Vietnam Restaurant wins the James Beard Award

By, Gabby Levine; Cherry Hill High School East '26

A customer is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a person or an organization that buys goods or services from a shop or business. The chef and owner of Vietnam Restaurant, however, perceives the people that continually dine at his restaurant as acquaintances, friends, and sometimes even family.

As the winner of the 2024 James Beard Foundation’s America's Classics Award, Vietnam Restaurant was recognized for their consistency as well as the cultural and communal feel that this restaurant provides. Chinatown’s Vietnam was started in 1984 by the Lai family, who had only arrived in the United States five years earlier from Vietnam. 

The Lai family endured hardships before being able to fulfill their dreams in the U.S. After escaping Vietnam, Nhu Lai and Thuyen Luu traveled with their eight children on a cramped boat to Malaysia. The family spent nine months in a Malaysian refugee camp before they boarded a plane from Malaysia to Philadelphia. 

In 1982, the Lai’s started a grocery store called Fu Wah Market located on 47th street, Philadelphia, where they are still popularly known today for their banh mi–vietnamese hoagie. People in Philadelphia appreciated the authenticity of the food and atmosphere of this market, leading the Lai’s to expand their food business with their Vietnam Restaurant in 1984.

The restaurant was eventually passed down to their son, Benny Lai, who remains today as the chef and owner of the restaurant. In 2008, Lai wanted to further expand, influencing him to open Vietnam Café located nearby to the grocery store. 

When people enter Vietnam Restaurant or Café, Lai says he wants “them to come in like it’s another dining room that they have in their house where a kitchen is ready for them.”

He explains that the main goal of his restaurant is to produce consistent results. Whether it’s a person dining alone or the next time bringing in several friends, he wants the dishes to taste the exact same. 

“Consistency is our recipe,” he says.

When Vietnam first opened in 1984, the Lai family didn’t have the money to buy advertising for their restaurant. They relied on word of mouth in order to attract consumers. Today, Lai still doesn’t pay for advertising because he wants people to be comfortable coming to his restaurant, and not be pressured by paid ads. He believes that this leads him and his wife Tammy to build genuine friendships with the people that constantly come into his restaurant. He expresses the importance of building these relationships, and how his long term goal is for generations of these people to continue to dine at Vietnam.

To further exemplify the gratitude the Lai’s have for their long term customers, on the Vietnam website, there is a collage of photos with different long term customers posing with the James Beard Award. Lai feels that he is where he is today because of these customers, so it made sense to him to give them credit for this award.

The rice paper wrapped crispy spring rolls and the soft and doughy viet ravioli display the quality of the food at Vietnam, but the customers that constantly express their high regards to this restaurant and continue to come back display the type of relationship that the Lai family has valued from the start.