Chopsticks and Crawfish

After years of adopting to life in the US, Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana married the culinary culture of their old home with their new home. The results are magically delicious.

I had just started an argument in New Orleans. It began innocently enough.  Sitting at the bar at oyster-centric Cooter Brown’s, located in Uptown, I asked the 30-something suit-clad guy next to me where could I find the best banh mi sandwich in town. “That’s simple,” said Leon. “Tan Dinh is the best.” Then the bartender, a brunette in her mid 20s jumped in. “Um, no! The best banh mi is Dong Phuong.” And suddenly the debate began. I tried to keep the argument from getting more heated, but inadvertently fanned the flames. “Okay, okay,” I said, “let’s switch to pho.”

 Leon and the bartender couldn’t agree on that, either. I put a $10 bill on the bar for my Sazerac and slunk out, heading to a newfangled Vietnamese place called Ba Chi Canteen.

 What I’d just witnessed was something of an anomaly in North American and is what makes New Orleans so special right now, particularly if you’re fan of Vietnamese cuisine: There are very few other places outside of Southeast Asia where you’d find two non-Vietnamese people passionately arguing over where to get the best Vietnamese dishes in their town.

 There’s a pedigree here going back to 1975 when the Vietnam War ended and hordes of southern Vietnamese immigrated to America. Many of them ended up in Louisiana, in general, and New Orleans, in particular. Integration hasn’t been easy but the fact that the non-Vietnamese locals have become so passionate about Vietnamese food is telling about the status of said integration these days. There were 7,700 Vietnamese in New Orleans in the late 1970s; today there are over 17,000, making the Vietnamese the largest Asian population in the greater New Orleans area.

 But one won’t find just traditional Vietnamese being served up in the Big Easy. Starting around the late 1990s, Vietnamese immigrants started opening Cajun restaurants in Louisiana, particularly in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, usually with generic sounding names like Cajun Seafood and The Boiling Crab.

 The trend is now going in the opposite direction as well. Non-Vietnamese chefs and chefs who are the first-generation children of Vietnamese immigrants are opening restaurants that serve updated versions of both Cajun and Creole classics but have a mashed-up sensibility to it. One of my Vietnamese friends in New Orleans called it “Asian-Cajun” cuisine. And still others have called the Vietnamese shrimp and crawfish boil restaurants “Viet-Cajun.”

 I not only wanted to find the epicenter of this culinary and cultural intersection in New Orleans – the spot that criss-crosses where Vietnamese are incorporating local ingredients into their cuisines and where non-Vietnamese chefs are borrowing from the Vietnamese – but I wanted to find out how the whole thing started. So, I headed from the Big Apple to the Big Easy intent on investigating this intriguing culinary miscegenation and how two incredible culinary cultures have spawned a very edible love-child.

 And there was no better place to do so than in New Orleans East, long the center of the Vietnamese-American community here. A friend of a friend had given me the phone number of Sandy Nguyen, saying she was the person to talk to. Sandy is the chief coordinator of Coastal Communities Consulting, where she acts as an advocate for Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers, many of whom don’t speak English very well. Sandy is their voice. In the wake of both Katrina and the BP oil spill, she was instrumental in educating the fishermen and shrimpers and walking them through the process of getting financial restitution from the government, many of whom would not have even known they were eligible.

 “Come down anytime,” she said when I called her. “The only thing I can guarantee is that you’ll have an amazing time with us.”

 It sounded like a deal. A few weeks later, I was walking into Café Trinh Quyen in New Orleans East to find the only patrons at one large communal table. About 12 Vietnamese-Americans sat there, beers in front of them, chain smoking. Sandy was there, one of only two women. The rest were male shrimpers and they’d just arrived after being at sea for nearly two weeks. I’d stumbled into a blow-off-some-serious-steam party.

A Vietnamese feast with shrimpers in New Orleans East.

 A bottle of Tiger beer was put in my hand and communal plates of Vietnamese cuisine appeared – dishes I’d either only seen at restaurants in Vietnam, such as be thui muoi (rare, partially cured beef) or never seen at a Vietnamese restaurant here or there (raw croaker fish with a tamarind dip, called goi ca ngoa).

 When I asked about their relationship to Cajun cuisine and the so-called Viet-Cajun phenomenon – no one had heard of the term. I suspect that’s because it was created when the culinary phenomenon was exported from Louisiana – Sandy’s Husband, Phuoc, who goes by Michael, a shrimper, said they eat Cajun frequently. “It’s just there. It’s good. And it’s similar to Vietnamese in that you can sit around and pick at it like we’re doing right now with this food.”

 “It really comes down to a business decision,” someone bellowed out – at this point, people were talking to me at random and Sandy was translating whatever she happened to pick out of the bibulous cacophony – “There were only so many Vietnamese to eat at Vietnamese restaurants in New Orleans – the white Americans were not eating Vietnamese much yet – and so some of us decided to start opening up restaurants serving the local cuisine.”

