Photown Philly

Jacob Trinh forgot his grandmother’s persimmons in his car. She has a tree in her backyard in Southwest Philly, where she lives with Jacob’s older brother, John, who gifted her the sapling seven years ago. The variety is called First Life from Jiro. They ripen through October but hang round long after winter has blown away all the leaves, leaving them dangling on the bare branches like squat orange lanterns. “She always instilled that I had to eat them fresh,” Trinh says. “Which is absolutely delicious, but my wife and I can only eat so many.”

We’re sitting at a corner table at the Lucky Well, a culinary incubator where Trinh’s six-month residency, a Vietnamese wood grill-focused restaurant called Nuong, is nearly over. If you’d told the chef when he was in high school that at 26 he’d be cooking coral prawns and canoes of bone marrow over smoldering white oak and dressing them with Vietnamese condiments and accouterments, he wouldn’t have believed you. “I grew up very Americanized, not really experiencing my culture head-on,” he says. “I was in a weird position where I wasn’t white enough to be in the majority, but I also wasn’t Asian enough to be in the minority.”

The persimmons will have to wait, though. Trinh has a hundred things to do today, and most days, since launching his independent culinary career in 2020 by selling homemade XO sauce out of his mom’s auto tags shop. The last three years have been a carousel of guest-chef dinners, pop-ups, tastings for the sake society he founded, a Beard House fellowship, meetings, meetings, meetings. Last summer Trinh opened Nuong, which wrapped in late February, and he already has his next act lined up. As we chat, he makes an off-hand remark about how his older brother, John, shares their mother’s unstoppable hustle. Listening, I wonder if he owns a mirror.

Trinh is part of a generation of Millennial Vietnamese Philadelphians, a mix of immigrants and first-generation Americans giving new energy to a restaurant scene that, until recently, hadn’t changed much since the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, when refugee resettlement following the fall of Saigon seeded the largest Vietnamese population in the U.S. outside of Texas and California.

Vietnamese pockets dot the city and inner suburbs, but the community’s undisputed backbone is South Philly, particularly a mile-long drag of Washington Avenue. The stretch is home to pillars like Hung Vuong supermarket, a fluorescent-lit wonderland of Asian cookery; Nam Phuong, Trinh’s childhood favorite; Café Diem, a specialist of bún bò Huê, the incendiary lemongrass soup of Vietnam’s royal capital; and restaurant-industry darling Pho 75, populated by chefs and servers on their days off. Vietnamese and non, an entire generation of Philadelphians has grown up with these businesses. They’re as tightly stitched into the fabric of South Philly, an immigrant haven for a century, as the multitudes of taquerias and parmigiana parlors.

Every weekend growing up, Cat Nguyen would drive with her parents from their home in bucolic West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Washington Ave. “I’d have my school work with me in the car because we would be out the whole day,” says Nguyen, the author of A Very Asian Guide to Vietnamese Food and co-founder and advisory board chair of the nonprofit VietLead. Now she lives just a few blocks away from the supermarket where her parents would pack their hunter-green Explorer with 50-pound bags of jasmine rice, fresh tofu and roasted ducks, and she’s seen the evolution of the Vietnamese dining scene change from the inside out.

“It’s been really great to see how many people are trying Vietnamese food that are not Vietnamese, and I think that’s really encouraging the Vietnamese restaurants to experiment with tradition,” she says. “We’ve graduated into this sort of adolescent period where we get to make our food trendy, popular, fun, extra-traditional, regionally specific.” To that point, she mentions restaurants like Gabriella’s Vietnam on East Passyunk Avenue, where chef-owner Thanh Nguyen eschews the same old vermicelli platters for steamed water fern dumplings and sizzling pork crepes, and Café Nhan on West Passyunk Avenue, a spiritual successor to Café Diem from mother and son Nhan Vo and Andrew Dinh Vo. Serving ferocious BBH as well as Superbowl-worthy wings, Café Nhan is a newer business representing a bridge between the generations. Meanwhile on Washington Avenue, mainstay Ba Le Bakery is an old business representing a bridge between the generations.

“In many ways my parents never felt like I was gonna be ready,” says Victor Nguyen, who took over Ba Le a year ago while simultaneously running four salons with his wife, Naomi, and raising three kids under six. “It took them over 12 years of me working full-time after graduation to find the confidence to say I could handle the store.”

Calling Ba Le a “store” is like calling Disney World a cute playground. Established in Saigon by Nguyen’s grandfather and then opened in Philly by his mother, Thi, in 1998, Ba Le is a mammoth operation in a persnickety old building. Production occupies most of the space, with a mere retail runway where every available inch of space is stacked with sacks of bread and summer rolls and plastic-wrapped logs of sundry bologna and banana leaf-wrapped pyramids of sticky coconut rice and pineapple smoothies and sesame balls and green-and-yellow-striped pandan-and-mung bean cakes and an entire line of attractively packaged condiments—Nguyen’s first project after taking over the business last year.

