya salad, but still sticks to the same staple elements of vegetables, duck, and salmon. According to him, Cicada’s small, light menu distinguishes itself by showcasing “high-end Vietnamese cuisine” that features these quality ingredients, namely, duck breast and sushi-grade salmon.

Bánh mì with cured salmon, vegetarian fillings, and chả cá.

Critically, the dishes also manage to be sustainable and affordable, producing little food waste. For Vinh, these are the guiding principles of the menu. After cooking duck confit, the staff extracts the bone and uses it to make a broth; they garnish dishes with cilantro leaves, but use the roots to make cashew pesto for the phở noodle salad. “We will eat a circle,” Vinh says.

Another principle of Cicada’s food is that it listens to the rhythms of the market, shaped by the supply of its particular location. For New England, this means seafood — thus, the centrality of salmon on the menu. “New England people love seafood,” explains Vinh. “Sometimes you cannot make decisions. The market makes decisions for you. You have to make sure you understand, what do people need?” 

Ultimately, Vinh designs his food to be healthy and in-tune with Cambridge’s audience yet authentically Vietnamese nonetheless. “The dishes I make here, you cannot find in Vietnam, to be honest,” he admits. He’s right: in Saigon, I’ve yet to encounter anything akin to the café’s pesto-topped phở noodle salad. The option of cured salmon, especially, reflects Vinh’s bend to the supply and tastes of New England. Still, he says, “It’s me, because it’s very authentic, very Vietnamese, but very American.”

One of Cicada’s staple drinks is the Sai Gon Latte, a less intensely sweet version of bạc xỉu that comes with oat milk.

Here, Dương provides a great litmus test for determining what can be categorized as true Vietnamese food. “Feed it to the moms and the grandmas and see what they think,” she says. “The parents and grandparents who come are always like, ‘Wow, that’s so Vietnamese, but I have no clue what this is.’” 

In other words, Cicada passes the test with flying colors. The menu goes beyond what is textbook and recognizable, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing what makes it essentially — perhaps intangibly — Vietnamese. “Adaption is the key to make [sic] your business successful,” Vinh says. “Don't say I am the rule keeper, but the rulebreaker. The spirit keeper.”

Cicada Coffee Bar is at 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

When my mother, a native of Singapore’s oft-visited Chinatown, described a pork offal soup stall with meatballs that “tasted suspiciously like that vermicelli dish we had in Huế back in 2013,” I knew I had to trek out to Chinatown Complex Food Centre to find it.

You may not have heard of the location by its full name, but you’ll know it when Singaporean locals mention the larger-than-life Buddha Tooth Relic Temple. Meanwhile, travel photographers know it for the community square where they go to capture photos of elderly Singaporean men playing checkers and Chinese chess. 

Once home to a Michelin-starred soy sauce chicken rice joint and still home to Danish craft beer brewery Mikkeller’s Singapore taproom, Chinatown Complex Food Centre is a foodies' labyrinth for both traditionalists and hipsters that requires a map, Google search, recommendations from locals and diehard patience to queue for food.

Singaporean–Vietnamese couple Chuk & Kim, owners of Monan Pork soup are far from shy and when I paid them a visit, they gave me a quick lowdown on what their soup is all about and how it came to be.

One could consider typical Singapore pig offal soup old-fashioned. The austere dish normally consists of intestines, liver, stomach, and some non-organ cuts cooked with a touch of pepper and crunchy Chinese sauerkraut, and topped with a handful of coriander. But Monan strives to reinvent beyond Singaporean conventions with a number of distinct innovations beginning with its unique daikon-based broth inspired by hủ tiếu gõ.

Egg sausage, known as trứng cuộn in Vietnamese, is the most unexpected addition to Monan’s pork offal soup. Interestingly, Kim claims it was inspired by her time swiping on social media apps. “Actually, it’s not common in Vietnam at all!” She said, before explaining the need to carefully blanched pieces of the delicacy for a warm, al dente finish. The tasty, Instagram-friendly, faintly yellow disks of egg sausage add immediate recognizability to social media pictures.

I cannot be entirely certain, but the first and only place in Vietnam that serves similar pork that comes to my mind is the popular Hủ Tiếu Mỹ Tho Dì 9 located in alley 538 of District 4’s Đoàn Văn Bơ street, an ultra-dense and gridlocked residential area with hordes of street food and market vendors.

According to a Singapore food blogger who visited the stall a year ago, the dish probably hails from Hakka Chinese culinary traditions, nothing that similar egg sausages are also found in Thailand and Cambodia as celebratory dishes for religious processions.

The duo spent months perfecting the technique through trial and error, aided by conventional sausage-making tools. The egg is painstakingly piped by hand as imperfections in the sausage casing can cause the egg to leak out. The soup’s meatballs are filled with umami oomph that balances the fat and protein nicely and seems to me to be a reinterpretation of Vietnamese-style chả ranging from mọc, chả lụa to chả cua.

Meanwhile, the dish’s pork leg is simply served sliced or unsliced, just like what one would find in a Saigon bún bò Huế joint. It is probably the only al dente pork leg I’ve encountered in Singapore that’s not Thai-inspired or stewed with soy sauce. It pairs well with a slightly acidic chili sauce inspired by Chuk’s love of Japan’s gyu kushi beef skewers. “The first time I tried dipping beef skewers into lemon juice in Japan, I didn’t get it. But it must be how it spikes your taste buds; I just kept on dipping it,” he noted while explaining why he believes an acidic component is vital for a well-rounded pork experience.

“We want you to taste our soup,” Chuk said, explaining why no sweet sauces are offered at Monan. But creating a soup that works on its own, with rice, and even with wheat and rice noodles was not a simple task. Consistency wasn’t just a goal, it was essential.

Fresh out of the corporate world in late 2018, Chuk and Kim decided to participate in a hawker Incubation Stall Programme (ISP) helmed by Singapore’s National Environmental Agency (NEA). The initiative subsidized 15 months of rent for aspiring hawkers that had a sound business plan. “Making tasty food at home builds your hawker dreams, but scaling up and cooking commercially anything from 20 to 50 liters of soup a day is a different ball game,” Chuk explained, adding that his previous experience at a food and beverage company involved in franchising large Singaporean baking brands kept him cautiously prepared.

While initial responses to their soup were positive, numerous veterans of NEA’s hawker advisory panel warned them that they would face challenges. Unlike familiar Singaporean dishes like Hainanese chicken rice, bak kut teh or laksa, most Singaporeans would consider their rendition of organ soup as foreign at first sight. Although the duo were warned that it was located in a mature residential estate filled with elderly inhabitants and visited by discerning international tourists, when a vacant Chinatown hawker spot was offered, they jumped at the opportunity.

But just three months after Monan opened on Christmas Eve, 2019, the global pandemic hit. The five-meter square stall was instantly put to the test as a steep decline in tourists meant they would need a steady flow of local return customers to survive. “If it’s no good, no repeats, I’ll close it,” Chuk initially promised himself.

Thankfully, they succeeded in capturing the attention and appreciation of locals who made repeated returns to their minimalist menu, inspired by Chuk's favorite Japanese ramen joints that also offer few options. One can stick to Monan’s standard combination of egg sausages with organs and lean pork or order a pork shabu-shabu soup complete with a handful of kway tiao, a close cousin of northern Vietnamese-style phở in terms of rice noodle texture.

Though the Chinese characters on the stall’s logo read Mạc Nam (莫南), the name Monan was way closer to heart than I could have possibly imagined. It has nothing to do with ancient Vietnamese warlords. “Món ăn lah!” Chuk chuckled.

Monan is at 335 Smith Street, #02-137, Singapore 050335. It's open daily from 10:30am to 8:30pm.

