Austin’s reputation as a barbecue destination has caused all kinds of great, culture-melding food to sprout up here. Củi, the new restaurant from husband-and-wife duo Quyen Nguyen and Hien Le, enters the fusion barbecue arena at 7318 McNeil with a unique spin on Vietnamese cuisine.
Neither Nguyen nor Le have any formal culinary training. According to Nguyen, who moved to the States from Da Nang as a teenager, Củi arrives as a passion project and a rejection of the traditional immigrant trajectory he was expected to follow.
“Young people, we always want to do something fun,” he says. “When I finished high school, I wanted to become a chef. My mom slapped me in the face and said, ‘No, it’s very difficult work!’ She wanted me to be a nail technician because I was very bad at school! You know, being Vietnamese, right?
“But my ego is kind of big. I don’t want to feel people’s hands and all those things. So I did engineering, house-flipping, a lot of stuff here and there, [but] why not go back to my original dream? I have family, I have kids, but I’m still stupid and young. My wife had just come to the U.S. and said, ‘You want to do it? Then do it.’”
Le affirms: “Before I met him, I was an English teacher in a rural area in Vietnam. We both met and he ended up shipping me here,” she says with a laugh. “Then it was like, let’s do a restaurant, so we opened this. Here, you can get good food and also good coffee.”
The restaurant’s name comes from the Vietnamese word for firewood, which the couple uses not only for boiling the broth for their beloved phở – folks line up outside the five-table restaurant for their traditional and Tex-Mex soups – but also for smoking barbecue, which Nguyen ate a lot of growing up in Texas.
“I ate a lot of Vietnamese food at home, but at the same time, I have a lot of friends who are not Vietnamese,” he shares. “So we would eat brisket, go on road trips like tubing or swimming at Blue Hole. We always would do barbecues, cookouts, pregames, that kind of thing. Just like normal Texas people.”
Củi’s Met Bánh Bèo-Nam-Loc appetizer platter Credit: Haris Qureshi
That experience inspired his love for cooking for people. “We cook every day for our family,” he says. “Whenever the family gathers, we cook, we do coffee together, and prepare the whole table for the meal.”
“He prepares the meat, I prepare all the soup,” adds Le. In addition to working on the phở broth, she also draws from her hometown’s traditional foods for many of Củi’s appetizers. The Bánh bèo (steamed rice cakes), Bánh nậm (pork and shrimp rice cakes), and Bánh Loc (tapioca pork and shrimp dumplings) are bite-sized tasty snacks that originate in Huế, with the latter two coming wrapped in banana leaves. Le even dubs the Bánh nậm her “Vietnamese tamales.”
“These are foods from central Vietnam,” she explains. “People from there tell me, ‘I appreciate you a lot because you do this for me to have my childhood back.’ It takes a lot of time to make so it shows how Vietnamese people make food: complicated but really delicious inside.”
Despite Củi’s focus on traditional Vietnamese cuisine, they also make sure to represent Central Texas culture. Perhaps their most unique dish is the Phở Taco, a Mexican-influenced phở broth that features a large fried tortilla chip along with barbacoa. The heat of the taco seasoning highlights the elements that Vietnamese and Mexican cuisine naturally share: spice and lime.
The Phở Cowboy, meanwhile, features smoked brisket. Despite not being formally trained or previously working in one of the many famed Texas barbecue houses, Nguyen takes his brisket as serious business. “For the last 20 years, I’ve been in Texas,” he says with pride. “When you do food, your reputation is for your culture. If I put brisket in there and you eat it and it sucks, I’m not respecting Central Texas. I didn’t respect Austin.”
Nguyen stresses that he and his wife do this as a labor of love, not as a method to extract maximum profitability. “When it comes to business, there’s only one question: whether it’s profitable enough to do it. But I do what I like more than what the business tells me what to do because as soon as you think about profitability, you’ve lost who you are. Sometimes you change a lot.”
While Nguyen and Le recently apologized to their patrons for opening their restaurant during the blistering Austin summer – which has forced many to wait outside in the heat before they get a table – the lines that customers often endure serve as proof that people here are hungry for the couple’s approach, one that melds painstaking traditional Vietnamese cooking traditions with the forward-thinking spirit that has defined Austin.
“This [restaurant] represents where we come from, but we want to do something unique and different,” says Le. “There’s still a lot of space to grow. Every step of the way, we learn something every day, even today. These are opportunities we [thought we could] never have. It’s fun, isn’t it?”
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