This year begins work on a much bigger endeavor: a new, ground-up building in the same shopping center. “This will give my expression of Vietnamese food, still keeping with the roots but presented with the variations that I think would suit our generation,” says Nguyen. When Ba Le 2.0 opens, it will have seating for the first time, more robust customer service and clearer signage and packaging. “From an outsider’s perspective, or even if you’re an Americanborn Vietnamese person like me, if I walk into the [existing] store, I wouldn’t even know what I’m looking at,” Nguyen goes on. “We have to curate a narrative around the food, so people understand.”

Until the new space is ready next year, business at Be Le continues as usual. Their baguettes—thinner-crusted and more cottony-crumbed than the loaves of Vietnam’s 19th-century French colonizers—travel from Washington Avenue to 40 wholesale clients across the city, including next-gen businesses.

Among them is the Breakfast Den, a sunny “American-Vietnamese” luncheonette that opened in 2020 and embodies this moment of culinary remixing. A colorful chalkboard collage of mottos and affirmations hangs over the counter: Ain’t No Party Like a Breakfast Party, Fly Eagles Fly!!!, and mostly instructively, Be Yourself, written toward the top-right corner. For Huyen Thai Dinh, who grew up in West Philly, being herself means serving chocolate-chip pancakes and kale caesars alongside cheesesteak banh mi and the coziest cháo gà, the Vietnamese version of congee, crowned with crispy twists of chicken skin, fresh herbs and a soft-boiled egg split open to reveal a jammy golden yolk.

“Not to say that the restaurants run by a lot of our parents or our relatives are not just as delicious and awesome,” Pham says, “but If I’m gonna do food, I want to make sure it’s like no other Vietnamese restaurant in the city.” That’s both out of creative impulse and respect: “It’s really important for me that we’re not taking away business or making a competition against our people.”

The exuberant food and drinks at CàPhê are distinct from any other restaurant, Vietnamese or otherwise, in the city. It’s less of a menu than an ephemeral collection of taste memories, all chronicled on CàPhê’s social channels. “To me it’s the most satisfying, but also the most effective way, for us to connect with customers that are not just Vietnamese, but anybody, because of that emotional pull and human effort in each and every item,” Pham says. Chef Kevin Huynh has drawn on his love of pasta for the “riêu-sotto,” a mesmerizing Italo-Viet mash-up of risotto and bún riêu, the tomato-and-crab noodle soup. Head barista Phat Tang mined his childhood favorites, kem and dâu phông (ice cream and peanuts) and sua Milo (Milo milk) to create a parfait of malted chocolate soft-serve, brownies and crushed peanuts. The velvety kabochasquash cháo, an early menu favorite, got its inspiration from a pumpkin soup from a Vietnamese grandmother. Jacob Trinh’s persimmon-growing grandmother to be exact. Jacob was CàPhê’s opening chef.

This is a small community in frequent dialogue and collaboration. “I think because there’s such a small number of the young generation opening Vietnamese restaurants,” Pham says, “we are pretty much all in contact with each other.”

Which is why Tuan Phung’s yellowtail collar at Banh Mi and Bottles, for whom Bui has consulted, costs $40. It’s part of a recent strategic pivot for Phung and his wife Olivia’s restaurant, which opened in 2016 as a refuge on South Street for craft beer and Vietnamese hoagies. Last year, out went the beer fridges and industrial décor, in came woven basket lamps and warm lighting and smart cocktails and baller Viet seafood towers stacked with grilled river prawns, squid ceviche, mussels, clams, oysters and lobster.

“Pre-pandemic, I don’t think our guests were ready for this, but now I think people are more adventurous,” says Phung, who immigrated to Philly as a teenager. “If they want a certain authentic dish, they’re probably gonna go to a mom-and-pop on Washington Avenue, so I take a different approach.”

Rubbed with shallots, garlic, lemongrass and chiles then grilled, the collar is a treasure hunt of succulent dark-meat morsels nestled in the contours of the pointy neck bones. Phung serves it with an outrageously flavorful sauce, a riptide of fresh pineapple and fermented fish. Bui recommends pairing the collar with a pét-nat from Banh Mi and Bottles’ list of natural wines, then marvels aloud at his own suggestion: “Pét-nat with Vietnamese fish collar—that phrase in itself is wild to me. Two years ago, that wouldn’t be possible.”

In two years that and more has changed for Vietnamese chefs in Philly. Two years ago, Victor Nguyen’s parents were still running Ba Le. Two years ago, CàPhê Roasters had just opened under the El. Two years ago, Jacob Trinh was still eating through his backstock of XO sauce. Now, he’s the new chef de cuisine of Little Fish, one of most seminal and beloved BYOBs in town. “I wanted to get back in touch with that more finer dining space,” he says, exploring Vietnamese and adjacent flavors in the context of a high-end seafood menu.