The first time I bought rượu, it was from Lang Giang, my tour guide in Sa Pa. We were staying in a Red Dao village known for its rice liquor production, and that night I received three water bottles, stripped of their original labels, each filled with a mysterious liquid.

One was in the fluorescent yellow of Gatorade. I gave them to the guests of my pop-up restaurant as part of a shot I called Rượu Awakening, and no one went blind, so I kept sourcing local spirits from all over Vietnam. I bought mulberry wine in Đà Lạt and plain ‘ol rượu đế in a District 4 hẻm — all handed over in plastic bottles that once housed sports drinks or purified water.

The story I’m about to tell you is not about rượu sold in plastic bottles. In fact, it’s the antithesis of that. This is the story of two Vietnamese men in the west and a foreigner in Vietnam determined to show the world what a Vietnamese rượu can be.

A History of Vietnamese Rượu

To understand where rượu is going, we need to understand where it came from.

Since the practice of distillation spread from China in the late 14^th century, alcohol made from rice has been a staple of Vietnamese life, from everyday consumption as part of a healthy lifestyle to ceremonies commemorating Tết, death anniversaries, and weddings.

The process of producing rượu was interconnected with pig farming. Farmers needed to cook the rice anyway to feed their pigs, so why not ferment it first and make alcohol before giving the leftover grains to the pigs? Because of this practice, rượu was mainly produced for an individual family’s consumption.

By the 19^th century, as the Vietnamese economy grew, specialization emerged between cooperating villages such that one might work to provide rice, another pottery to hold the drink, and a third took care of the fermentation. Cù Lâm Village in Bình Định Province is known for its rượu Bàu Đá. It gets its name from the ancient water source used by the village to make the alcohol. The Vân Village in Bắc Giang sends a family representative on the fourth day of Tết every year to the Rộc Temple to swear by a blood oath to keep the secret of their rượu technique within the village. Phú Lộc village — now known as Cẩm Vũ — in the Red River Delta was famously so good at producing rice liquor that the Nguyễn Dynasty exempted it from its strict alcohol regulations.

But things changed under French colonization. During the mid- to late-19^th century, French colonies were under pressure to be profitable, so they drove small, native distillers out of the market through a licensing system and regulations that required more resources than most locals had. By the end of the century, the colonial government had essentially established a complete monopoly on alcohol. From there they produced industrial, aggressive, nearly pure ethanol in huge factories and sold it as “rượu” for four times the old price.

The only legal liquor was from the state-owned company, commonly known as rượu ty, short for rượu công ty (company liquor). The colonial regime cracked down on illegal distilling operations through unconscionable fines and years of prison time.

However, the Vietnamese people could not be stopped.

In the north, women would transport alcohol from rural areas by strapping wineskins under their bodices. A thirsty resident of Cochinchina would approach these deceptively large women with a cup and some cash; she would then dispense the rice alcohol through a hose, after which the customer would then immediately pull his body back. This pulling back action earned the spirit the name rượu lùi.

In the south, the intrepid would distill in tall grasses called cỏ đế, which grew so thick that it deterred French enforcers from entering, thus the name rượu đế. Cỏ đế grew all over the countryside and is notoriously difficult to destroy, a metaphor for the Vietnamese spirit.

In the south, the intrepid would distill in tall grasses called cỏ đế, which grew so thick that it deterred French enforcers from entering, thus the name rượu đế.

As France started losing control of Cochinchina, it also lost its hold on the spirits market, until its stranglehold was completely dismantled by 1945. Unfortunately, the factories established by the French were absorbed by the state-owned Saigon Beverage Corporation (Sabeco) and Hanoi Beverage Corporation (Habeco), which continued the French’s industrial production methods, pumping out massive batches at the lowest possible prices, thus accelerating rượu’s reputation as a low-quality spirit and harbinger of hangovers.

For a deeper dive on the history of rượu, read our two-part series on rice wine.

A Tale of Three Men

It was in this environment that our three men grew up: Suy Dinh and Tien Ngo, the founders of SuTi Craft Distillery, in Vietnam; and Markus Madeja, the founder of Sơn Tinh, in Switzerland. Tien was born and raised in the outskirts of Saigon. During our phone interview, he recalls wandering through the surrounding farmlands and a device-free childhood playing with marbles and cricket fighting: “Somehow I was into architecture way back then. I like to make a little house for my crickets. You can make them a floor plan and look down and see them going room to room. That’s probably more me: [I’d rather] raise crickets than let them fight.”

In 1980, at the young age of 15, Tien decided to make the risky journey from Vietnam to America, alone. “I wanted to be an architect and I didn’t see any developments in Vietnam [at the time]. I didn’t see things that I could do. My mom wouldn’t let me, but my dad said okay [because they] can’t stop me, since I had it in mind for so long.”

Similar to other teenage boys who ended up in the Vietnamese refugee camps, Tien loved his time in Malaysia. “The refugee camp, that was my paradise. I had been kinda sheltered. I never left the house. My parents never went on vacation, so I [had] never seen the sea. For me, it was like being a bird out of its cage for the first time, especially since I escaped by myself. I climbed and hiked up mountains when I was supposed to be in school for English,” he chuckles.

By the next year, his brother, who was a former military pilot and had flown out in 1975, sponsored 16-year-old Tien to live with him in Fort Worth, Texas. “Back then, when you’re growing up, you think that you’re old enough. Now I look at all my nieces and nephews — they’re 20...21...24...graduates — I still think they’re too young to go anywhere!” Tien laughs.

It was through his brother that Tien met his future co-founder and distiller Suy, who had grown up in Vũng Tàu and immigrated to Texas six years prior. “My brother [is] married to [Suy’s] sister...so we come to our nephews’, our nieces’ birthday parties. That’s how we ran into each other.” The two went on to attend the University of Texas at Arlington together. Suy studied electrical engineering; and Tien, architecture, of course.

Halfway around the world, Markus Madeja grew up in a small town outside of Zurich to German parents who had fled Soviet forces before the construction of the Berlin Wall. As someone who grew up studying Latin and speaking both High German and Swiss German, it wasn’t a surprise to find out Markus studied linguistics and anthropology while at university.

Photo by N.Vĩnh via baoquocte.vn.

Between 1993 and 1997, Markus spent his time flying back and forth between Vietnam and Switzerland, learning the language and culture while completing his degree. After his first trip back from Vietnam, he and a friend set up a specialized Southeast Asian tourism agency operating out of Switzerland. Markus elaborates, “With my background in anthropology, the Vietnamese language, and tourism, I became an expert in [community-based ethno-]tourism.”

In the early 1990s, when Markus first arrived in Vietnam, beer was much more expensive than rượu and was a treat to be enjoyed about once a year. At that time, rượu was considered more of a staple than a spirit; there was little attention paid to its quality, consistency, aging methods, or branding.

“Alcohol came in plastic bottles from the countryside, you had no idea who produced it. There was no label or anything, no certification. It was really rough and tough moonshine. It was a common thing that people were drinking because it was cheap, so there was no status or prestige attached,” Markus tells me over our video call. “It’s not like whisky — people talk about whisky more than they drink it. In the 1990s people had more stuff; slowly, slowly, more money, and so people really started to show off with imported spirits, while Vietnamese rượu was for the poor, for the workers...”

The Future of Rượu

In 1997, three years after trying rượu nếp cẩm, a deep purple liquor made from black sticky rice, for the first time in a student bar and inspired by rượu “taverns” in Hanoi and their range of traditional infusions, Markus became interested in making rượu himself.

He worked with the people in his then-girlfriend’s, now-wife’s, village and paid them extra to discard the “heads” and “tails” of their distillation. These first and last parts often make a liquor cloudy or dangerous because of the high methanol content. He attributes the high quality of his rượu to this cutting practice.

