NYC's Top Vietnamese Restaurants Have Something in Common
Meet the herb & spice purveyor who’s bringing the flavors of Vietnam to NYC
Thanks for reading People & Food. Today we are running a story by Angela Xu (@BrooklynFoodLady) about Vân Vân, a specialty Vietnamese herb and spice purveyor in New York.
While the herbs they provide to restaurants are game-changing and essential to the business, Angela writes here that “their fledgling business originated from a more personal place of homesickness and hunger.”
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The Vietnamese restaurant scene in New York City is having a moment. From the uber authentic dishes at Mắm, served atop low plastic tables and stools evoking Hanoi, to the Tết celebration at Saigon Social featuring dishes such as canh khổ qua (bittermelon soup) and bánh tét chiên (fried sticky rice), gone are the days of lamenting over a lack of incredible Vietnamese food.
The offerings have evolved beyond phở and bánh mì too. At Falansai, chef Eric Tran is creating elegant, innovative dishes at the intersection of his Vietnamese and Mexican roots. Meanwhile at Ha’s Snack Bar and the newly opened Bistrot Ha, traditionally French and Italian dishes are getting the “Ha’s treatment” with a pinch of Vietnamese herbs, a dash of spices, and a lot of fish sauce.
Underpinning this culinary renaissance is a need for fresh, flavorful ingredients, which have not historically been accessible in New York City. That is, until Vân Vân came along.
It may appear as if wife and husband duo, Thảo Bùi and Duy Võ, founded Vân Vân to meet the increasing demand for quality Vietnamese ingredients stateside. In reality, their fledgling business originated from a more personal place of homesickness and hunger.
Enter Ăn Xôi
Thảo Bùi was born and raised in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). Growing up, some of her fondest memories took place around her grandmother’s table, gathered with her family to eat an enormous feast. However, she took the fresh, home-cooked meals she ate everyday for granted. It wasn’t until she immigrated to the U.S. that she realized how special the native ingredients of her motherland truly were.
When Thảo and Duy arrived in Queens in 2017, the couple made the bleak discovery that “New York didn’t really have good Vietnamese food”. Thảo realized that if she wanted to taste the delicious, home-style dishes of her childhood, she would have to learn to cook them for herself.
The COVID lockdowns provided the perfect opportunity for Thảo to learn her family’s recipes. The process could be daunting at times: during instructional video calls with her mother quantities were eyeballed and timing was vague. “You have to be more specific!” was a common refrain, repeated exasperatedly during that time.
As she dove deeper into the intricacies of Vietnamese home cooking, the pandemic project evolved into more than satisfying her homesick cravings. “I started understanding a lot of the nuances in Vietnamese cooking, and it made me a lot more appreciative of my food and my culture,” she shares.
“Through generations of migration and displacement, my family has kept our food traditions alive. Now that I live abroad and probably won’t go back to Vietnam to live permanently, I don’t want all of these recipes to die with me.”
Eager to share her newfound appreciation, Thảo founded a pop-up called Ăn Xôi, literally “eat sticky rice”, where she used sticky rice as a canvas to present the abundance of Vietnamese food to the world. However, she quickly had to put the passion project on pause when the undiagnosed neck pains she had been experiencing for over a year became debilitating.
Thảo’s doctor finally suggested an MRI to rule out a brain tumor. The scans revealed a massive tumor that was encroaching on her spine. Five days later, she was wheeled into the operating room for emergency surgery.
The road to recovery post-operation was slow, but Thảo was armed with a new lease on life. In an Instagram post from early 2022 she shared, “All of February went by in rehabilitation. Learning to stand up. To walk. To move my toes. What was once normal suddenly took a tremendous amount of efforts and sweats. I also thought a lot about Ăn Xôi. Maybe it was the time to do what brings me joy.”
As Thảo regained her physical mobility, she turned to Ăn Xôi as an outlet for her energy and a way to reclaim independence. However, with each trip to the grocery store, her frustration mounted over the lack of access to the herbs and spices required for Vietnamese cooking.
Suddenly, it clicked. “Growing up in Vietnam, we were surrounded by really, really good aromatics,” Thảo recounts. What if she introduced the ingredients that she grew up eating everyday to an American audience?
Thảo began consulting family members back home about where to go to find different ingredients. When sourcing from abroad proved nearly impossible, she flew back to Vietnam. Even then, sourcing ingredients continued to be a challenge. Despite speaking Vietnamese, people could tell from her accent that she wasn’t local, which made it hard for her to build relationships. Furthermore, many farmers didn’t care about ethical sourcing, and preferred selling large quantities to existing buyers over taking a risk with a new buyer. But she persisted.
After many months of building every aspect of their company from scratch, Thảo and Duy launched Vân Vân in 2023 with the goal of bringing the flavors of Vietnam to the North American pantry by specializing in single-origin, terroir-driven herbs and spices.
The Restaurants Hooked on Vân Vân
Helen Nguyen, chef and owner of Saigon Social, was an early champion of Vân Vân. She first met Thảo and Duy through Ăn Xôi, having run her own restaurant as a pop up for two years, and helped advise the couple on early sourcing trips to Vietnam.
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