{"id":420357,"date":"2026-08-29T16:02:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T16:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/420357\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T16:02:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T16:02:26","slug":"first-look-barbecue-culture-meets-vietnamese-tradition-at-cui-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/420357\/","title":{"rendered":"First Look: Barbecue Culture Meets Vietnamese Tradition at C\u1ee7i \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Austin\u2019s reputation as a barbecue destination has caused all kinds of great, culture-melding food to sprout up here. C\u1ee7i<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Neither Nguyen nor Le have any formal culinary training. According to Nguyen, who moved to the States from Da Nang as a teenager, C\u1ee7i arrives as a passion project and a rejection of the traditional immigrant trajectory he was expected to follow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYoung people, we always want to do something fun,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I finished high school, I wanted to become a chef. My mom slapped me in the face and said, \u2018No, it\u2019s very difficult work!\u2019 She wanted me to be a nail technician because I was very bad at school! You know, being Vietnamese, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBut my ego is kind of big. I don\u2019t want to feel people\u2019s 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\u2019m still stupid and young. My wife had just come to the U.S. and said, \u2018You want to do it? Then do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Le affirms: \u201cBefore I met him, I was an English teacher in a rural area in Vietnam. We both met and he ended up shipping me here,\u201d she says with a laugh. \u201cThen it was like, let\u2019s do a restaurant, so we opened this. Here, you can get good food and also good coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n

The restaurant\u2019s name comes from the Vietnamese word for firewood, which the couple uses not only for boiling the broth for their beloved ph\u1edf \u2013 folks line up outside the five-table restaurant for their traditional and Tex-Mex soups \u2013 but also for smoking barbecue, which Nguyen ate a lot of growing up in Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI ate a lot of Vietnamese food at home, but at the same time, I have a lot of friends who are not Vietnamese,\u201d he shares. \u201cSo 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"C\u1ee7i\u2019s Met B\u00e1nh B\u00e8o-Nam-Loc appetizer platter Credit: Haris Qureshi<\/p>\n

That experience inspired his love for cooking for people. \u201cWe cook every day for our family,\u201d he says. \u201cWhenever the family gathers, we cook, we do coffee together, and prepare the whole table for the meal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe prepares the meat, I prepare all the soup,\u201d adds Le. In addition to working on the ph\u1edf broth, she also draws from her hometown\u2019s traditional foods for many of C\u1ee7i\u2019s appetizers. The B\u00e1nh b\u00e8o (steamed rice cakes), B\u00e1nh n\u1eadm (pork and shrimp rice cakes), and B\u00e1nh Loc (tapioca pork and shrimp dumplings) are bite-sized tasty snacks that originate in Hu\u1ebf, with the latter two coming wrapped in banana leaves. Le even dubs the B\u00e1nh n\u1eadm her \u201cVietnamese tamales.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are foods from central Vietnam,\u201d she explains. \u201cPeople from there tell me, \u2018I appreciate you a lot because you do this for me to have my childhood back.\u2019 It takes a lot of time to make so it shows how Vietnamese people make food: complicated but really delicious inside.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite C\u1ee7i\u2019s focus on traditional Vietnamese cuisine, they also make sure to represent Central Texas culture. Perhaps their most unique dish is the Ph\u1edf Taco, a Mexican-influenced ph\u1edf 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.<\/p>\n

The Ph\u1edf 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. \u201cFor the last 20 years, I\u2019ve been in Texas,\u201d he says with pride. \u201cWhen you do food, your reputation is for your culture. If I put brisket in there and you eat it and it sucks, I\u2019m not respecting Central Texas. I didn\u2019t respect Austin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nguyen stresses that he and his wife do this as a labor of love, not as a method to extract maximum profitability. \u201cWhen it comes to business, there\u2019s only one question: whether it\u2019s 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\u2019ve lost who you are. Sometimes you change a lot.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Nguyen and Le recently apologized<\/a> to their patrons for opening their restaurant during the blistering Austin summer \u2013 which has forced many to wait outside in the heat before they get a table \u2013 the lines that customers often endure serve as proof that people here are hungry for the couple\u2019s approach, one that melds painstaking traditional Vietnamese cooking traditions with the forward-thinking spirit that has defined Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis [restaurant] represents where we come from, but we want to do something unique and different,\u201d says Le. \u201cThere\u2019s 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\u2019s fun, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n

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