Markus Madeja and his partner. Photo by N.Vĩnh, via baoquocte.vn

“As soon as the stuff came out, everybody liked it and everybody said it was better than the other stuff in those taverns. And that was when the idea was born to set up a small tavern as well to see if we could sell this...if people still like it after they have to pay for it,” laughs Markus as he recounts the beginning of his chain of taverns, Highway 4.

Since then, the spirits served at Highway 4 have come to life as their own brand — Sơn Tinh — which has gone on to become Vietnam's first internationally recognized and awarded premium liquor.

Photo via sontinh.com

On the other side of the world, Tien and Suy were catching up over a lake-side bike ride in Texas. Suy told Tien about his rượu đế-making hobby and Tien asked to try some. He recounts his reaction to me over the phone: “Oh this is really interesting. It’s totally different.” Like Markus, Suy also discards the heads and tails of his distillation, keeping only the “heart.”

Photo via sutiusa.com

So impressed by the quality and motivated because there wasn’t anything else like it being sold in the US, Tien convinced Suy that they should start a rượu đế distilling business together and call it SuTi, from the first two letters of each of their names. The process of doing the paperwork, finding the land, building on the land, buying stills from Germany and getting the liquor license, while simultaneously refining their products took them four years, and the pandemic delayed them another four months. So it’s well-deserved that since they opened their doors in November 2020, people all over the world, from Europe to Australia, have been trying to score a few bottles. In just a year, they’ve had visitors to their tasting room come from as far as Hawaii and Alaska.

So how does America’s first rượu do things differently? First off, they are very particular and consistent with their ingredients. During the product development period, they experimented with many types of yeast and rice. “With liquor you have to wait two weeks to get results...Very long process, very detailed. It’s like waiting on [the] grass [to] grow. Suy is very good at keeping records and he’s very patient.”

Part of the process requires learning about different types of yeast and their behavior. As Tien goes into the details, you can hear the boy who raised crickets coming out: “We [are] just kinda raising the yeast. They are just like little creatures. They can get stressed. They need vitamins to be healthy. Certain temperatures they don’t like. If you don’t give them what they want, they get stressed and create bad alcohol. Don’t make them unhappy!”

SuTi Craft distillery. Photo by Cody Neathery via fwweekly.com.

They also experimented with many varieties of rice, from the store (“they enrich the rice with iron or infuse a jasmine smell...the yeast don’t like it”) and from Thailand (“has kinda a burlap smell to it”). Eventually, they found an organic, Louisiana-grown jasmine hybrid that gave them great, consistent results. This became the rice used in their Rượu Đế Ông Già, a spirit named for the older Vietnamese men in the area who gave Suy and Tien feedback on their product. Their second, less-traditional product, Lion 45, uses a long grain rice grown along the Gulf Coast in Beaumont, Texas. “US rice has a specific DNA, and we love it,” Tien exclaims.

When asked what he was most proud of, Tien answered, “When I went to the stores in Vietnam, they don’t call it rượu đế, they call it ‘premium rice vodka.’ It's kinda disappointing that they think to be able to sell, they have to call it vodka. We’re proud to have rượu đế on our label.” To Tien, what is most rewarding is “to see this product [be a] part of family get-togethers, to be người đồng hương. To be able to represent [a] Vietnamese product alongside any fine liquor. Vietnamese [customers are] proud to show the product to [their] non-Vietnamese friends.”

Rượu Đế Ông Già and Rượu Đế SuTi. Photo by David Ochoa via wfaa.com.

Similarly, Markus expressed his desire to give Vietnamese a national domestic product that they can be proud to serve their guests, “I think it’s something that’s definitely growing, this pride and this recognition. It’s not bad just because it’s Vietnamese. Initially, that was always the perception: anything from Vietnam is cheap, low-quality, and some kind of dodgy. But nowadays Vietnamese are proud of their own products. We’ve got cars. We’ve got international products that are not worse than the foreign products.”

Internationally, Markus wants rượu to be recognized with its own designation, like soju or sake, “It’s not vodka; it’s not whisky; it’s not tequila...it’s rượu. So that people associate the name rượu as a really cool product. Shops all over the world don’t call it a sandwich, they call it a bánh mì. I want people to actually order a rượu and not a Vietnamese vodka. This is my crusade, my dream.”

Dô to that.

Twenty years ago in America, tofu was considered, at best, a bland, tasteless, hippie meat replacement, and at worst, a dangerous, highly processed food product that would allegedly cause men to grow breasts and women to develop breast cancer (even though the opposite is true). It was at that time that one Vietnamese refugee decided he would take back tofu.

Minh Tsai grew up in District 10 of our lovely Saigon. Over the phone, he fondly recalls the time spent with his grandparents. “I was born during the war and my parents just didn’t have time to take care of me, which [was] very typical of the time. By default, my grandparents took care of me. There were daily rituals with them that were all food related. The morning would entail my grandfather taking me out to mua xôi ăn,” he tells me. Like many Việt Kiều, he easily switches between English and Vietnamese because there are still some words one’s second language can’t quite capture the emotion of.

“And sometimes we would go get fresh soy milk in one of the hẻm nhỏ. You know how people say your sense of smell is usually the longest memory? I remember [the smell of that soy milk] to this day. [Now] I can smell soy milk a mile away — it’s so fragrant. And the same place that sells soy milk would sell tofu. So sometimes we would buy a block of tofu in a plastic bag with water...like a goldfish! And we would take it home to my grandmother to cook.”

Minh continues to wistfully remember the days he would spend with his grandmother at the local wet market, learning how to pick the best produce, meat, and fish. “Those experiences growing up really influenced how I ended up starting a food business. I think some of it is unconscious, right? We love food, and we do what we love.”

In 1980, Minh’s parents told him they were going on a family vacation. It wasn’t until they were on the boat that his parents confessed they were actually leaving Vietnam. “So literally one night, pack up...gone. I didn’t even get a chance to tell my friends.”

His family ended up in one of the bigger refugee camps in Malaysia, on Pulau Bidong. For me, the image of a refugee camp has always conjured up images of scared, starving families huddled underneath threadbare tents behind barbed wire. When I ask Minh about his experience in Pulau Bidong, he gleefully exclaims, “I was 11. It was the best adventure of my life. I was fishing. I was stealing coconuts, shelling coconuts, and swimming. It was amazing to run around an island.” As further proof of how much he thoroughly enjoyed his time in the refugee camp, Minh wrote a book of “Huckleberry Minh” adventures about the experience for his two boys.

From Pulau Bidong, Minh’s family was sponsored to go to Maryland, which didn’t have the kind of Asian community that Minh’s dad needed. So his dad went to San Francisco, a city whose Chinatown is the largest Chinese enclave outside of Asia, found work, and eventually sent for Minh and his family. “We took the bus from Maryland to San Francisco. It took three days, but that was also amazing. I think I ate more McDonald’s on that trip than my entire life put together,” Minh continues in his upbeat attitude.

After growing up in the Bay Area, Minh moved across three time zones to New York to study Political Science and Asian Studies for his bachelor’s degree, and Economic Development and Microeconomics for his master’s degree at Columbia University. Despite having two degrees from an Ivy League university, he felt the need to explain, “Much to the chagrin of my parents, I never really had good science teachers, so I never had the passion for science. I ended up just studying the things I love.”

