Morgan Ong

Background to Andy Nguyen’s: 

Vietnamese-Americans in Sacramento

      A ccording to a restaurant review in the The Sacramento Bee [Dan Vierra, July 22, 1994], Andy Nguyen’s was Sacramento’s first Vietnamese restaurant. In April 1984, Hung Nguyen and his wife Lien Thi Nguyen opened Andy Nguyen’s Vietnamese French Restaurant, naming it for their young son. The restaurant took over the space at 2007 Broadway occupied since 1966 by Winn’s Ladies’ Wear and Winn’s Men’s Wear stores.

Previously, a reporter had written in The Bee that Andy Nguyen’s was the city’s second Vietnamese restaurant, after Asian Palace on Florin Road. The article was headlined: “A Rough Road for Ethnic Eateries: Exotic Cuisine Can Be Liability” (David Carpenter, 2-11-85].

The first review of Andy Nguyen’s was Nov. 11, 1984 by Stan Gilliam, the Bee’s novice critic. Confused by the promise of French food -- it might have been a language barrier -- he wrote that his party thought they were told the French dishes weren't available. Nevertheless, the review was headlined: “Tasty Vietnamese Cuisine Proves Excellent at Nguyen.”

 

Vietnamese arrive in Sacramento

Following the 1975 fall of Saigon and again in 1990, Sacramento received more than 14,000 primary refugees, mostly from Vietnam and Laos. Federal policy hoped for a widely-dispersed pattern of Southeast Asian refugee resettlement across the country, but a highly-clustered pattern emerged by the mid-1980s. Family reunifications enlarged population centers, and the lure of places with the best government benefits and services made Sacramento a desirable place for Vietnamese, Hmong, Mien, and other Southeast Asian refugee groups. 

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates about 19,600 residents in the 4-county Sacramento region were born in Vietnam.  Of the region’s approximately 230,000 residents who consider themselves of “Asian race alone,” a little more than 10% (24,400) identify themselves as ethnically Vietnamese (American Community Survey 2005-2007). This makes them the fourth most populous Asian-heritage group locally, after Filipinos, Chinese, and Asian Indians. Ranking fifth and seventh are Hmong and Laotians. 

 

Appeal of the South Sacramento area

Vietnamese Sacramentans live in large numbers in a sector to the southeast of the downtown, both east and west of the Stockton Boulevard commercial spine (see accompanying map of 2000 data). They are part of a larger pattern of Asian settlement in the Sacramento region that favors the south side, both within and beyond the City of Sacramento.

 This pattern has roots in the agriculturally oriented settlements of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, dating back more than 100 years. Also, when urban renewal destroyed downtown’s Chinatown and Japantown, the displaced businesses, institutions, and residents faced fewest barriers to the south and generally moved in that direction.

By the time the influx of Southeast Asian refugees began, the south side offered a lot of inexpensive housing and commercial property. These latter resources were tied to earlier overbuilding, a broad “minority” presence that included Latinos and African-Americans—Sacramento’s first subdivision marketed as “interracial” was in this sector—and arterial streets with bargain rents resulting from freeway-induced blight. Refugee sponsorship by south side churches, notably Bethany Presbyterian at 24^th Street and Fruitridge Road, also played a role. Refugee services such as Sacramento Lao Family Community, Inc. and the Hmong Women’s Heritage Association sprang up on the south side, tending to reinforce the attractiveness of the area to additional Southeast Asian refugees.

 

Vietnamese business-minded

From the time of the arrival of the first Vietnamese refugees in Sacramento in the late 1970s, it did not take long for them to open small businesses. The 1981 Sacramento city directory lists two Asian markets at addresses on Stockton Boulevard. The following year brought a third Asian market and also the Sacramento Chinese of Indo-China Friendship Association (many Vietnamese are of Chinese background). By 1984, Stockton Boulevard had become home to a few more businesses with Vietnamese names.

 

New appreciation for “exotic” food

Unfamiliarity with Vietnamese food—and many other once-exotic cuisines—is no longer a concern locally. If searching yellowpages.com for Vietnamese restaurants in Sacramento, you now get about 30 choices. And while some are to be found in the remarkable “Little Saigon” that has evolved along Stockton Boulevard, many others, including Andy Nguyen’s, are located in areas with no particular Vietnamese identity. Their presence is a testament to the development of the Sacramento palate and to the ethnic integration present along many commercial corridors in the region.    

Andy Nguyen’s now has a second identity that brings in a group of people not necessarily seeking “ethnic” food—vegetarians. In keeping with her deepening Buddhist beliefs, owner Lien Thi Nguyen briefly closed her restaurant, famous for clams, chicken and lemongrass beef, and re-opened it in February 2005 as a strictly vegetarian place.

 

Vegans on Broadway

Broadway is a good location to serve this demographic, which is widely dispersed in the metropolitan area, but no doubt well represented in nearby cosmopolitan Midtown.  And while fewer than 4% of Americans are vegetarians, more than 10 times that share “sometimes order a dish without meat, fish, or fowl” when eating out, according to a 2008 Zogby International survey conducted on behalf of The Vegetarian Resource Group (Vegetarian Journal, Issue 3, 2008, pp. 22-23). Going vegetarian ended up as a wise decision. Andy Nguyen’s vegan menu fills an important niche in Sacramento’s ever more complex restaurant ecology.