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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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(He borrowed elements of his recipe from both women.) The flavors, in outline, may recall cheaper bowls in Chinatown. And unlike the stiff cuts favored elsewhere, the meat — Angus brisket, eye of round simmered into submission and luscious, unorthodox short rib — yields and melts without hesitation. We’re especially fond of the small plates like the pork summer rolls with layers of crunchy texture (fried onions in the middle, crisp cucumbers and lettuce, and crumbled peanuts in the hoison sauce for dipping). One of the Old Quarter’s best-restored properties, this traditional merchants’ house is sparsely but beautifully decorated, with rooms filled with fine furniture set around two courtyards. Note the high steps between rooms, a traditional design incorporated to stop the flow of bad energy around the property. There are crafts and trinkets for sale here, including silver jewellery, basketwork and Vietnamese tea sets, and there’s usually a calligrapher or another craftsperson at work too.
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These are made with a delicious pork sausage and stuffed with fried bits of garlic. The rating scale of 0 to 100 reflects our editors’ appraisals of all the tangible and intangible factors that make a restaurant or bar great — or terrible — regardless of price. Now, you still probably can’t walk in at 8pm on a Friday with six people—but it’s easy to get a reservation at Hanoi House with a bit of planning.
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Here, you get a big platter of crispy spring rolls, pork meatballs, grilled pork, rice noodles, and lettuce wraps to pile everything into. This is a big dish that works well for sharing, but you can also easily just go all-in on it by yourself. Since opening, that clams and congee dish has gotten its fair share in the limelight.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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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.
We’d like to add that combination of ingredients to everything we cook at home, and that’s one of the main reasons why we’ll keep coming back here. A cauldron of simmering beef bones, garlic, ginger, star anise, and cinnamon just won’t fit into any of our studio apartments. Picture the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to you in the past year. This phở is similar to that, in that you won’t be able to stop thinking about it in rich, excruciating detail. The broth is incredibly flavorful, the filet mignon and brisket are perfect, and the hefty servings of parsley and pickled garlic bring this bowl of soup over the top.
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.
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.
Sitting there makes you feel like a spy in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. A couple of blocks away, at Madame Vo, the broth is equally limpid and marrow-deep. But here the carnality is countered by sweetness, brought on by first roasting the bones, then adding rock sugar and a bounty of aromatics whose profusion might be frowned upon in the more austere north. A side plate spills over with basil, lime, wheels of jalapeño and bean sprouts heaped like kindling.
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.
The food here is made with elegance, integrity, and first-class cooking technique. The Tyger serves fantastic food from a variety of Southeast Asian countries in a bright Soho space that’s good for groups.