His original goal was to work internationally at an institution like the United Nations, but “I ended up becoming an investment banker by default,” Minh cheerlessly goes on. After seeing two rounds of layoffs in the early 2000s, he had had enough: “I decided to leave because I just thought that it’s not fair that the few colleagues that I was working with were not as competent and they get to stay, while a lot of my very good and smart colleagues were laid off.” Those experiences soured his attitude towards the corporate sector: “America’s not really the meritocracy I believed in. To really be successful here, it’s not what you know, but who you know.”

“As an economist, I recognized that there were a lot of recessions and [I needed] to do something that is more recession-proof. And food is something that is recession-proof. Everyone needs to eat.” At that time, 20 years ago, the Bay Area was undergoing a renaissance of artisanal goods and farmers’ markets. People were eating up local and organic cheeses, chocolate, coffee, and chili sauces. But no one was making tofu.

Hodo factory.

After being disappointed in both the watery bricks of tofu at the supermarket and the non-organic tofu sold at the few tofu shops in San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Vietnamese shops in neighboring San Jose, in 2004, Minh joined the farmer market vendors. His tofu was made with fresh, certified organic beans using processes he learned from traveling around Asia and speaking with traditional tofu makers.

Some snippets of Hodo's tofu-making process. Photos via Hodofood.com.

From a farmer’s market stand, selling to eco-conscious San Franciscans, Hodo Tofu — emphasis on the đậu — started supplying venues around the country, from Michelin-starred restaurants to the beloved burrito chain Chipotle. They are currently in over 3,500 restaurants and 7,500 retail stores, including Whole Foods, the Annam Gourmet of the US.

This last part is particularly noteworthy because foods from a non-white or non-Black culture have been relegated to the “ethnic” aisle of American supermarkets since the 1930s. In an interview with The Washington Post, Krishnendu Ray, author of The Ethnic Restaurateur, states, “When we call a food ethnic, we are signifying a difference but also a certain kind of inferiority. French cuisine has never been defined as ethnic. We are really not willing to pay for ‘ethnic food.’”

Yet despite these stereotypes, and against all odds, Hodo Tofu, a brand founded by a Vietnamese refugee, is the most expensive tofu brand in Whole Foods, a retailer so pricey that customers often nickname it “Whole Paycheck.”

Hodo’s products. Photos via Hodofood.com

“One of my proudest achievements is to reintroduce tofu to the west, in the best of its light, and not as another cheap product. The notion that ethnic food has to be cheap...No. We’re the most expensive tofu brand in the country, and I’m proud of it. We’re the most sought-after tofu brand in Michelin-starred restaurants in the country, and I’m proud of it.”

Hodo’s sales and distribution would thrill any food entrepreneur, but Minh recalls, “When my parents came to the US as new immigrants, I felt like they were being taken advantage of by other immigrants — that kinda pissed me off. I love the fact that I’m able to provide a really good working environment for all the immigrants that come. I imagine my parents working for me at my current plant and it makes me happy. Those are things we don’t talk about, but I’m happier with all that than how big our sales are.”

Staffs working at Hodo. Photos via Hodofood.com

When I ask Minh about his vision for the long-term future of Hodo, he surprises me by saying, “I think Hodo’s got a life of its own now. Kinda like a kid that’s grown up. Right? If anything, I’m working less and less. I’m not the frontman of the business anymore. I want to read. I want to write. I want to exercise. I want to cook. I want to spend time with my boys.”

Minh also muses about consulting with other packaged food brands in Vietnam, using Hodo’s “playbook” as a guide. “It’s kinda like that joke, ‘If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere?’ I have a joke that if I can sling tofu, I can sell anything. I could sell ice to Eskimos.” But he does follow-up with humility, “Hodo’s success, so much of it is the market. It’s not me.”

And who knows? Maybe you’ll see him back in Saigon in the future. “I think in a few years, when I can do even less than I do for Hodo, I want to go back to Vietnam and do a wine and tapas bar.”

Graphics by Phan Nhi, Hannah Hoàng, Hải Anh, and Lê Quan Thuận.
Illustrations by Hải Anh and Hannah Hoàng.
Motion graphic by Phan Nhi.
Photos courtesy of Minh Tsai.

“Our parents met here in the Czech Republic after being invited by the government to work in [their] factories around 1983. They were one of the first Vietnamese here,” says Giang Ta, the front-of-house and fraternal half of Taro Group, a fine-dining restaurant group that currently consists of three concepts: Gao Den, Taro and Dian.

Gao Den, Taro and Dian.

“I personally had zero Vietnamese classmates [because] our parents were first generation, ”elaborates Khanh Ta, the older of the two brothers and the one in charge of what goes on in the kitchen. Giang chimes in: “[At 35 and 32] we [are] kinda the older ones from the second generation. I only have one [Vietnamese] mate from secondary school. Now it’s pretty normal to have three Vietnamese people in class.”

Brothers Giang and Khanh Ta at their restaurant Dian.
Photo by Tam Le.

Today, the Vietnamese population makes up the third-largest minority in the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, falling only behind the neighboring Slovaks and Ukrainains. It also represents the third-largest Vietnamese diaspora in Europe after France and Germany. 

“If you see an Asian person on the streets of the Czech Republic, it’s like a 95% chance they are Vietnamese,” Giang informs me, a fact that delighted me because in the United States, people of Vietnamese origin only make up 9% of the Asian population.

But unlike France’s diaspora, or even other countries such as the United States, Canada, or Australia, the Czech Republic’s immigrants originally came from northern Vietnam. In the 1980s and early 1990s, then-Czechoslovakia — and many other communist European countries — had guest worker agreements with the newly communist Vietnamese government, which hoped its citizens would return from Europe to the motherland with new, useful skills.

However, after Czechoslovakia’s government moved away from communism in 1989 and the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, many Vietnamese workers decided to stay. 

Viet Anh Vu at his restaurant Bao Bao.
Photo by Tam Le

“My parents, they were born in Vietnam. They are from the north, close to Hanoi. And then they moved to Russia...in the end of [the] eighties. They went as a group to work in factories. It was quite rushed, I guess, in Russia in those days, so they decided it’s better to move, and Czech was more peaceful. We moved here in 1995 when I was five. We were the first [of our family here],” recounts Viet Anh Vu, owner of the restaurant Bao Bao. 

Viet Anh’s parents, like many other first-generation Vietnamese-Czech, operated a business in Sapa, or Little Hanoi, the Vietnamese enclave about 15 kilometers south of Prague’s Old Town Square, and one of the city’s only ethnic neighborhoods. Growing up there, Viet Anh helped his mom sell xôi and bánh khúc, and got to know many of the vendors in the area. Now however, his business forces him to remain closer to the city center, returning to Sapa mainly for ingredients. 

This narrative echoes Khanh’s, who worked at his parents’ wholesale imported clothing store — a popular industry for first-generation Vietnamese immigrants — before starting their restaurant Gao Den. “But we still get most of the herbs and spices from Sapa. So we are there like every week,” adds Giang. 

Photo via Châu Praha.

Over the past four decades, the nature of the Vietnamese population in the Czech Republic has started changing. 

For one, they became a sizable minority group. Khanh explains: “The first Vietnamese were invited by the Czech government, and then other generations were invited by their relatives here. That’s how it started.”

One such example is Trang Nguyen, the driving force behind Banh Mi Makers. Her father immigrated to Prague in 1998 to earn money and send it home to Vietnam until she and her mother could join him in 2003. Trang was twelve years old when she arrived. “Even though I’ve been here for so long, I still look up at the buildings and am amazed. I love this city,” she exclaims with a happy sigh.  

Trang Nguyen and her mother at their second location of Banh Mi Makers.
Photo by Tam Le. 

Another change is the generation of children growing up in the Czech Republic has entered a much greater variety of careers compared to the previous generation. Trang elaborates: “They call us ‘banana kids.’ Vietnamese people do everything now, in every profession, like lawyers, doctors, in finance, in art... [The older generation] has their own businesses like restaurants, nails, textile shops, and grocery stores... But now Vietnamese people do everything.”

