What is Minnesota Vietnamese food today, and what will it be in the future? Visit new Vietnamese-anchored restaurants in the Twin Cities, and the question just about reaches up from the menu to demand attention.
To begin to answer, let’s swiftly recap the origins of the Minnesota Vietnamese tradition. In 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, ending the Vietnam War, a conflict that involved all the nations and peoples living thereabouts, including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, and the Hmong people, who fought with the U.S. in our “secret war” coupled to the Vietnam War. Starting that year, America began relocating our war allies to save them from retribution. Between 1975 and 2010, 1.2 million people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia came to the United States, thousands landing in Minnesota, providing the seed of the Southeast Asian community here, now estimated at around 300,000 souls by the Wilder Foundation.
By the 1990s, when I sat with Anthony Bourdain in a restaurant then called Saigon, now relocated and called iPho, he kept repeating, “Do you know how good this is?” We in Minnesota knew. I remember getting a letter from a reader when I was at City Pages that said, There’s a really great Vietnamese restaurant by me; the spring rolls are so good; the people are so nice….I put it aside, thinking, This is not news. Everyone in the Twin Cities metro has a really good Vietnamese restaurant near them. Time marched on. Meanwhile, the immigrant kids of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s grew up, and now, in 2023, they are becoming the new restaurant kings and queens. They are also foodies who like tacos and pasta and Bar La Grassa and Oceanaire—and these passions, translated into their foods in creative ways, are what’s new now.
Chelas Tapas
Stop by Chelas, on Nicollet Avenue, far south of where Eat Street ends and the land of Minnehaha Creek begins, and your first impression might be that it’s still Prieto, the Latino spot that preceded it—after all, the Prieto sign is still hanging bright and proud behind the bar. About six months ago, just before Christmas 2022, Prieto was taken over by Timothy Truong and Luom “Bronko” Do, two sons of eminent Twin Cities Vietnamese restaurateurs. Truong is family to the Minneapolis Jasmine Deli and Jasmine 26 Bar and Restaurant banh mi pioneers. He made his own name launching the North Loop SoulFu food hall counter, combining southern U.S. and Southeast Asian flavors. Bronko grew up with family behind the stove at St. Paul pho legend Trieu Chau.
“Tagging along while my aunt cooked at Trieu Chau, that’s my earliest restaurant memory,” Bronko tells me on the phone. “It smells so good when the broth is bubbling at Trieu Chau; you just never forget. That’s what you want to be doing with your days. The rest of my time was running around the West Side [of St. Paul] with my friends, going to their houses, going to taco trucks. If it’s tacos from a food truck, I’m there. That’s the good stuff. Even as a kid I thought, Vietnamese and Mexican cuisines—we’re using a lot of the same flavors, except treating the ingredients differently. Dried chilies for Mexican food, fresh ones for Vietnamese. Lime. Cilantro.” He went on to Le Cordon Bleu cooking school and consulted for and managed various restaurants, including the fast-sushi spot One Two Three Sushi.
Fast-forward to now: The food at Chelas is what happens when Truong and Bronko, two chefs with Vietnamese restaurants in their blood, get a chance to run their own ship. The crispy pork belly is a great place to start. Direct your mind to the lettuce wraps that are a key part of the Southeast Asian table—from Korean ssam to the various Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Hmong versions of a pile of something good paired with a mound of lettuce leaves and vegetables. A significant part of the Chelas menu is one kind of lettuce wrap or another, and so it is with the pork belly: prepared so it’s a little gelatinous, a little super-crisp, then piled in the center of lettuce, sliced planks of cucumber, and circles of tomato in the perfect style of a Southeast Asian lettuce-wrap feast. But there’s a surprise beside the Chelas version of the herb-flecked traditional Vietnamese vinegar sauce nuoc cham: bright green salsa verde, vibrant with tomatillos. It’s a pairing that is unexpectedly on point and gives the table a sense of being of the moment. Add a bowl of the rich Vietnamese stew bo kho, turned into a menudo variant with the addition of hominy, and the instinct that Bronko has as a chef—that Vietnamese and Mexican food share particular chords—plays out in perfect harmony in the meal.
I suspect that a great number of neighborhood diners will never get past the obvious appeal of Chelas’s glassily crisp chicken wings, sweet with a Korean-descended glaze and very nice beside a lychee-gin highball or a mezcal-and-Vietnamese-iced-coffee variation on an espresso martini. But there’s real chef talent and smart instinct here, and dishes like the whole branzino, grilled till crisp, served with all the herbs and sauces to make a feast, are worthy of any food-trend skeptic’s attention, for the fish is beachside-perfect and simple, and everything with it is lively and fresh.
“We don’t like the word authentic,” says Bronko. “Our customers could travel down to the main part of Eat Street for mom-and-pop authentic. What we do is more like keeping close to the roots of the cuisine, both cuisines—that natural palate of salsas and sauces with pure flavors—then adding some wow factor so the customers here want to come back. Some people get confused: Why is this here in Tangletown? But the opportunity came up, and this is who we are.”
