When America embraces refugees, we get some of our favorite foods. Look no further than Vietnamese dishes pho and banh mi, which are now some of the most popular dishes in America. So how did that happen?
We're here at Good Girl Dinette, one of the more than 8,000 Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S., to find out. Thank you. I have no idea how I'm supposed to properly eat pho.
So if you're unsure about how to use your chopsticks, go lower. Lower. Then say higher.
Yeah, get more control if you go lower. OK. There you go. All right.
There you go. Terrible? Yeah.
So this has to be, hands down, probably the most popular Vietnamese dish in America, I would say. Do you agree with that? Sure, yeah. So your family has their story about coming here to the U.S. has a lot of ties to sort of the same way that...
pho became popular. Why do you think pho is sort of the ubiquitous Vietnamese-American dish at this point? My grandmother came in 1975. This is right after the American embassy collapsed.
At the time, she came through a refugee resettlement program that the U.S. created. After the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of Vietnamese immigrants came to the U.S. in three main waves. First, the U.S. government evacuated more than 100,000 Vietnamese in 1975. Second, ethnic Chinese and refugees often from rural areas came in the late 1970s. And then third, more refugees, political prisoners, and Amerasians, the children of U.S. service members and Vietnamese, arrived in the 80s and 90s.
The American government had to figure out how to resettle refugees. They said, oh, how are we going to assimilate these refugees? So it was not too long ago that Asians were considered the unassimilable aliens, hence the Chinese Exclusion Act. The American government could not see how Asians could be American. That's kind of similar to some of the talk we hear about refugees now.
Absolutely. You know, there's so much fear and fear like what these refugees would do to the fabric of America. Today, there are close to 2 million Vietnamese people in the U.S.
My grandma was an entrepreneur, had been all her life. When she was 16 in Vietnam, she sold her wedding jewelry to start her first business. Wow.
Like, she was hardcore. And so she told grandpa, go to the Goodwill. Get the biggest pot you can find. We're going to make pho. And so she made this huge pot of pho in her garage.
And there were other Vietnamese refugees in the area. They came to her garage. She made a big pot.
And then she... She started when the pot was empty, and that's how she kind of recreated like a tiny bit of Vietnam. And she called it, which means homeland. That's how she started making pho in the US.
It filled a need. It was not just a need for sustenance, but it's also like this community. Food is familiar.
Yeah, and it felt like they didn't have their country anymore. So what makes this pho rather than a different noodle dish? It's the noodles themselves, the way they prepare it. It's flat noodles and then it's cut, so it's like a more rectangular versus Other rice noodles are round, more like a spaghetti.
Pho is traditionally a soup made with pho rice noodles, broth, and protein. Its popularity rose in Hanoi due to a surplus of beef bones during French rule in the late 1800s. Pho then made its way to Saigon and southern Vietnam.
Now it's the country's national dish. So when your grandmother, she started selling pho out of her garage, pho definitely left the community and became more popular. So what helped that happen?
I don't know what to say. I'm like, how did sriracha become ubiquitous in every household, you know? Because Vietnamese community isn't walled in, you know? And communities are porous.
Like, how do I know about falafel? You know, so especially in California, we intermingle all the time. You can't control it.
Do you believe that there is such a thing as authentic Vietnamese food? I don't think it's a debate. I see.
It doesn't exist. Food is culture, and culture is not static. Culture changes all the time, you know?
And some people don't know that. Somehow, I think like when we think about immigrant food, we want it to be like a-The same forever. Yeah, we want it to be like frozen in time. Especially in America, they want the other to not have humanity. So if you make Vietnamese food static, you're kind of denying like the culture's humanity, its ability to grow.
You tell me a food that has not ever changed, and I will tell you that you're completely wrong because agriculture has changed. The climate's- have changed like all these things that affect even like the growing of ingredients that make a food well i think a lot of the time when that conversation comes up part of it is that maybe a person outside of that community that ethnic community is presenting a dish and maybe people feel like they're stealing something from another culture you're talking about cultural appropriation yes um i think that term is such an umbrella term that i think it's hard to tease ...out what it actually means. I really don't care how many white people make pho. I don't care.