As a testament to that, there are more people of Vietnamese origin getting screen time in the Czech Republic, such as actress and café owner Ha Thanh Špetlíková, and Khanh himself. Prostřeno!, the Czech version of the British reality series Come Dine with Me, featured Khanh in the first week of their 2020 season, which has had a big impact on their business. 

Khanh Ta with his fellow chef contestants on the reality TV show Prostřeno!,
the Czech version of the British reality series Come Dine with Me.
Photos via Prima.

As the Vietnamese population grows and a generation of those familiar with both Vietnamese and Czech culture reaches adulthood, a new wave of Vietnamese restaurants are popping up. These restaurants fight the harmful stereotypes of old-school Vietnamese restaurants with poor service, language barriers, and lack of attention to decor. This means that Czechs unfamiliar with Vietnamese cuisine are now presented with approachable and attractive options. 

The interior of Banh Mi Makers. Photo via Instagram page Banh Mi Makers.

Vu Anh answers me over the round, lacquered wood table of Bao Bao about why he chose to start a new restaurant over working at his parents’ existing one: “My parents, they are doing the Vietnamese street food [in Sapa] and it wasn’t common in Prague or in Czech. So I wanted to show it to Czech people. I saw an opportunity so I wanted to try it.” 

Bao Bao flanked by typical Prague architecture.Photo by Tam Le.

Giang, who focuses on the service aspect of the brothers’ restaurants, muses: “Maybe the food is not that different from other restaurants. It’s still bún bò and phở that you can get anywhere in Prague. [But] we are thinking about not just the food. From the point [of view] of a Vietnamese restaurant, I think that the big change here is the atmosphere, service. For us it’s really crucial to have the best service, to have people feeling good in the place. I think that’s why our restaurants are so popular now.”

The interior of Khanh and Giang Ta’s restaurant Dian.
Photo by Tam Le.

Giang isn’t giving his brother Khanh enough credit. Yes, the interior of Dian, the most casual of the three restaurants, oozes class and balances luxurious, velvet, brass-accented chairs with the lush, verdant, tropical atmosphere of hanging pothos vines and pots of fiddle-leaf fig trees. However, dishes like their signature beef rendang on milk bread toast — topped with a generous amount of truffles, shredded to resemble chà bông more than the coveted wild mushrooms — don’t appear on the menu of every Vietnamese restaurant. At Dian, the gỏi cuốn is topped with a passionfruit gel and served like pieces of maki sushi. 

From top to bottom: Dian’s signature beef rendang on milk bread toast,
poached shrimp in a tomato consommé, and beef summer rolls.
Photos by Tam Le.

In all my years of eating Vietnamese food, I don’t think I’ve ever had a dish quite like their poached shrimp in a tomato consommé. The first bite was a flavor explosion. The generous pieces of tender shrimp were accompanied by marinated cherry tomatoes and chili-tinged jackfruit. The basil and dill were herbs outside the usual Vietnamese repertoire, and reflected Khanh’s European upbringing. Everything about Khanh and Giang’s restaurants defies the country’s outdated stereotypes about Vietnamese restaurants. 

This boom in service-focused, approachable Vietnamese restaurants has paved the way for passionate up-starts like the aforementioned Trang to introduce more Vietnamese dishes to an open Czech audience. 

Bún bò Nam Bộ is synonymous with Vietnamese cuisine in the Czech Republic, which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise given the diaspora’s northern roots in the country. Every restaurant I interviewed, from casual to fine dining, despite their specialty or niche, lists the northern stir-fried beef noodle dish as their bestseller.  

However, every restaurant I interviewed also lists bánh mì — pronounced almost like “báng mì” in their endearing, slight northern accents — as a well-known Vietnamese dish among Czechs behind phở and bún chả. 

“Actually I bring [sic] the first bánh mì to Czechs,” Trang of Banh Mi Makers modestly admits. She wanted to introduce her country to this dish that’s been a part of her life since her childhood in Vietnam and adolescence in the Czech Republic. Her face lights up as she tells me about her two-month trip down Vietnam, learning to make the iconic bánh mì baguettes. After months of trial and error back home, she was finally confident enough to start taking orders online and delivering her sandwiches, all while finishing up her university degree. 

“I wanted to show how Vietnamese food is actually cooked; to bring the authentic taste of bánh mì in Vietnam without having to fly there,” Trang passionately declares.

Banh Mi Makers’ grilled duck bánh mì is unlike anything I’ve tasted in Vietnam.
Photo by Tam Le.

I wholeheartedly disagree with her, however. Her bánh mì tastes like no bánh mì I’ve had in Vietnam. It tastes so much better in my opinion. One of the most controversial hot takes I have is that bánh mì are simply not good. The bread is airy and tasteless with the only texture being the crunchy shards that rain down every time you take a bite. Just try eating bánh mì while seated and wearing black; it’s worse than a case of serious dandruff. Not to mention there is an excess of cilantro stems and at least two surprise slices of thick chili peppers, ribs and seeds still intact, that will — out of nowhere — set your mouth on fire. Even if you had the foresight to open up your sandwich and toss these little devils out before your first bite, their heat still remains as a ghostly presence, contaminating random pockets of your bánh mì with a burn you never asked for. 

Banh Mi Makers’ baguettes are reminiscent of Hội An’s torpedo-shaped loaves with ends that come to a point. Their baguettes are soft and don't leave an explosion of crumbs in their wake. There is no sneaky chili and the cilantro and pickled vegetables are kept to a reasonable amount. However, my sister and I have been unable to determine exactly why Banh Mi Makers’ bánh mì are the best bánh mì we’ve ever eaten. Could it be the homemade mayonnaise developed by Trang and her mother? Could it be because the meats are treated to a long marinade and grilled over charcoal, a feat difficult to accomplish in small urban restaurant kitchens? Or is it because we’ve eaten nothing but Czech food now? 

Whatever it is, it’s no surprise Banh Mi Makers went from a dorm-room dream to an anticipated four locations in Prague. 

It’s now been many decades since Khanh and Giang’s parents made up the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants to the Czech Republic. Since then, a generation of Czech-born children has grown up, mastered two of the world’s most difficult languages, defined for themselves what it means to be both Vietnamese and Czech, and built their businesses to reflect that. I, for one, can’t wait to see how the Czech culinary landscape will change in another forty years. 

Chef Khanh Ta overseeing orders at Dian. 
Photo by Tam Le.

Graphics by Phan Nhi and Jessie Trần.

Ănthology is a series exploring stories of Vietnamese food served around the world. It focuses on chefs and restaurants that are reimagining Vietnamese cuisine or crafting traditional dishes in new contexts, and how our national dishes have evolved in response to different geographic tastes and ingredients.

If Crush the sea turtle from Finding Nemo took the form of a Vietnamese guy in his early thirties, he’d sound just like Andrew Ho, the co-founder and co-owner of Pinch Boil House and Curry Boys BBQ.

We’re sitting outside the pink shack that houses some of the most inventive takes on Texas barbecue and laughing ov our shared childhood experiences as Việt Kiềus who grew up in Houston. Then Andrew, with his surfer’s drawl — a completely unexpected accent for a Texas native — asks me, “Was your family a Sinh Sinh family or a Tan Tan family?” Growing up Vietnamese outside of Vietnam often means you only have two restaurant choices for big, milestone dinners.

Being from Houston, we were lucky to live in the city with the third-largest Vietnamese diaspora population in America (the first two being California’s Orange County and San Jose), so in Bellaire, Houston’s Little Saigon, Andrew grew up eating bò lá lốt, bánh xèo, and mì xào giòn to his heart’s content on the weekends.