Em Que Viet
The newish Grand Avenue restaurant Em Que Viet is the work of six adult children who descend from other local Vietnamese restaurant legends. The married couples Lauren and Dat Le, Maria and Khanh Nguyen, and Brianna and Tam Le are family—Dat and Tam are brothers; Khanh is Dat and Tam’s cousin. Everyone calls their new endeavor Em, a term of endearment that translates to “little brother” or “little sister.” The name distinguishes it from big sibling Que Viet, which the family believes is the oldest continuously operating Vietnamese restaurant in the Twin Cities. Founded in Northeast Minneapolis by Dat and Tam Le’s parents, Que Viet opened in 1980. “I was just a typical 10-year-old, standing on a box washing dishes, standing on a box working the cash register,” remembers Dat Le now, laughing. The other owners descend from the folks behind other foundational Twin Cities restaurants: Brianna’s family ran Hunan Garden in St. Paul, and Khanh’s family founded the Vina restaurant in Richfield in 1982.
They all grew up loading bus tubs, chopping scallions, and eating Minnesota school lunch. By the time they became college-grad 20-somethings, all six were card-carrying foodies, calling ahead to reserve a Bludgeon of Beef at Manny’s for birthdays and avid fans of Bar La Grassa, Fuji Ya, Spoon and Stable, and 112 Eatery. “We all love to eat,” Lauren says. “We try to keep up with new trends, and there’s nothing more fun than to get a great dish, try to pick it apart in your mind—how did they do it; could it be done better; if not, why not—really think it through.”
The team of six began to have their own entrepreneurial dreams. Brianna and Tam were part of the younger generation who thought the State Fair could be a gold mine and worked with partners to bring about the now legendary Que Viet trailer selling egg rolls on a stick. That success gave the new generation credibility with their families, and in July of 2022, the three couples opened a place we should all bookmark as the next generation’s Vietnamese restaurant, Em. Little sister.
The menu keeps a foot in each of two worlds. There’s plenty of greatest hits from the past—yes, the big-as-a-meal egg rolls are here, as well as the light-as-a-feather little butterflies of cream cheese wontons. But there’s also a lot on the menu that reveals a new future of Vietnamese food. Pasta. Carpaccio. Risotto-like squid ink fried rice. And fancy, of-the-moment cocktails.
They turned to Oceanaire bartender Wendie Sederstrom to help devise a drinks list that’s both playful and original and that amplifies their new endeavors. They met Sederstrom back when all the next-gen Em principals would grab their own kids and head down to the Oceanaire for happy hour after a busy Sunday at Que Viet. As soon as Sederstrom saw them coming, she’d start filling their standing drink orders—a Shirley Temple for this child, an iced tea for that teen. Then the family would order 24 dozen oysters. Yes, 24 dozen.
“A lot of servers, they’d see us coming and be cranky: Oh no, not them,” laughs Lauren. “But [Sederstrom] was so calm, so sweet, and she mixed a really nice craft cocktail.”
When you visit Em, don’t miss the royal-purple butterfly pea tea lemonade. I was also charmed by my lychee, hibiscus, and clementine martini. It has that clean zestiness of being made to order and complements the Italian- and Japanese-influenced dishes.
Yes, Italian and Japanese! Like everyone in the Twin Cities, when the Em six went out, they often went Italian or Japanese. Lauren became fascinated with all the squid ink dishes around town and came up with her own: rice, cooked and then re-cooked with Japanese ikasumi squid ink, rendering it night-black to hide dewily tender shrimp inside. To serve, the risotto-textured rice is dotted with generous spoonfuls of bright orange masago roe and heaped with bonito flakes, which wave in the rising heat of the rice—think fried rice wearing a tuxedo, headed out to the fanciest ball in the land, which happens to be a magical place where Japan and Italy meet in Vietnam. Each time I slipped my spoon into the pretty creation, it came back with a bit of slick comfort, a bit of surprising salt. It was unlike any fried rice I’ve ever had, which is particularly interesting coming from an extended family that has surely served tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of plates of fried rice between them. If anyone knows fried rice, and has earned the right to tinker, surely it’s the team behind Em.
What about the Italian facet? The pasta entered the menu courtesy of the next, next generation: Lauren and Dat’s sons. Kyle started hand-making pasta when he went off to college, learning from YouTube; Sean decided it was his favorite meal ever. The recipe the two perfected is now created by a local pasta maker for Em and served cloaked with a sort of Vietnamese variation on Bolognese—it’s a meaty, rich, intense sauce that I’m told is a very traditional Vietnamese staple that must be cooked all day, though it’s not traditionally served on thick ribbons of pappardelle. The marriage between the tender pasta and the silky sauce is both beautiful and fun. It’s like finding the influence of Jimi Hendrix in Nirvana: If I close my eyes, I can just taste the distant influence of Bar La Grassa. This dish is topped with a full deep-fried soft-shelled crab, which has nice crunch, but being a foodie too, I immediately wonder, Does it need the crab? With a short rib on top, this dish would become a St. Paul comfort food legend.