But when there's so many Vietnamese Americans cooking in obscurity and trying to hone their craft every day and not just in their adult life, like probably since like their childhood, the first time they ate pho. I think that's more objectionable, like, to have so many people cook the same stuff. But who do you highlight?
This white person that went to Vietnam for three months. Who do you give the mic to? Right.
A business is extremely hard to open and extremely hard to maintain and to keep its doors open. So I think immigrants are for the most part, you know, undercapitalized. So it's like who gets to succeed? I think it has to do with power, has to do with money. What does it mean when you highlight and you make a white person an authority on, let's say, pho?
What you're doing is you're giving them authority and authority translates into economic viability because it's considered the expert. and people are going to come to them and, you know, they'll get opportunities. Like, give Vietnamese Americans that opportunity to be experts. I think women of color, we have to try so hard to be an expert. You can't be mediocre.
You don't have the safety net to be mediocre. No, because we're not considered authorities to begin with. You know, we have to be so much more to be at a certain level with straight white men. Thank you.
Bye. I'm going to miss it. So you did great.
Thank you. Yeah! The pho's finished, but we're not done yet.
Banh mi is next. So what's in here? Garden of Lettuce is a local farm.
Okay. And then it's cilantro maggi mayo. Okay. Which you make here. And there's pickled green tomatoes, because it's a summer banh mi.
And there's red boat bacon, bacon that we infuse with cinnamon, star anise, cloves, and then also red boat fish sauce. Ooh. Yeah. And then there's a lot of other stuff.
I'm gonna take a bite. I don't have to use chopsticks for this one, so I feel more ready. A banh mi sandwich typically includes a protein, chilies, and pickled vegetables inside a baguette.
No one really knows who exactly invented banh mi. There are multiple claims to that title. But generally, the story goes that the modern version was probably created in Saigon toward the end of French rule.
France colonized Vietnam from the late 1800s until the 1950s, and for better or worse, they left Saigon to the French. some influence on the culture. They always like to say, oh, it's a product of colonialism. What isn't? Like, you know?
You know, the French colonial imperial power, you know, like wanted a baguette, and that's what they got. But the Vietnamese baguette has as much to do with France as Japanese ramen has to do with Chinese ramen. It's the reality that borders are really, they're arbitrary.
So the banh mi that immigrants had originally come from Vietnam with, what's changed about it over time? Like, Lee's Sandwich. I think that changed a lot.
Brothers Henry and Chiu Le opened the first Lee's Sandwich's location in San Jose in 1983. Henry Le died in 2016. By then, they had more than 60 locations in multiple states. Their innovation was that they had this neon sign that would say, Hot Baguettes. All these chains kind of helped increase the profile of banh mi in the US, but I think Lee's in particular, because it was such a phenomenon, I think-Didn't you try to bring Lee's Sandwich- sandwich to your grandfather at some point?
Yeah. Before I came to see him, I made a pit stop at Lee's, brought him a sandwich. I said, Grandpa, you gotta try this.
And I thought he would really love it. And he had one bite, he goes, this is atrocious. He was so offended.
And I go, it's great, what's going on? He goes, oh, it's just cutting off the roof of my mouth, you know? So he loves the soft french fry too. So I do think it has a lot to do with what you like.
and what you grew up with. So this is also your restaurant, which is very cool and amazing. So what do you want your food to do in terms of introducing people to Vietnamese food?
Or is maybe that's not the goal at all? I don't care to introduce people to Vietnamese food, but people are introduced to Vietnamese food by my restaurant. We're idiosyncratic people, you know what I mean?
Everyone's not the same. Yeah, you know, like I wanted it to reflect our full humanity. That's my goal. Like somebody one time asked like, oh, I know about your restaurant. I heard you serve Vietnamese food and then regular food.
Oh my God. My understanding of that is regular food is sort of what we think of. American food.
stereotypically as American food. But aren't we at a point in 2018 where pho, banh mi, Vietnamese food is American food? Absolutely.
I don't think you can deny it. I mean, I think sometimes the Anglo food is like the default, but that's not really what America is or has been for a very long time. Well, this is awesome.
Thank you. Loved eating everything that we had. Thank you so much for letting me come here and teaching me things about Vietnamese food.
I feel like my chopstick game has really risen 100%. I saw the progression. Yeah, it was great. I think that we can finally finish this now.
Lovely. So I'm going to do that.