Life in the suburbs during the rest of the week, however, was a different story. “Growing up, in grade school and intermediate school, [I thought] let’s just keep the friction to a minimum and try to fit in,” his voice drops lower. “There were so few Asians at our school...I just didn’t feel like I belonged.” In addition to just looking different, Andrew had to contend with the ramifications of over 150 years of America emasculating Asian men and perpetuating stereotypes about our height and physical prowess: “I grew up playing basketball, and it’s like how do you fit in? How do you show the coaches that being Asian isn’t a liability? Because a lot of time, that’s how it feels.”

Fortunately, once he was at The University of Texas — alma mater to myself and the previously profiled Christine Ha — Andrew embraced his upbringing to the delight of others. He started throwing Houston-style Viet-Cajun crawfish boils, and attendees, including his current co-founder and co-owner Sean Wen, would beg him to open up a shack near the campus in Austin. “I would have loved to, but between the cost of that and school, I could not. There was always a plan to do a crawfish hut on 26th and Guadalupe,” he recalls.

College crawfish boil.

However, after graduating in 2011 with his degree in Corporate Communications, Andrew found himself a position as a client service manager at the same oil and gas company his dad worked for back in Houston. It didn’t take long though before Andrew started itching for something new and decided to quit his corporate job to work as an English teacher in Thailand. As you can imagine, his parents weren’t especially pleased with his decision. “Me moving to Asia was a huge shock initially. They were like, ‘Wow what are you doing? You have a very stable job. You just graduated university. You’ve only been working for a couple of years.’” But to Andrew, he was young and never got to study abroad in college — this was his chance.

After a year of teaching in Phitsanulok, Thailand, a northern city that falls almost halfway between Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Andrew planned to spend a few months in Vietnam to get better acquainted with his dad’s family in Saigon. Those “few months” ended up stretching to a year and a half as he went from being an English teacher to the operations manager at Quán Ụt Ụt, the popular American-barbecue joint.

He and I spend the next few minutes just purely reminiscing about eating snails on Vinh Khanh Street in District 4 and the mì hoành thánh xá xíu shops near Chợ Lớn in District 5 (“We would drink bone marrow using a straw!”) the way old classmates recall their days in school. “I lived on Co Bac and De Tham, just two streets over from Bui Vien — which back then [in 2014] wasn’t like what it is now!” he hurriedly corrects. “Right in that area, there was a street that has six bò lá lốt places and four stalls with bánh xèo, so obviously anytime we were looking to eat...”

But it was on Đề Thám and Trần Hưng Đạo at Cafe Zoom (which has been replaced by a coconut ice cream shop as of December 2020), where Andrew would find himself orbiting closer and closer to his dreams of opening a restaurant. “That was the foreign teacher hangout and we’d hang out there 30 deep, every night.” Over time, Andrew struck up a friendship with a fellow American regular, Mark Gustafson, without realizing who Mark was. “I saw him at Quán Ụt Ụt the first time I went there, and then later I was like, ‘I saw you there. That’s cool we eat at the same place.’ And he was like, ‘That’s actually my spot.’” Mark was the pitmaster and is one of the three co-founders of Quán Ụt Ụt.

Andrew hangs out with friends at Cafe Zoom in Saigon.

Andrew continues the story in his endearing drawl, “Then two or three months later, [Mark] was like ‘Hey, you’re a teacher right? How’s that going?’ and I’m like, ‘It’s good, but me and my friend [Sean] are trying to open up a restaurant. We’re doing pop-ups and we’re going to start a food truck in the US when I go back.’ And he was like, ‘Dude, we’re like looking for a Vietnamese foreigner, Việt Kiều, Operations Manager that can be the segue between our all-local staff and the owners. What do you think?’”

And thus, Andrew’s formal experience in the hospitality industry began: “I feel like I dove right in because [at that time] they were building the first BiaCraft and building the second Quán Ụt Ụt in District 2, the flagship.” In addition to his full-time position at Quán Ụt Ụt, he was also assisting with management, administration, and guest experience at the vegetarian hostel he was living at. “It was a very immersive experience all at once.”

After eight months of working at Quán Ụt Ụt and almost three years of living in Southeast Asia, Andrew started feeling the pull to rejoin his college friend Sean in Texas and open up the crawfish spot that they had always dreamed of. “I was looking at other jobs, like teaching English in Eastern Europe, and if we didn’t do it soon, we would table it for maybe forever.”

But, before his departure, Andrew left his mark on Vietnam. In December 2015, a fire broke out across from the hostel he was staying at. “We could see the smoke from the window,” Andrew told AsiaLIFE, “I read on Facebook that Quán Ụt Ụt was on fire and the first thought I had was of the little kids I knew, so I ran straight down there.” He delayed his homecoming plans to raise VND150 million (about US$7,200) for over 30 households to rebuild their lives.

Andrew finally reunited with Sean on March 9, 2016 in San Antonio, Texas, just in time for the start of crawfish season. Two days later, they held their first Viet-Cajun crawfish pop-up. Unlike Houston, the Hispanic-majority city of San Antonio didn’t have many Vietnamese-inspired seafood restaurants.

The proportion of San Antonio’s Asian population is a third that of Houston’s, which is one of the biggest reasons Taiwanese-American Sean Wen wanted to base their restaurant in San Antonio. His enthusiasm is undeniable and his passion is contagious. “Proliferating the Asian culture is like a really cool thing. That’s one of the big reasons why we wanted to start stuff like this. Sure it’s nontraditional to do restaurants...but if you do it the right way, and you do it intelligently, you think about it, just as you would if you were a doctor or a lawyer, then I think like you have every right to push the culture in a good direction and make other Asians empowered. Make them feel like being Asian is cool. Asian food is awesome, you know?”

After two and a half years of pop-ups, Andrew and Sean turned their idea to a brick and mortar: Pinch Boil House, a restaurant serving Southeast-Asian-inspired seafood. On the menu, you’ll find a few items influenced by Andrew’s time in Vietnam. “We have a Coconut Curry sauce at Pinch that is the same recipe as when you eat ốc len xào dừa. When I was living in Vietnam, I paid one of the snail guys to let me go to his place one morning and teach me how to make all of the different recipes of his ốc dishes.”

Two of Curry Boys BBQ’s co-founders: Andrew Ho and Sean Wen.
Photo by Tam Le.

Eventually the offerings evolved beyond seafood to include rice bowls as the crew in the kitchen started to change. During our interview, the founders sang the praises of their Laotian chef, one of the additions to their team, “He made a panang curry that blew our socks off.” Soon Kap’s Chicken Curry became one of the most popular items on the menu.

This crowd-pleasing curry came about around the same time the smoked beef rib Panang curry was being developed by Khói Barbecue (a Viet-Tex barbecue pop-up run by brothers and fellow Houstonians Don and Theo Nguyen) and a visit to Eem PDX (a Portland, Oregon restaurant that serves Thai barbecue and tiki drinks). Since then, an idea to collaborate with their friend and pitmaster Andrew Samia of South BBQ took root, but there was never enough time.

Rice bowls at Curry Boys BBQ. Photo via Facebook page Curry Boys BBQ.

Then along comes March 2020, and the world’s restaurants all suddenly had plenty of time... too much time. Both Pinch Boil House and South BBQ experienced a steep drop in sales and had to temporarily close their restaurants because of the pandemic. But, when one door closes, another one opens, and now Andrew Samia, Andrew Ho, and Sean Wen, finally had their chance to test out some dishes and host a couple of pop-ups in May and June 2020.