Which Em itself will probably be anyway, purely because of the combination of heritage Vietnamese dishes presented with fun cocktails in a pretty, bright, and flower-filled room. Don’t miss the on-trend desserts in the case when you come in. It’s stocked by Dat’s sister Tuyen Nguyen and Lauren’s sister Phuong Tran, two gifted pastry chefs with whimsical style. Keep an eye out for the funny little charmers, like a macaron adorned with a belt of bright Fruity Pebbles or the multi-textured honeycomb-candy cake with peanut brittle.
When I asked the Em six about the future of Vietnamese food in Minnesota, I heard thoughtful responses mainly revolving around whether fans of traditional Minnesota Vietnamese were ready to accept change. The team has experimented with brisket cooked in pho seasonings for tacos and with a Vietnamese burger, but they worry about pushing too fast, too far. “I wanted us to be one of the first Vietnamese hip, modern restaurants for my children’s generation,” explains Lauren, “but I want to make sure we hold on to our customers.”
Dat tells me when the Vietnamese restaurants first opened in Minnesota, they put items like banh xeo eggy crepes on the menu, but we Minnesotans weren’t ready for traditional Vietnamese dishes. Instead, we demanded 1950s Chinese American staples like egg foo young. In the present, we’ve all become fans of banh xeo crepes, but we also still want 1950s-style sesame chicken. Brianna’s mom makes some of the best, so she has taught the Em crew, and now sesame chicken is a top seller. When you go looking for the future of Vietnamese food in the Twin Cities, you find yourself, the local customer, as the quieter half of a 40-year relationship, co-creating a Vietnamese scene that is continuously evolving.
Vellee
In thinking about the history of local Vietnamese chefs playing with American flavors, one giant name sprung to my mind: Joyce Truong. As co-owners and co-founders of Vellee, one of Minneapolis’s first food trucks, Truong and her Hmong husband, Will Xiong, took their Asian burrito and taco spot to the core downtown skyways. As of this writing, Truong and Xiong are still running their downtown spot, as well as a splashier Vellee in Northeast with beer and, sometime this spring, brunch. They’ve also found a commercial kitchen spot in Brooklyn Park where the old truck can operate seasonally with picnic tables under shade trees so Vellee can start commercial production of packaged goods, like Vellee’s Kicker Spice, from the hot peppers Xiong’s mom has been hybridizing during her long lifetime of growing peppers for her family.
“Honestly, I grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas, and my parents were working factory jobs all day, so I was hanging out at all my Mexican neighbors’ houses after school,” recalls Xiong of his Hmong-refugee childhood. “We had tacos and fajitas at school lunch. In my head it was like, There’s traditional Hmong food and Mexican food. Those are the main kinds of food. So when Joyce said, ‘We’re going to do tacos and burritos,’ it was like, Of course. We’ll use my mom’s Hmong curry recipe for the Currito; everyone likes tacos—let’s go.”
I hadn’t been to Vellee in a while, so I dropped in to the Northeast location for dinner and was pleased to find duck confit tacos, still rich, still perfectly contrasted with a mound of pickled red onions, like the cornichons served with pâté, still fit for a white-tablecloth restaurant, forever fantastic. Curried burrito, secretly Hmong, still phenomenal. Banh mi with lacquered pork, still one of the best in town. I’m not sure I’d ever had the Vellee Rolls, pork egg rolls that Xiong explained to me as halfway between Hmong egg rolls because of the glass noodles made from mung beans (yes, those are the same glass noodles you find inside stuffed chicken wings) and Vietnamese egg rolls, which are meatier. They are delicious, simple, and filling.
Then I noticed something going on at Vellee that riveted my food-critic attention. Because so many of its customers are keto, paleo, or low-carb, Vellee has started offering its tacos as DIY lettuce wraps, bringing the Vietnamese/Mexican food story something close to full circle. Vellee’s tacos were bold in 2010 because they explored new territory in the world of fusion food, where Mexican and Vietnamese food had never, or at least rarely, met before. Now, a decade on, this well-honed, market-tested, market-loved bit of fusion leaped back from its tortilla to a lettuce wrap and suddenly became not fusion but a logical extension of Vietnamese cuisine: a lettuce wrap, simply made now with the sauce cooked onto the meat, a sauce based on fire-roasted chilies.
This may seem trivial, but in food, these little evolutions often add up to a very big deal and then go on to define our lives. Pizza as we know it today, with tomato sauce, wasn’t born in Italy until the 1600s—after tomatoes made it back to Europe from their native ground of South America, were seed-selected until they grew larger, and became an Italian staple. How many careers and family Friday nights rest on that distant day tomato met crust? How many careers and family meals now revolve around fusion and pho and countless other more recent food innovations that weren’t part of our Minnesota vernacular 10, 20, 30 years ago?
So, what is Vietnamese food today in Minnesota, with all its layering of yesterday, today, and tomorrow? How about this for an answer: It’s the thing on our plates that arose from a zillion shared and public moments and another zillion quiet and private observations; it’s changing every day and will be different again in 2050. Most important for our days and our lives: It is delicious.
Chelas, 4751 Nicollet Ave., Mpls., 612-315-5147; Em Que Viet, 1332 Grand Ave., St. Paul, 651-330-4363; Vellee, multiple metro locations