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In a town where multiple publications obsessively chronicle the rise of star chefs and every development of a restaurant’s opening — like, ahem, this one — it’s pretty unusual that such a star chef could come out of practically nowhere. But that’s exactly what Nguyen did, along with Hanoi House owners Sara Leveen and Ben Lowell. On the 4th, the Hanoi House chef Instagrammed Infatuation’s best new restaurants of 2017, of which the Vietnamese East Village restaurant was one. It was a First We Feast video of how to make Nguyen’s acclaimed pho that he posted about on December 14. December 20 brought New York magazine critic Adam Platt’s best new restaurant list. And this was all just in the last month — the chef and restaurant has racked up many more accolades since Hanoi House opened in January 2017.
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Great Vietnamese food has always been elusive in Manhattan, beyond rumors of sandwiches sold at the back of pawnshops and isolated dishes on otherwise forgettable menus. The arrival of Hanoi House and Madame Vo, which opened nearly simultaneously in January and share a respectful yet open-minded approach to traditional Vietnamese cooking, is cause for rejoicing. This is pho nam, as it might be made in the Mekong Delta, where the mother of the chef, Jimmy Ly, was born, or on the Gulf of Thailand, once home to his mother-in-law.
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The broth is a living thing, animal, drawn from a pot crowded with bones — long marrow bones, neck bones rayed like starfish, oxtail bones ringed with meat — and kept seething through the night. It’s deceptively crystalline, belying its lushness, and almost indolent in how it clings to the tongue. The frog legs are a revelation, which come in what is described as a Cajun rice batter and heaped with pickled garlic and peanuts. They may never replace buffalo chicken wings, but they're meatier than most amphibian appendages.
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Gosch worked with Nguyen at The District by Hannah An in Los Angeles, where Nguyen rose to chef de cuisine. That’s where Nguyen learned to make pho and all the other cuisine classics. Once he mastered those, though, he tried to reinvent them, Gosch says. A vegetable stew with a coconut-milk base tastes dull as dishwater, an essay in mellowness in search of a purpose. And a green papaya salad comes decorated with shredded pig ear that proves too much trouble to chew. They’re the perfect pairing to the shredded green papaya and sweet soy dressing.
In case you are waiting in a line for your pho, entertain yourself with some fun facts about Hanoi!
This, too, is a formidable dish, and one just as popular as pho bac in the outdoor food stalls of the Vietnamese capital. Either soup is the best reason to visit Hanoi House, but there are plenty of others, too, like the bun cha ($21). For historical reasons, much of the Vietnamese food served in New York City originated in the southern part of the country, specifically in the Mekong Delta southwest of Saigon. But gradually, over the last few years, restaurants with a northern Vietnamese bent have appeared. Most, like Nightingale 9 and Bunker, have been founded by restaurateurs who have visited Vietnam and become enchanted with its street food.
When the 42-year-old Nguyen connected with Leveen and Lowell — both Stephen Starr alums — he was living and cooking Sichuan food in China. He happened to be back in the U.S. for a wedding when he checked Craigslist job postings in New York and spotted the Hanoi House listing. Even though he had built a life for himself in China, with a job and a (now long-distance) girlfriend, he applied — the chef had always had the idea of his own NYC Vietnamese restaurant in the back of his mind. After spending two hours on the phone with Leveen and Lowell, Nguyen flew to New York on the spot for a tasting.
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A little over a year ago, Nguyen wasn’t even cooking in New York City. But the food is generally exciting; Hanoi House is fascinating addition to the city’s growing roster of Vietnamese restaurants. You’re not allowed to temper the broth with torn basil or a twist of lime, as is the custom at other Vietnamese restaurants in New York.
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This is pho bac, the noodle soup indigenous to northern Vietnam, darker and funkier than its sweet southern cousin. In Hanoi, it’s made with sa sung, dried marine worms, an ingredient theoretically unavailable here, although this hasn’t stopped John Nguyen, the chef, from occasionally slipping it in. At Hanoi House in the East Village, the first spoonful of pho is a shock.
Located just off Tompkins Square on a block with an incredibly diverse array of restaurants, it was opened a few months ago by Sara Leveen and Ben Lowell, who worked previously at Buddakan and Upland. The chef is John Nguyen, who grew up in Orange County, California — one of the country’s hotbeds of Vietnamese cuisine — but has also worked mainly in Stephen Starr restaurants. Hanoi House is small and cramped, decorated with tropical storm shutters, wooden lattice work, and potted foliage that give it a colonial vibe. The layout is mainly barroom, with the best seats in a small raised room at the rear.
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That’s important, because this restaurant serves some of the best Vietnamese food you’ll find in NYC. We have a small kitchen with shared work surfaces so we cannot guarantee that any dish is 100% allergen free. No part of this site may be reproduced without our written permission.
The spring rolls are fabulous, bumpy and crisp and tasting of crab and pork. (They’re available as an app for $9.) Really, you can eat the bun cha any way you want. One method involves picking up little piles of ingredients with your chopsticks, dipping them in the broth, and then downing them. Another is to treat the bowl of noodles as a staging area, dumping everything, including lettuce and herbs, into it a little at a time. The phở at Hanoi House is rich and deep in flavor, but what sets this bowl apart from the rest of the NYC greats is the amount of parsley in the soup and the pickled garlic on the side.
Instead, on the side, there are sheer petals of garlic pickled in rice vinegar — a small act of mercy lending a delicate, leavening sting. Well Hello, HanoiFrom French colonial architecture to tasty street food and chic boutiques, Vietnam's capital will surprise you. In a world where Instagram drives diners and press, it’s an increasingly common, if newer, sentiment for a chef. But Nguyen’s style has always been to straddle traditional and modern — even when his employers didn’t want any added creativity, according to Nguyen’s former sous chef Clement Gosch.
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