The responses to their Texas barbecue Southeast Asian curry dishes were so overwhelmingly positive that within a few months, they were able to open up Curry Boys BBQ in a little pink wooden shack on St. Mary’s Strip, a buzzing street lined with live music venues, bars, and food trucks in central San Antonio.

The fact that they have sold out almost every day since opening should indicate just how much the community has welcomed the food. But for the small Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in San Antonio, it holds a bit more significance. “It’s a great reception from everyone, but [with Curry Boys] and Pinch, whenever we do talk to AAPI people, they’re always like, ‘Dude, thank you so much for creating this. We bring our friends here,’” Andrew elaborates.

San Antonio’s Curry Boys BBQ Brisket Smoke Show (a favorite of Curry Boys BBQ co-founder Andrew Ho), Cold Chili Garlic Noodles (a favorite of mine), Fresh Herb & Cucumber Slaw, and Flan Solo. Photo by Tam Le.

Sean chimes in: “That’s just the fucking coolest thing. Sure, you have your intentions when you open a restaurant, but you never expect it to happen, in a weird way. When you hear that...when other people who look like you or kinda have a background like you, that’s just so cool, you know. It’s a little humbling. We definitely felt that embrace from the Asian American community.”

If only the basketball-playing, middle-school Andrew could see his current self proudly proclaiming, “Now everyone wants to go eat where you eat! Now being Asian is hip.”

Ănthology is a series exploring stories of Vietnamese food served around the world. It focuses on chefs and restaurants that are reimagining Vietnamese cuisine or crafting traditional dishes in new contexts, and how our national dishes have evolved in response to different geographic tastes and ingredients. Have a good story to share? Let us know via contribute@saigoneer.com.

“I was in a creative writing program for grad school at the time, and I thought, as an artist, going on MasterChef would give me something to write about.”

Little did Christine Ha know that her decision to enter the American version of MasterChef, the competitive cooking show made famous by Gordon Ramsay’s acerbic assessments, would give her more than just fodder for her literary ambitions. In a sense, she was right: winning MasterChef comes with a cookbook contract and hers, Recipes From My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food, became a New York Times bestseller.

Photo via FOX

Christine’s family is originally from northern Vietnam but they immigrated to the south, along with almost a million other northerners after the Geneva Agreement of 1954. “Because my family was originally from the north, we eat our phở the northern way with the wider rice noodles and few herbs or condiments. My grandmother was also known for her giant 8”x8” [20 cm x 20 cm] bánh chưng during Tết,” she explains.

On April 29, 1975, Christine’s father, who was still courting her mother, realized they needed to leave the country very, very soon. He rushed to ask for her mother’s hand in marriage, and they ran to find a US naval ship. Bouncing from the Philippines to a refugee camp in Guam to Pennsylvania to Chicago to southern California (where Christine was born), the family eventually settled down in Houston, Texas when Christine was two years old.

Flash-forward 18 years and Christine started losing her vision due to neuromyelitis optica (NMO), a rare inflammatory autoimmune disorder, just as she was begining to experiment with cooking. While in grad school for Creative Writing, her then-boyfriend (now husband) John Suh set up a blog. They called it The Blind Cook.

Photo via FOX

In 2012, they reached out to her about auditioning for Season 3 of the show and Christine thought the name Gordan Ramsay “sounded familiar.” John and her friends strongly encouraged her to apply so she could bring awareness to what visually impaired people were capable of. Christine simply saw it as a way to gain experience and inspiration for her writing.

So she set aside her thesis and answered the open casting call, which asked potential contestants to present a dish that represented their life story. “For me, I’ve been on this eternal hunt to recreate my mom’s recipes,” she says. Christine’s mom passed away when she was 14 before teaching her daughter how to cook or writing any of her recipes down, so it’s been a series of trial and error since college. “I chose thịt kho because it was the dish I grew up eating the most often. There was always some in the fridge at our house.”

“I chose thịt kho because it was the dish I grew up eating the most often. There was always some in the fridge at our house.”

For her first audition in front of the judges, Christine put together another classic Vietnamese dish: cá kho tộ. Khôi Phạm, Deputy Editor of Saigoneer, reflects in a Saigoneer Podcast episode, “I think she’s one of my favorite contestants because she sticks to her roots. Her audition dish is actually a very, very traditional dish. If you watch western cooking shows, the fish is usually filleted horizontally but for Christine’s dish, she cut it vertically. If you go to fish markets in Vietnam, all the butchers will cut it that way. She doesn’t even try to deconstruct it or add any frills, bells and whistles.” A perfect balance of savory and sweet, her caramelized and braised catfish dish impressed the judges, and thus Christine’s life was changed from that point forward.

But Christine may be more familiar to Saigoneer readers for her turn as a judge on MasterChef Vietnam (Vua Đầu Bếp) Season 3 from 2015. The role made her the first former contestant to become a regular judge — in any country — and placed her amongst the few female judges in the whole international franchise. “It was a great feeling to go from contestant to the other side and become a mentor,” Christine reflects.

MasterChef Vietnam Season 1 Runner-Up, Trí Phan, reflects, “From her story, I realized the most important thing when it comes to cooking is taste. And since then, I started to put more emphasis on flavor combinations that make sense, [instead of] throwing many things on a plate, just to make it look impressive.”

The Five Fungi Congee served at Christine’s new restaurant Xin Chao. It’s a grown-up take on a dish all Vietnamese children remember eating. Photo by Tam Le.

To reference the ubiquitous Thai phrase known to anyone who has traveled to the Land of Smiles, filming MasterChef Vietnam was “same same, but different” from filming MasterChef US. “A lot of the challenges emulated the American ones, but there were still many differences. For example, the contestants cooked for the military, just like I did, but the military bases were so different. The ingredients in the pantry included a lot of fish and shellfish I’ve never heard of because they’re regional to Vietnam.” Additionally, the unionization of film crew labor in the United States meant that production could only take place six days a week, stretching filming over a period of three months; whereas Vietnam’s ability to work seven days a week meant a rigorous one-month film schedule. Same same, but different.

As a Việt Kiều, Christine faces the additional challenge of having only spoken conversational Vietnamese at home. “When I came to MasterChef Vietnam, it was terrible. Not only was there new slang, but there’s a different lexicon to speak formally on TV.” If Christine’s upbringing was anything like mine — which, as a Việt Kiều who also grew up in Houston and attended the same university undergrad program as Christine, I think is a fairly safe bet — she may have only heard this formal way of speaking on Paris by Night which has been playing non-stop at all Vietnamese family gatherings since the late 1980s.

Photo via Ngoisao.net

“As I grew older, I didn't really have family around to keep it up. So I feel like my Vietnamese [was] rusty when I first arrive in Vietnam. It’s an ordeal when I travel with my husband John, who is Korean American, but has sight. Whereas I know Vietnamese, but I can’t see. So he has to spell out all the signs, and I need to remind him to include the accents or I won’t be able to read it. But it’s like riding a bike — it comes back.”

When I asked Christine about the dishes in Vietnam that surprised her the most, she had the same answer I did when I first moved to Saigon: the new street snacks. “In America, the Vietnamese food we got was what our parents brought over [in the late 1970s], which has stayed stagnant. Now a newer generation has come up with new dishes like bánh tráng trộn and bánh tráng nướng. That’s the kind of stuff that really intrigued me.”

Creative street food dishes and nhậu culture inspired Christine and John to open their first restaurant venture: The Blind Goat (Christine was born in the Year of the Goat) in 2019. Currently located in Houston’s Bravery Chef Hall among other creative culinary concepts (there are plans to move it to a standalone restaurant), The Blind Goat is an open kitchen with about fifteen seats wrapped around it like a bar. It was the first place the public could enjoy Christine’s cooking and dishes made famous by MasterChef, such as Rubbish Apple Pie, a Pop-Tart-shaped pocket pie inspired by McDonald’s apple pies but with a Vietnamese touch of star anise and ginger in the filling and a fish sauce caramel drizzle on top.

