How Seattle became a hot spot for Vietnamese cuisine

This story is part of 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. 

Seattle is known for its rich Vietnamese food scene — it seems like every neighborhood around Puget Sound has its own banh mi or pho shop, and upscale eateries showcasing the breadth of Vietnamese cuisine continue to proliferate. 

That wasn’t always the case. 

Prior to the fall of Saigon, there was not a significant Vietnamese food scene in Seattle. Our city’s first wave of Vietnamese restaurants opened as refugees settled in the area in the late 1970s, opening businesses to make a living. These entrepreneurs are responsible for introducing many local diners to dishes that would become staples of “Seattle” cuisine. 

Those first families opened the door for successive generations of restaurateurs, with recipes and techniques passed down, often from parent to child. These chefs continue to prove that Vietnamese food is much more than just pho and banh mi — that it’s a culinary tradition worthy of critical praise and James Beard nominations.  

Today’s Vietnamese American restaurateurs are still educating people about how diverse their homeland’s cuisine is — while pushing the boundaries of what Vietnamese food can be. 

The first wave 

There wasn’t a large Vietnamese community in Seattle until the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when North Vietnam’s capture of the South Vietnamese capital ended the Vietnam War. Then-Gov. Dan Evans welcomed the first Vietnamese refugees to Washington at a time when other governors were reluctant to open their borders. 

In an invitation for refugees to settle in Washington, Evans specifically used food as a selling point: “Food supplies and growing conditions here are another reason for settlement in Washington state,” he wrote, adding that local stores sell rice paper, dry shrimp, fish sauce, rice noodles and more. An initial group of 500 refugees was followed by more than 6,000. Ultimately, tens of thousands of Vietnamese people resettled here. 

Vietnamese food is now beloved in Washington: Washington Hospitality Association counts 49 Seattle restaurants in their membership with “pho” in the name, and in 2020, Seattle Times food writer Tan Vinh ate at 100 banh mi shops to name his favorites. But Seattle’s first Vietnamese American restaurateurs took a shot in the dark when opening their shops.   

Some restaurant owners highlighted family specialties; some guessed at what American eaters would enjoy; others made concessions to make a living.

“Vietnamese food, by nature, is street food, everyday food that people can eat,” said Thanh Tan, a journalist and former Seattle Times editorial writer who has produced multiple documentaries and a podcast on the Vietnamese American experience. 

In 1978, Tan’s parents immigrated to Olympia from Vietnam, eventually opening a Thai restaurant in a mall when Tan was 12 years old. “The landlord wanted Thai food,” Tan said, “so we made Thai food.” There was one Vietnamese dish on the menu: pho.

By the 1980s, Vietnamese food was finding its footing in Seattle. Duc Tran opened the beloved grocery store Viet-Wah in 1981 (it closed in 2022), and in 1982, Theresa Cat Vu and Augustine Nien Pham opened the first Phở Bắc — originally known as Cat’s Submarine Sandwich Shop.

When the Phams opened Cat’s, they sold sandwiches because they thought Americans liked sandwiches. The couple weren’t too worried about the cuisine — they just wanted to own a business.

“I just think about livelihood,” says Yenvy Pham, Theresa and Augustine’s daughter and leader of the Pham family’s lauded collection of Seattle restaurants, along with her sister, Quynh-Vy. “People opened restaurants because they wanted a good life for their family; that was the main motivation for our parents.” 

Pham’s parents had always been entrepreneurial. In Vietnam, they did a little bit of everything, from repairing bicycles to running a coffee shop. And while they originally started selling sandwiches in Seattle, it was the pho that took off.

By 1989, the Pham family began adding locations of Phở Bắc, re-creating the magic of that first shop — and, by fortune or foresight, firming up their family’s culinary legacy by purchasing the properties on which they built their restaurants. That provided them flexibility other Vietnamese restaurant owners did not have.

Yenvy Pham has moved beyond merely thinking about livelihood — she and her sister have carried the torch forward, expanding the business, showcasing the diversity of Vietnamese cuisine, and injecting it with their own flavor. 

“We had the advantage to carry [our legacy],” Pham says, “or evolve it and do what we really like to do.” 

The sisters have leaned into that pursuit of evolution, earning critical acclaim in the process. 

At the since-closed Denny Triangle location of Phở Bắc, the Phams’ brother, Khoa (who died in 2021), initiated a makeover then a total interior revamp. He turned Phở Viet — the family’s second restaurant — into Phở Bắc Súp Shop, which took the traditional pho their parents sold and elevated the ingredients in a transformed dining room. Then came Phởcific Standard Time, a Vietnamese cocktail bar, and the siblings’ coffee shop and roastery, Hello Em, which both opened in 2021; The Boat followed in 2022, spotlighting the Phams’ take on a traditional street food dish of pressure-fried chicken with pandan waffles for dessert.

These moves have amplified recognition for the Pham family, including two James Beard nominations and an inclusion on Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants list in 2022 for PST. 

Innovation — a hallmark of today’s generation of Vietnamese restaurateurs — keeps Pham’s wheels spinning, and will keep carrying this cuisine into the future. And the Pham sisters aren’t the only siblings building on their parents’ legacy of Vietnamese food. 

Trinh and Thai Nguyen’s parents settled their family in Seattle in 1998 after a “long and complicated journey” in refugee camps. In 2005, they opened Phở T&N in Poulsbo. 

“They didn’t speak the language,” Trinh Nguyen says of her parents, Rang Nguyen and Huyen Tran, and “[the restaurant] was easy and something they could do quickly without having to speak the language.” 

