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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.
Great Places Near Hanoi House
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.
Menu
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.
East Village
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.
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.
A Dozen More Restaurants Close in New York City
(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.
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.
Hanoi House’s John Nguyen Is on Loan to NYC
Hanoi House's John Nguyen Is on Loan to NYC - Eater NY
Hanoi House's John Nguyen Is on Loan to NYC.
Posted: Wed, 17 Jan 2018 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