Pork Belly Baos make the perfect fried, sweet, savory, fatty snack.
Photo by Tam Le.

It was there that Christine and John serendipitously met Tony Nguyen, chef and partner at Saigon House and their future business partner. Not long The Blind Goat opened, Tony introduced himself to the couple and the restaurateurs started commiserating on the labor-intensiveness of Vietnamese food. Tony offered to help prep at The Blind Goat so they wouldn’t have to take Christine’s egg rolls off the menu, and soon one conversation led to another. "We have similar backgrounds and it turns out, the same philosophy on Vietnamese food: our parent’s food is great, but we want to make it more contemporary and reflective of Houston," remarked Christine.

At Saigon House, Chef Tony Nguyen was known for his Viet-Cajun crawfish and his H-Town Bang sauce which contains 29 ingredients including garlic, butter, citrus, cayenne pepper and cilantro. It is now a weekly special at Xin Chao.
Photo by John Suh.

Within a few months, a location with a good deal on rent opened up and by January 2020, Christine, John, and Tony signed a lease for their new brick and mortar restaurant Xin Chao. “Going into business together is like a marriage, and we didn’t know each other that well, but you don’t know until you try.” Xin Chao would be a larger, more sophisticated restaurant than The Blind Goat, with a more robust modern Vietnamese menu complete with tequila and nước mía cocktails.

Local Houston artist Caroline Truong contributed on of the murals that cover the restaurant’s colorful interior and exterior. There is ample outdoor seating on bright blue picnic tables, a lifesaver considering Xin Chao didn’t open for business until September 2020 when America still had many pandemic restrictions for indoor dining. The inside consists of sleek wood tables, echoing the contemporary dishes.

Xin Chao Interior.
Photo by John Suh.

Speaking of their menu, the duo’s differing tastes result in a range of offerings. “Tony’s palette is very into robust flavors. He loves smoking meat and working with beef and pork. I am on the other end of the spectrum. I feel like less is more and when flavoring foods, I’m disciplined in creating a delicate balance. I enjoy creating more refreshing dishes and working with chicken and seafood,” analyzes Christine. And like any good marriage, “we complement and challenge each other.”

Xin Chao’s Smoked Beef Rib Flat Rice Noodles is one of the dishes that represent both Christina’s Texan side (smoked beef rib) and her Vietnamese side (flat rice noodles).
Photos by Tam Le.

You can find updates from Christine Ha, The Blind Goat, and Xin Chao on Instagram. You can also catch Christine Ha on a bag of Uncle Jax American Gourmet popcorn. As a notorious snack lover, I, Tam Le, will emphatically tell anyone who will listen and any readers of this article that Uncle Jax (either the Wisconsin cheddar cheese flavor or the Uncle Jax mix of cheese and caramel) is the best snack brand available in Vietnam.

Designed by Phan Nhi, Phuong Phan.
Top graphic by Jessie Tran.
Illustrations by Patty Yang, Hannah Hoang.

Ănthology is a series exploring stories of Vietnamese food served around the world. It focuses on chefs and restaurants that are reimagining Vietnamese cuisine or crafting traditional dishes in new contexts, and how our national dishes have evolved in response to different geographic tastes and ingredients. Have a good story to share? Let us know via contribute@saigoneer.com.

Joo Chiat, a neighborhood in the eastern realms of Singapore, is hardly a forgettable area.

Filled with colorful Peranakan buildings from the district’s flamboyant Straits Chinese past, Joo Chiat is one of those places in the island nation where one can sample at least half a dozen good local dishes without traversing more than 300 meters.

But these days, the enclave preserves not only the past century of Singapore’s multicultural heritage, but also an unlikely, yet fast-growing, community. Joo Chiat Road is also home to a sizable population of Vietnamese bar girls, thus over time giving rise to a range of good places to grab decent Vietnamese grub.

I met Kim at her restaurant, Ky Anh Quan, near one of my favorite places for cháo tiều, otherwise known as Teochew porridge in Singapore. I’d probably seen Kim's eatery once or twice but never bothered to stop by. I then discovered that she was not the first owner of this Vietnamese restaurant. Three or so years ago, Kim bought it from the previous owner, (partially) re-named it, and changed its destiny for good. My visit was warranted by a simple reason; Kim’s bún đậu mắm tôm had achieved fame amongst the local Vietnamese community for being a remarkable rendition of the original dish.

Guests are provided with tiny spray bottles to wet bánh tráng before rolling.

“My bún đậu is not traditional...it’s a fusion of three regions,” Kim explained. “Cách tân ba miền.” She uses the phrase commonly associated with fashion and clothing, referring to her noodle creation as a modernizing project.

A respectable bamboo mâm with portion big enough for four people, Kim’s platter consists of de-boned pork leg, tofu, chả cốm, crispy deep-fried pig entrails, vermicelli and a surprisingly large serving of fresh vegetables. It is not exactly a common serving at Vietnamese eateries in Singapore. Spray bottles help to soften a side serving of bánh tráng for wrapping everything together.

Using rice paper to eat bún đậu may not be common, but it's accepted among certain circles in Vietnam's food scene. Some restaurants in Saigon, for example, call this style bún đậu cuốn miền Tây, meaning southwestern-style bún đậu.

Bánh tráng is a common addition to a bún đậu portion in the Mekong Delta.

“Pork [is] not cheap in Singapore,” Kim said. For her, Vietnamese ham and meat cakes have to be made with the freshest ham hock and minced only once to preserve the right bite and consistency. The recent bout of swine flu in Vietnam has also caused a spike in pork prices in Vietnam, approaching those of many affluent cities. We laughed at the fact that pork may have already overtaken beef as meat for ‘splurge days.’

To Kim, operating a Vietnamese restaurant in Singapore is not just a matter of expensive rent, human resources and material costs, but a next-level cultural challenge. How does one make Vietnamese food that appeals to Vietnamese people from different regions? Beyond all that, procuring ingredients, especially greens, can be a mammoth task.

A small slice of Vietnamese cuisine in Singapore.

“It’s unbelievably difficult! Not just [the] food safety [standards in Singapore]. Every dish requires something different. You need a different herb or leaf for a different dish. Vietnamese food can be complicated,” she explained. Many times, she has to venture to the Golden Mile Complex, known to many as Singapore's Little Thailand, to visit its supermarket for rare herbs. 

From her original bún đậu dipping sauce to a large menu which draws inspiration from all regions of Vietnam, Kim insists that her success lies in understanding her clientele.

“[You have] all kinds [of Vietnamese] living on this island,” as she began an almost statistical lecture about the socioeconomic diversity of the Vietnamese community residing in Singapore. “[You have the] professionals with family, Vietnamese brides. And also the expats on high-skill employment papers. [And] students. Oh, [and] don’t forget the beautiful ladies who work along this street.”

We sat down together with her crew for a quick bite since the dinner crowd was slated to appear shortly. As I spoke casually to her team, who hail from many regions of Vietnam, I began to agree that Kim had successfully pleased the taste buds of so many ethnicities.

“Even Singaporeans can eat our mắm tôm sauce,” she said proudly.

Ky Anh Quan is located at 233 Joo Chiat Road #01-01, Singapore 427491.

Ănthology is a series exploring stories of Vietnamese food served around the world. It focuses on chefs and restaurants that are reimagining Vietnamese cuisine or crafting traditional dishes in new contexts, and how our national dishes have evolved in response to different geographic tastes and ingredients.