This is the first story in this week’s Vietnamese Food Guide, a special edition dedicated to Seattle’s vibrant Vietnamese cuisine. Find more at seattletimes.com/life/food-drink and in Sunday’s edition of The Mix.
When Monsoon opened on north Capitol Hill 25 years ago, its elevated Vietnamese cuisine was more akin to a doctoral thesis than a menu: an idea to be prodded, debated and defended.
Owners Sophie and Eric Banh, aka the Saigon Siblings, believed their homeland’s cuisine, when done expertly, deserved the same white-tablecloth treatment as French food or any other highbrow tradition. And they prepared it that way — using wagyu beef, Mangalitsa pork and organic vegetables. Rice dishes and other Southeast Asian fare would pair better with wine, not beer or tea, the siblings believed — and their menu reflected that.
And Monsoon’s pho, that cheap bowl of comfort, would cost more — much more — because of the high-quality beef used and the intensive labor needed to create its marrow-deep broth.
This was jarring to Seattle diners who were accustomed to shelling out a ten-spot for a Vietnamese dinner. “It was just a constant fight with the public to get our points across,” Eric Banh says now, laughing.
The Banhs can joke today because their argument has carried the day. A quarter-century later, Monsoon is considered a groundbreaking restaurant in the city’s foodscape. And the siblings now own a constellation of six restaurants — two Monsoon restaurants and four Seattle branches of their cafe, Ba Bar, including the offshoot Ba Bar Green.
The restaurant’s influence is visible today in Vietnamese restaurants around the Sound, from Ba Sa on Bainbridge Island, with its $16 banh mi, to the new Anchovies & Salt in Renton, which charges $24 for wagyu pho.
Recently, the Banhs sat down for an interview to reflect on their 25th anniversary and those early controversies, especially over “having the most expensive pho in Seattle.” Here’s what they said.
Elevated Vietnamese food
The roots of Seattle’s bustling Vietnamese dining scene can be traced to the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when then-Gov. Dan Evans welcomed hundreds, then thousands of refugees to Washington state. To make a living, many refugees opened hole-in-the-wall pho and banh mi counters in cheaper-rent neighborhoods around Seattle.
The Banhs fled their war-torn country in 1977 to Edmonton, Canada, before settling in Seattle. The descendants of Chinese ancestors were born and raised in Saigon and fell in love with the cuisine and the food scene there.
Seattle had an appetite for Vietnamese food back then, but the Banhs didn’t think many restaurants at the time showcased the nuances of a cuisine steeped in French and Chinese influences.
When they opened Monsoon on Feb. 21, 1999, the Banhs were the first Vietnamese bistro in town to adopt the “eat local” mantra: They swapped out farm-raised tilapia from Vietnam for local sockeye and other seasonal seafood. In the early years, their imperial rolls were stuffed with Carlton Farms ground pork and Dungeness crab meat.
Those were under-the-radar tweaks that went largely unnoticed. Then they put a $9.50 pho on the lunch menu in the early 2000s and all hell broke loose.
At a time when the going rate for pho was $7 and cheaper around the Chinatown International District, some customers bellyached that $10 pho was price gouging, or the yuppification of Vietnamese food. It became water-cooler conversation that even made the local media airwaves.
Eric Banh, the family spokesperson, replied to every customer’s complaint, held impromptu news conferences and defended their pricing in a blog post in 2013.
Andrea Nguyen, a California-based cookbook author and a leading authority on Vietnamese food, considers Monsoon a revelatory restaurant that broke the stereotype in Seattle that Vietnamese food has to be a lesser cuisine — made cheaply and sold cheaply.
“When you go to Vietnam, you can eat on the street or go to a high-end restaurant. But people see Anthony Bourdain eating street food, and they think our food is monochromatic, just cheap eats with people sitting in plastic chairs,” Nguyen said. “What Monsoon signals is Vietnamese food has many price points.”
The problem is that too much Vietnamese fare, and the prices for it, are stuck in a time capsule, said Banh.
