HOUSTON – The Hughie’s on West 18th Street is one of the many Vietnamese-American restaurants in this city. But it may have more in common with a Dairy Queen.
For starters, it was a Dairy Queen. The sign still has the eye-shaped outline of the ice cream chain logo. On the menu, alongside banh mi and beef, are thick crusts, buttermilk brined chicken tenders, a Dairy Queen standard.
The most notable similarity, however, is the restaurant’s drive-through window, which opened in March 2020 in response to the coronavirus lockdowns.
Paul Pham, an owner of this Hughie’s and another a few miles away, hopes his restaurant will one day be as ubiquitous as Dairy Queen. He will open a third location next year and has plans to expand in Texas and perhaps beyond.
In his view, the drive-through—a classic American innovation that has fused the fast food business with the country’s car culture—is also a potential vehicle for turning Vietnamese food into the next cuisine to match that success story. He believes that Americans’ increasing familiarity with Vietnamese cuisine makes it the ideal food for the next generation of drive-through restaurants.
In Houston, several Vietnamese restaurants with the same idea have opened in recent years, including Oui Banh Mi, Saigon Hustle, and Kim’s Pho & Grill. Outside of Texas, there’s Simply Vietnam in Santa Rosa, California; Mi San Banh Mi Co. at Brooklyn Park, Minnesota; and To Me Vietnamese Sub in Calgary, Alberta.
All of these restaurants have drive-throughs and owners who try to attract a wider fan base for Vietnamese cuisine by combining the flavors with American convenience.
“We’re moving to a more Chick-fil-A concept,” said Mr. Pham, a native of Houston, home to about 150,000 Vietnamese Americans, one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the United States. † “They are the godfather of this company, right?”
For him, that also means using technology to streamline customer service, opening in densely populated neighborhoods and closing on Sundays, as Chick-fil-A does — practices, he said, that are less common among Houston’s older Vietnamese restaurants. .
“Our concept wouldn’t survive in an old-fashioned Asian environment,” he said. His family opened the first Hughie’s in 2013.
Americans who identify their background as Vietnamese numbered about 2.1 million in the 2020 census. Many North American cities, including Philadelphia, Washington and San Jose, California, are experiencing a surge in new Vietnamese restaurants.
But by adopting the fast food industry’s drive-through and other practices, restaurateurs hope to reach audiences beyond their fellow Vietnamese Americans.
“We’re trying to be on the level of Panda Express,” said Cassie Ghaffar, an owner of Saigon Hustle, which she opened last February in the Oak Forest neighborhood of Houston, with her business partner Sandy Nguyen.
Saigon Hustle — which serves banh mi, bun (vermicelli bowls), and com (rice bowls) — looks like a 1950s American drive-thru, with a large awning decorated with dragon fruit images and an area where cars can stop. Saigon Hustle only has one location, but the founders said it is on track to bring in $1.8 million in revenue this year. They plan to expand nationwide within two to three years.
For many diners who aren’t Vietnamese, a trip to Chinatown for Vietnamese food can be challenging, as the menu may not be in English, while the more upscale Vietnamese fusion restaurants can seem priceless, said Ms. Ghaffar, 40.
“The drive-through is less intimidating,” she said. “It gives more people the chance to try Vietnamese cuisine.”
Originating in the mid-20th century and thriving in the 1970s, the drive-through was primarily a conduit for traditional American staples like burgers and chips. Fast food chains that sell Mexican-American food, such as Taco Bell and Taco Cabana, have also widely adopted it.
The drive-through found new life in the early days of the pandemic, when many restaurants embraced ways to limit face-to-face contact.
Kenny To and Hien Nguyen opened To Me Vietnamese Sub in Calgary in October 2020. But their drive-through was less inspired by the pandemic than Canadian fast food chain Tim Hortons.
“Every morning I have to drink coffee at the Tim Hortons drive-through. It’s very useful for me, for my daily life,” said Mr. To, 60. “I was thinking, why don’t I let the Vietnamese submarine drive through?”
Vietnamese dishes like banh mi and spring rolls are portable and easy to pack, Mr. To said, making them great for a drive-through format. But because he pays special attention to his banh mi, making every part to order and even baking the bread, it’s harder to make them as fast as other fast food items like burgers and fries.
“You have to fry the sub, and then with the meat you have to cook it nicely,” he said. Sometimes customers have to wait up to 30 minutes.
Mr Pham, of Hughie’s, said a major barrier to national expansion for a restaurant like his is the limited availability of certain ingredients. A condiment like Golden Mountain Seasoning Sauce, which he uses in marinades, may be hard to find in areas without large Asian-American populations.
But at least one Vietnamese fast-food restaurant has already figured out how to scale it nationally: Lee’s Sandwiches, founded in 1983 in San Jose by Ba Le and Hanh Nguyen. Today, the chain has 62 locations in eight states, including California, Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas. Several have drive throughs.
The expansion of the restaurant, which began in 2001, was limited. “We were a little more careful back then,” said Jimmy Le, Lee’s vice president and grandson of the founders. The company chose only areas with significant Vietnamese American populations.
Although Lee’s has since opened restaurants in areas with a more multicultural population, half of its locations are still in predominantly Asian-American neighborhoods, said 40-year-old Mr. Le.
He said he was happy to see all the new Vietnamese drive-throughs. But he’s not trying to turn Lee’s into an American fast food chain. “We don’t want to change too much, or not change at all,” he said. “People know Lee’s Sandwiches and they know what they’re going to get.”
It’s hard for Mai Nguyen, 58, another longtime Vietnamese-American restaurateur, to get excited about these newer restaurants. She has been running the much-loved Vietnamese restaurant Mai’s in Houston since 1990; her parents opened the place in 1978.
“What I see is the generation now, they make the restaurant look very nice and modern,” she said. “But I don’t see the food being authentic.”
Yet authenticity has a different meaning for these restaurateurs, most of whom grew up outside of Vietnam.
At Mi-Sant, in suburban Minneapolis, that means serving not only traditional banh mi but also croissants—a specialty of one owner, Quoc Le, 37, whose father received his pastry training in France—from a drive-in in a former KFC.
“This is part of our identity,” says Linh Nguyen, another owner, along with her three sisters and brother. “Growing up, seeing a drive-through was nothing special to us.”
She wants Mi-Sant, which opened in 2018 and has another location in the area, to mimic the upscale fast-casual restaurants like Shake Shack. But she acknowledged that her Vietnamese clients may have become alienated from her contact with a wider audience.
“I didn’t have all the Vietnamese-speaking employees who could talk to them,” she said. “There were no Vietnamese words on the menu, so they couldn’t read it, and our price is a lot higher” than many old Vietnamese restaurants in the area.
And some diners are still not used to ordering a banh mi through a drive-through. “We get people who just come and order a burger and taco, and it’s really funny,” said Ms. Nguyen, 33. “I have to say, ‘We don’t do that here.'”
for mr. Pham’s modeling of Hughie’s after American fast food restaurants is not just a way to attract more types of customers, but a reflection of his upbringing in Houston.
“The menu, and those two different kinds of worlds combined, is pretty much me,” he said.
To do it any other way, he added, would feel unreal.