Houston — Huey’s West 18th Street is one of the many Vietnamese-American restaurants in the city.But it may have more in common Dairy queen..
For starters, it was once a daily queen. The front of the sign-out has an eye-shaped outline of the ice cream chain logo. The menu includes thickly peeled buttermilk-salted chicken tenders, alongside vine mee and swaying beef. This is the standard for Dairy Queen.
However, the most striking similarity is the drive-through window of the restaurant, which opened in March 2020 in response to the blockade of the coronavirus.
Paul Pham, the owner of this Hughie’s and a few miles away, hopes that one day his restaurant will be everywhere like Dairy Queen. Next year, he will open a third location and plans to expand into Texas and perhaps beyond.
In his vision, drive-through, a classic American innovation that harnesses the fast food business into the country’s automotive culture, is also a potential means of making Vietnamese food the next dish to participate in its success story. He believes that Americans are becoming more and more familiar with Vietnamese food, making it an ideal dish for the next generation of drive-through restaurants.
For him, it also means using technology to streamline customer service, opening in diverse and populous areas and closing on Sundays, as Chick-fil-A does.
“Our concept will not survive in the old-fashioned Asian environment,” he said. His family opened the first Hughie’s in 2013.
Americans who consider their career to be Vietnamese are roughly counted 2.1 million In the 2020 census.Many North American cities, including Philadelphia, Washington When San Jose, California.. , Is experiencing a surge in new Vietnamese restaurants.
However, when adopting drive-throughs and other practices in the fast food industry, restaurant owners want to reach an audience beyond their fellow Vietnamese-Americans.
“We’re trying to sit at the level of the Panda Express,” said Kathy Gaffer, owner of Saigon Hustle, which opened in February last year with business partner Sandi Nguyen in the Oak Forest district of Houston. ..
Offering Bainh Mee, Van (Vermicelli Bowl), and Com (Rice Bowl), Saigon Hustle looks like an American drive-in from the 1950s, with a large awning decorated with images of dragon fruit and a car pulling up. There is an area where you can. .. Saigon Hustle has only one location, but its founder says it plans to make $ 1.8 million in revenue this year. They plan to expand nationwide in a couple of years.
For many non-Vietnamese diner, the menu may not be in English, so a trip to Chinatown for Vietnamese food may be a challenge, but the more upscale Vietnamese fusion restaurants are exorbitantly expensive. You may feel that, Ghaffar, 40, said.
“Drive-through isn’t that intimidating,” she said. “It gives more people the opportunity to try Vietnamese food.”
With the drive-through that appeared in the middle of the 20th century Prospered in the 1970sIs primarily a conduit for food products such as hamburgers and french fries. Fast food chains that sell Mexican-American food such as Taco Bell and Taco Cabana are also widely adopted.
Drive-through discovered a new life during the early days of the pandemic, where many restaurants adopted methods of limiting human-to-human contact.
Kenny To and Hien Nguyen opened the To Me Vietnam Sub in Calgary in October 2020.But their drive-through wasn’t more pandemic-inspired than the Canadian fast-food chain. Tim Hortons..
“Every morning, I have to drink coffee at the Tim Hortons drive-through, which is very convenient for my daily life,” said 60-year-old Toh. “Why don’t you drive through a Vietnamese submarine?”
Vietnamese food such as vine mee and spring rolls are easy to carry and package, making them ideal for drive-through formats. However, he has a special hardship with Binh Mee, ordering each part and baking bread, so it’s difficult to make as fast as other fast food items such as burgers and french fries.
“You need to bake the subs, then you need to cook well with the meat,” he said. Sometimes customers have to wait as long as 30 minutes.
Hughie’s Pham said the main barrier to the nationwide expansion of restaurants like him is the limited availability of certain ingredients. Seasonings like the Golden Mountain Seasoning Sauce he uses for marinades can be difficult to find in populated areas of Asian Americans.
But at least one Vietnamese fast food restaurant already knows how to scale up nationwide. Lee’s sandwichStarted in San Jose in 1983 by BaLe and Hanh Nguyen. Currently, the chain is located in 62 locations in eight states, including California, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas. Some have drive-throughs.
There was a limit to the expansion of the restaurant that started in 2001. “We were a little more cautious at the time,” said Jimmy Le, Lee’s vice president and grandson of the founder. The company has selected only areas with a large Vietnamese-American population.
Since then, Leeds has opened restaurants in areas with a high multicultural population, but half of those places are still mostly in the neighborhood of Asian Americans, Le said.
He said he was happy to see all the new Vietnamese drive-throughs. But he’s not trying to turn Lee into an American fast food chain. “We don’t want to change much, or at all,” he said. “People know Lee’s sandwich, and they know what they’re trying to get.”
For Mai Nguyen, 58, another long-time Vietnamese-American restaurant owner, it’s hard to get excited about these new restaurants.She has run her beloved Vietnamese restaurant corn, In Houston since 1990. Her parents opened the place in 1978.
“I’m looking at this generation. They make the restaurant look very nice and modern,” she said. “But I don’t think the food is real.”
However, credibility has different implications for these restaurant owners, most of whom grew up outside Vietnam.
At Mi-Sant, a suburb of Minneapolis, it means that not only traditional Bainh Mee, but also the croissant, a specialty of the owner Quoc Le (37 years old) whose father was trained in pastries in France, will be offered from the drive-through. increase. Former KFC.
“This is part of our identity,” said another owner, Linh Nguyen, along with her three sisters and brothers. “Growing up and seeing a drive-through, it wasn’t normal for us.”
She hopes to emulate a finest fast casual restaurant like Shake Shack in Mi-Sant, which opened in 2018 and has another location in the area. However, she admitted that reaching out to a larger audience could have alienated Vietnamese customers.
“Not all Vietnamese-speaking employees could speak to them,” she said. “I couldn’t read it because the menu didn’t have Vietnamese, and the price was much higher than the long-standing Vietnamese restaurants in the area.”
Also, some diners aren’t used to ordering vine me through drive-through. “Some people just order burgers and octopuses, which is really interesting,” said Nguyen, 33.
For Fam, modeling Houston’s After-American fast food restaurant is not only a way to attract more types of customers, but also reflects his upbringing in Houston.
“It’s almost me who combines the menu with these two different types of worlds,” he said.
He added that to do it the other way around, he would feel unreal.