When it comes to cheap pho, many customers drown their bowl in Sriracha and hoisin sauce. That’s because the broth doesn’t possess enough flavor, it’s diluted or it’s too thin. The reason: Many noodle houses use cheap beef that’s rendered from old cows that can no longer produce milk, Banh said.
A great bowl of pho requires 14 hours of charring and simmering with loads of bone marrow, and a superior soup uses toppings of high-quality cuts of beef that aren’t sinewy or gristly, he added. Banh said Monsoon’s pho costs more because it uses Prime-grade eye of round and briskets.
He thought that beneath the pho controversy lay racism, with people implying that Vietnamese food wasn’t worthy of Michelin-quality craftsmanship.
“We were so frustrated because they compared apples to oranges,” Banh said. “I don’t see other people comparing a Dick’s burger to a higher-price restaurant burger.”
For the record, their controversial pho now costs $16 — “But you know what? We no longer have the most expensive pho in Seattle,” Banh said, laughing. “There’s a lot of $20 bowls now, so people can get off our backs.”
“Drown out the noise”
The siblings took other stances that were unpopular back then.
Monsoon uses MSG in its cooking, a flavor enhancer that was derided as causing headaches and other health issues before those myths were debunked. If a customer wanted the dish made without MSG, the siblings instructed servers to politely reject the request and redirect toward other dishes that didn’t include it.
Monsoon was also the first Vietnamese restaurant in Seattle to advocate wine pairing such as caramelized catfish claypot with chenin blanc and lúc lắc shaking beef with a light pinot noir.
“Monsoon food is not as good without wine,” Banh said. “Wines with good acidity really lift and accentuate the flavors of many Asian dishes.”
By the mid-2000s, as full-service Vietnamese restaurants proliferated and other cafes began to copy their menus, Eric Banh returned to his homeland to find unusual dishes to feature. In 2008, they started adding classics from North Vietnam such as the distinctive dill fish chả cá lã vọng and the street food vermicelli noodle bún chả Hanoi.
Some former prisoners of war and veterans in the Vietnamese community demanded their heads on the platter for celebrating dishes synonymous with the regime that took over South Vietnam in 1975. The Banhs were even labeled communist sympathizers.
“I didn’t care what they say,” Sophie Banh said, “we were not removing any dishes.”
North Vietnamese dishes now appear frequently in gastronomic centers from New York City to Paris, most notably bún chả Hanoi, a dish that got the Banhs in such hot water 16 years ago. That noodle appears on menus around Seattle and worldwide now as “bún chả Obama,” a reference to that viral moment in 2016 when the former president shared that noodle in Hanoi with Bourdain.
Over the years, the Banhs’ dining rooms have been packed with culinary colleagues, like star chefs Holly Smith of Juanita Café and Tom Douglas, along with many bold-face-name athletes and celebrities, like Seahawks great Michael Bennett and Usher, and tech billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
To kick off its 25th anniversary celebration in February, Monsoon brought back its greatest hits, including the pan-seared Chilean sea bass ($49) and the wok-fried Dungeness crab with garlic noodles ($69). (The sea bass is temporarily off the menu but will return, Eric Banh said.)
Eric Banh, 59, no longer works in the kitchen except to test recipes. He spends his days managing the three Ba Bar branches and the Ba Bar Green, while Sophie Banh, 63, remains hands-on at their two Monsoons, sometimes working the lines at both kitchens on the same day.
Last fall, the siblings renewed their lease to keep Monsoon on Capitol Hill for 10 more years. They have started pondering succession plans for their kids to take over the two Monsoon restaurants and the Ba Bar franchise someday.
The restaurant business is a rough racket, and with all the sideshows the siblings got pulled into, Eric Banh didn’t think Monsoon would last 25 years.
His sister interjected: “I did. I didn’t care what people said. I just keep my head down and work,” she said, cupping her hands above her eyes. “Drown out the noise.”
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