The siblings followed their own paths at first, trying anything else to avoid the restaurant industry. In 2018, the pull was too strong, and they began taking over Pho T&N from their parents. By 2019, Trinh and Thai opened their own restaurant, Ba Sa, on Bainbridge Island.

Much to their parents’ chagrin — “They were like, ‘I don’t understand you, why didn’t you just take my concept, close your eyes, and take the money!’” — the Nguyen siblings didn’t want to open another pho shop. They imagined Ba Sa as a place where they could show people “what Vietnamese food could be” — what it looked like beyond soup and sandwiches.

“The problem with the pho restaurant was we had no identity, it was our parents’ identity,” Trinh says. “We had our own way, our love language for food, and we wanted to be able to showcase that and show what our interpretations of food and flavors are.”

They do serve pho and banh mi, but they also feature dishes like pan-seared duck with a ginger nuoc cham salad, and a fish dish with vermicelli noodles called cha ca la vong. They implement dishes from outside Vietnam, too, like Japanese karaage chicken. Now, the siblings are putting the finishing touches on their next restaurant, Ramie, set to open this spring on Capitol Hill.

Their mentality reflects how far Seattle’s Vietnamese restaurant scene has come. This is a nuanced cuisine with a wide variety of dishes and price points, led by chefs with an eye for improvement — a direction that accelerated when siblings Eric and Sophie Banh opened their landmark restaurant Monsoon 25 years ago, raising the bar for Vietnamese cuisine in Seattle.

By serving a better bowl of pho for $10 when others charged $7, challenging what people thought of Vietnamese cuisine (and how much it should cost), the Banhs walked so the Nguyens and their peers could run. 

Now, the most expensive bowl of pho in the city costs more than $20 — and menus are expanding once again to teach diners in Seattle what Vietnamese cuisine is and can be.

The next 50 years 

It would be difficult to prove which Vietnamese restaurant was the first in Seattle — but Viet Nam Dynasty was the first that warranted a review in The Seattle Times, penned by Larry Brown in November 1974.

Run by two cousins, Alexandra Canh and Mrs. Nguyen-Thi-Dung Padgett, the restaurant opened about two years before the first Vietnamese refugees arrived in Seattle. During his visit, Brown had imperial rolls, beef salad, crab royale soup, chicken, crispy bananas and a pot of oolong tea — a meal for four that cost 26 bucks. Bowls of pho, described as a “soup including either beef or chicken in a spicy broth, with noodles” went for $1.65. He explained menu items in great detail and wrote that the restaurant is a “place to go for good food, not for special décor or atmosphere.” 

“Seattle had no examples of traditional Vietnamese cuisine,” Brown wrote of the cousins’ motivation to open Viet Nam Dynasty, so “they decided to open the restaurant … to present a side of the culture about which persons seldom read or hear.” 

The expansive menus of early Vietnamese American restaurants like Viet Nam Dynasty gave way to specialty shops hawking banh mi and pho. Now, a half-century removed from that restaurant review, Vietnamese cuisine is again at a turning point. “I think we’re at this weird inflection point to where we’re losing our connection to that first generation,” said Tan, the documentarian.

A new generation of restaurateurs is proving there’s room for both tradition and innovation for Vietnamese American cuisine. The common thread between generations? An emphasis on family tradition and culinary education. 

Chen Dien, who co-owns Coffeeholic House and the brand-new M Cozy Fusion Cafe with his wife Trang Cao, relishes the opportunity to educate customers. The couple opened the first in a wave of new Seattle Vietnamese coffee shops in Columbia City in 2020, and from the get-go, they were in coffee-teacher mode.

“It was a lot of education for people,” Dien said. “Why is it robusta beans? Why is condensed milk in there? Why is there egg in coffee? Can you drink it? You just take it one sip at a time.” 

Now the couple run three Coffeeholic House locations. They just opened their first cafe in University Village, M Cozy, and Vietnamese coffee shops have continued to pop up around Seattle.

“Our mission is to continue to help to rise and build the introduction around our culture,” Dien said. “It doesn’t stop at coffee. It doesn’t stop at pho and banh mi. There are so many beautiful ingredients, and we wish people to know that.” 

Another chef pushing the cuisine forward and leaning into a teaching philosophy is Lisa Bi, who brought her pop-up Ba+Me from Atlanta to Seattle last year. She started Ba+Me (which means “dad and mom” in Vietnamese) during the height of the pandemic, when the stress from her job as an EMT had her searching for the Vietnamese comfort food of her childhood. 

“The only warmth I would get from family was through food,” Bi said. “We weren’t very communicative verbally, the love was through food.” 

Bi’s parents were refugees who settled in Massachusetts and “felt they had to assimilate so hard [that] they gave me an American name and money for lunch so I could have mac and cheese,” the chef said.

They never taught her how to cook, so Bi taught herself to scratch that nostalgic itch for catfish and century egg. Once she worked up the confidence to share her food through Ba+Me, she found customers who shared the same nostalgic yearning for soothing Vietnamese food.

Her pop-up features traditional homestyle dishes like banh gio, a rice dumpling steamed in banana leaves, and chao hot vit bac thao, a rice porridge with chicken and a century egg. She looks at educating her customers as an opportunity, approaching the interaction as “a family member,” embracing “a moment for us to chat and understand how that connects with each other.”

She’s yet another Vietnamese American restaurateur making the cuisine her own.

“I think it’s great my parents assimilated,” Bi said, “but now it’s time to thrive and truly be authentic.”