New York’s Vietnamese food scene began auspiciously: In 1961, what was billed as the first restaurant in America devoted to the cuisine, called simply Viet Nam, opened in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. But when hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, most settled elsewhere. As a result, while places like Houston and California’s Orange County have long abounded with bún bò Huế (spicy beef noodle soup) and bánh xèo (savory, crispy stuffed crepes), the options here were, until recently, somewhat limited. In recent years, however, the city’s Vietnamese population has grown — up almost 9 percent between 2015 and 2020, a much faster increase than for the city’s overall population — and so, too, has the cuisine’s presence.
On the Lower East Side, Ha’s Snack Bar offers unexpected dishes like oysters with green chile, snails with tamarind butter and towering bánh patê sô (a flaky, meat-filled pastry) with sorrel. The husband-and-wife chef-owners Anthony Ha, 33, and Sadie Mae Burns, 30, opened the restaurant last December — joining several other Vietnamese destinations in the neighborhood, including the street food-focused Mắm (run by another husband-and-wife team, Nhung Dao, 36, and Jerald Head, 32) and the vegan Sen Saigon, overseen by the chef An Nguyễn Hawks, 35, and her husband, Erik Dornbush Hawks, 32. Ha and Burns next plan to expand with Bistrot Ha, located just around the corner, later this year.
The chefs Nhu Ton, 34, and John Nguyen, 43, also co-own two restaurants in the city, the newest of which, Bánh Anh Em, debuted near Union Square earlier this year. Nguyen says the way they run their kitchens — baking bread in-house and serving bánh ướt chồng (stacks of steamed rice sheets) to order — is “a tribute to the way that people make these dishes back home. It’s very labor-intensive.”
For others — like Phoebe Tran, 31, a chef and herbalist whose Bé Bếp (or Baby Kitchen) offers workshops, pop-ups and postpartum delivery meals inspired by Vietnamese plant-based medicine, and Thu Pham Buser, 33, a food stylist whose roving banquet series, Ăn Cỗ, explores the country’s varied regional cuisines — cooking is a means of connection. “It extends beyond food, as a way to preserve culture and build community,” Tran says.
And though they are based in New York, Trisha Đỗ, 27, and Gùi Trang Nguyễn, 34, have also hosted their roving supper club, Xin Mời, in Amsterdam, Paris and Toronto, and regularly travel to Ho Chi Minh City to draw inspiration. To Đỗ, the recent explosion of exciting Vietnamese food in Manhattan makes sense, given the circumstances of immigration. Her grandparents’ and parents’ peers, she points out, lived through a war and struggled as refugees. Now their offspring, no longer focused on survival, finally have the privilege of pursuing creativity alongside commerce in cities that excite them. As Đỗ says, “I feel like it takes a generation.”
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