 Suddenly a bottle of cognac materialized. Shots were poured, glasses were raised and down the hatch it went. We slammed our empty glasses down and laughed. In two days all of the men here would be back out at sea. I called a taxi and made the decision I’d spend the next day or so doing some research into how this phenomenon began.

 We have to go back to 1975 when tens of thousands of (mostly) southern Vietnamese immigrated to the United States after the Fall of Saigon. Many Vietnamese fishermen ended up in Louisiana. And many of them eventually adopted the local cuisine and style of eating. But as jobs dried up, flocks of Vietnamese fled to other parts of the country. Houston, for example, was a popular spot. According to food writer Andrea Nguyen, the Houston Chronicle began writing about the Vietnamese crawfish phenomenon in the early 2000s. From there it spread to Southern California’s Vietnamese community. Today every major city in the country boasts at least one Viet-Cajun spot. In the ultimate triumph of this hybrid cuisine, there are now Viet-Cajun restaurants in Vietnam.

 The Vietnamese have a proclivity for taking the best aspects of other cultures. As Andrea Nguyen wrote, “It’s the dynamic of Vietnamese culture, which, for the sake of survival and self determination, has always absorbed and re-invented foreign concepts without hesitation.” Just look at the banh mi sandwich. When the French arrived in Vietnam, sometime around the beginning of Gallic colonial rule in the year 1887, they brought with them baguettes and pate, which were combined to form a rather rich sandwich. After the French left, the Vietnamese took ownership of it, adding slices of pork deli meat and, particularly in the southern and central parts of the country, fresh herbs and vegetables like cilantro and pickled carrots.

 For further perspective, I met up with Anthony Tran the next day. Anthony, who was one of the “boat people”—Vietnamese who escaped the country via a harrowing boat journey – owned a Viet-Cajun restaurant in Lafayette until about three weeks before I met him. Cajunland, which first fired up its boiling pots in 2008, served up fairly traditional Cajun crab and crawfish boils.

 I met Tran at Cajun Seafood, a small Vietnamese-owned chain in New Orleans. We met at the Lower Ninth Ward location. “I think the key here is to realize that Louisiana has such a strong food tradition. Other cities have culinary traditions, too – Italian American in New York, for example – but nowhere is it so strong as Louisiana. You can’t escape it. And inevitably it’s going to end up in your own food, like it or not.”

 He added: “When you think about it, the similarities between southern Vietnam and Louisiana make a blending of our cuisines and cultures inevitable: there’s the humid weather; the Mekong Delta and the Mississippi Delta; we both have rice-growing cultures; the fact that we’re both former French colonies.” Tran pointed out the similarities between the banh mi and the po’ boy sandwich; the Vietnamese blood sausage and the boudin sausage; gumbo and various Vietnamese soups and stews like bo kho and bun bo Hue.

 Just then, our order arrived: a thick boiled turkey neck and a pound of crawfish, both delivered to our table in transparent plastic bags, as is the tradition. The difference between a Cajun and a Vietnamese boil is subtle: suck the brains out of the head of the crawfish and you can detect a subtle fruity sweetness. That’s because, as is the southern Vietnamese culinary tradition with just about everything they cook, they sprinkle sugar in it. And for good measure they douse the boil with lemon juice. “In a traditional Cajun boil,” Anthony said, “you’d be almost assaulted by Cajun spices.”

 It doesn’t seem like the non-Vietnamese locals mind the subtle difference. I looked around the restaurant and the majority of diners were African-American (which would make sense since we were in an African-American neighborhood). “There are 185 Viet-Cajun restaurants in New Orleans alone,” Anthony said, who is a fountain of such statistical facts thanks to his position on the board of economic development in New Orleans.

 Another fact that Anthony laid on me: the owners of Cajun Seafood, Viet Nguyen and his wife, Nge Le – the man who started this mini-chain in 1995 – came up with this particularly Vietnamese sweet-fruity concoction for the boils. There’s no way to prove this but Viet’s son, Chi Nguyen, soon gravitated over to our table (Anthony is an old family friend) and when I asked him for confirmation, he agreed.

 “My mom, who had been working at a traditional Cajun restaurant previously, came up with the idea to add sugar and lemon to the mix. We wanted to balance out the flavors, adding sweet and sour flavors to a recipe that was already salty and spicy.” Which is the heart of the philosophy of all Vietnamese food: a balance between sweet, sour, spicy, and salty in one dish.

 The story of the Vietnamese in Louisiana can be traced to how their cooking has evolved since 1975 and how the non-Vietnamese locals have perceived Vietnamese cuisine here. There was very little interest in Vietnamese cuisine among the non-Vietnamese here. Then they started doing their take on Cajun cuisine, a sort of if-you-cook-it-they-will-come effort. It worked. But in the last few years, Vietnamese cuisine has really exploded in popularity in New Orleans. “In the past you had to go to New Orleans East or Gretna to eat Vietnamese,” Anthony told me. “Now there are traditional Vietnamese restaurants opening up all over the place.”

Besides that, there are newfangled Vietnamese spots opening. Ba Chi Canteen, the restaurant I went to on my first night in town, for example, is owned by the son of Vietnamese immigrants who had run a traditional Vietnamese restaurant in the 1980s. Ba Chi Canteen is now serving dishes like “bacos,” a riff on tacos, a blend of steamed buns folded up with pork belly and lemongrass chicken. Or there’s Namese, started by another first generation Vietnamese-American, who serves dishes like a Pho Boy, essentially all the ingredients of pho in a sandwich (with a small bowl of pho broth in which to dip it).

 Everyone I asked about the sudden popularity of Vietnamese cuisine in town had an idea why. The analogy with sushi came up often. “Remember in the 1990s when suddenly everyone was eating sushi,” said Leon, the guy I met at Cooter Brown’s a few days earlier. “Well, that’s what has happened here with Vietnamese. We suddenly all started eating Vietnamese very often in the last few years.”

Then there’s Mopho. At the helm is Michael Gulatta, a non-Vietnamese chef who had worked his way through chef John Besh’s empire, including holding the position of chef de cuisine at August. Mopho is his first restaurant. I stopped in one night to ask him why his first restaurant was one that combined Vietnamese and Cajun flavors.

 “When I thought about where I like eating on my day off, it was always Vietnamese,” said the chef. “We don’t have a Chinatown or Little Italy here. We’re all pretty well assimilated. Except for the Vietnamese. So, this restaurant is my vision of what it would be like if they blended together, if the Mekong and the Mississippi Rivers collided in New Orleans.”

 I still wasn’t exactly sure when the big bang of Viet-Cajun occurred. Was it when Viet Nguyen, owner of Cajun Seafood, reportedly first came up with the idea to make a flavor-balanced crawfish boil, as his son and Anthony Tran assert?

 Before I could think about it more, I got a call from Sandy Nguyen. She said she was going down to the docks the following day and would I like to come along to meet some shrimpers.

 The next day I was near Venice—not in Italy or California, but in Louisiana, not far from where the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico meet. “Look!” a white fisherman approached Sandy and me, holding out his iPhone. “I am a grandfather.” And then he began flipping through photos of a newborn baby. He was wearing a necklace with a jade pendant of the Buddha on it, indicating he was either a Buddhist or he was showing solidarity for his Vietnamese colleagues.

 Within minutes, I was on a docked boat and talking to Kong, a Cambodian shrimper (Vietnamese make up about 60 percent of shrimpers in Louisiana; Cambodians, a much smaller degree). Kong immediately launched into his experience during Katrina.

 “It was much worse than the oil spill,” he said, referring to the British Petroleum oil spill that occurred five years ago this year. “During the hurricane we lost everything – our house, our possessions – but not the boat,” he said, looking back at his wife busily hurrying around Miss Christina, their boat. “Sure, we had to relocate for about six months but if we’d lost the boat, we would have had nothing.”

 About 20 feet away on the dock, I noticed Sandy and another man of Vietnamese descent standing next to a large steaming pot on a bench. She waved me over. It was a shrimp boil, the type of lunch they often have here on the docks. I picked up a shrimp and followed Sandy’s lead, twisting off the head and sucking the brains out, before peeling the out shell and legs off and eating the rest. There was a buttery goodness to these just-pulled-from-the-sea morsels. But beneath that, subtle hints of spiciness and sweetness that hit all those traditional Vietnamese notes. I was already thinking that this might be the best thing I’d ever eaten in my life. And then, toward the bottom of the pot, soft shell crab. I picked one up and bit into it. Juice ran down my arm, my rolled-up shirt sleeves acting as an impromptu sponge. I didn’t care. I was enraptured in utter deliciousness.

 “Oh my god, they eat this way all the time?” I asked to no one in particular. I looked over at Sandy and she nodded.

 I ate until I was uncomfortably full. I felt like a dog that had just been given an endless bowl of food. I could not stop eating.

 And it was then that it hit me: Long before any Vietnamese restaurateur decided to open up a Cajun restaurant; ages before any Vietnamese immigrants moved to Houston or Orange Country or Orlando and fired up the burners on a boil restaurant, there was this: Vietnamese (and in some cases, Cambodian) shrimpers, who would come in after a long morning at sea and, along with the white shrimpers, make a communal lunch with some of their bounty.

 They’d make it in a way that would make sense to their palate (i.e. sweeten it a bit, go slightly easier on the Cajun spices) and they’d sit back after a long hard morning at sea and pick at the fruits of their bounty.

 Which is what I was just doing: just finishing the best meal of my life at what may be the place of origin of one of the most unlikely yet delicious hybrid cuisines the world has ever seen.

 There was certainly no argument about that.