“In our family, we don’t plan anything,” says restaurateur Yenvy Pham, standing in the roastery room at Hello Em, the Vietnamese coffee café she launched in 2021. After trying her best to recruit someone else to operate a cafe on the ground floor of the Little Saigon Creative Space on Weller St., she took on the project herself. Unable to find a Vietnamese roaster who would ship the robusta beans she wanted, she learned how to roast the beans herself. She’s not one to do things halfway. “If I’m going do it. I’m just going to go.”
Hello Em highlights the historic creativity and importance of Viet culture in Seattle, not just through coffee but through its partnership with the Friends of Little Saigon, founded in 2011 to preserve and enhance the cultural, economic, and historic vitality of the Little Saigon neighborhood.
The name of the café is telling. In Vietnamese, “em” can mean little sister or brother. It’s also a term of endearment. Yenvy is the youngest of five children in the close-knit Pham family. Their parents, Theresa Cat Vu and Augustine Nien Pham, immigrants from Vietnam, scraped together enough money to open Cat’s Submarine Sandwich Shop in 1982 in what became Little Saigon. They thought sandwiches would appeal to an American palate, but they soon realized their community craved a taste of home. Thus was born Pho Bac, Seattle’s first pho shop, named for the hearty noodle soup enriched with bone marrow, as it’s made in northern Vietnam.
The Phams didn’t stop with one store. “My parents were always opening restaurants,” Yenvy says. “They loved to expand, but they’re terrible at maintenance.”
The kids pitched in when needed. Yenvy recalls cashiering by age twelve. “We were always involved in the business. We had a great childhood. They gave us a lot of freedom. Our parents would say, go travel, do things, but when we came back there would be a new place.”
Her sisters Tuvy and Uyenvy are now doctors. Yenvy, her sister Quyen-Vy, and their brother, Khoa eventually ended up running the restaurants, armed with degrees in finance and economics. The last Pho Bac their parents opened before retiring was on Minor Avenue downtown. It was the first Pho Bac that the siblings really put their stamp on.
Their next big project, Pho Bac Sup Shop, debuted on New Year’s Day in 2018. The vibe is modern and energetic. The well-stocked bar dispenses Viet and classic cocktails. The menu offers snacks and a wide variety of pho, including the much-photographed soup bowl sporting massive beef ribs.
Sup Shop sits across a parking lot from the original boat-shaped Pho Bac. Now called The Boat, it’s been spruced up inside and out, and serves only one dish, cơm gà mắm tỏi, half a small, fried chicken slicked with fish sauce and smothered in garlic. It comes with rice or noodles. Those in the know will add on a stack of pandan waffles with salted coconut foam for dipping.
Post pandemic, the siblings set their sights on expansion. They closed the Minor Avenue store and opened a bigger Pho Bac on Seventh Avenue. In the loft area above, they created an intimate cocktail bar, Phởcific Standard Time (PST), serving drinks and snacks. Khoa, who was deeply involved with PST, died suddenly of a heart attack at age 35, six months before it opened in October 2021.
Khoa was a passionate advocate for the CID, where he was well-known and loved. His sisters keep that spirit alive with their community involvement in projects like The Landmark. Expected to break ground this Fall at 10th and Jackson, on property co-owned by Friends of Little Saigon and Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda), The Landmark will house a Vietnamese community center and commercial space beneath 70 family-oriented, affordable housing units.
Plans are to move Hello Em into The Landmark when it’s completed in about two years. Other commercial tenants are expected to include a community kitchen and a pastry shop from the owners of Ramie in Capitol Hill. The future of the Little Saigon Creative space on Weller hasn’t been determined. “We want to do what’s feasible for the nonprofit,” Yenvy says. She’s willing to donate the Hello Em equipment for pop ups. “The pipe dream is for Friends of Little Saigon to keep the current creative space for small business activation of a different capacity than The Landmark.”
Another pipe dream involves a parcel a block away from The Landmark that’s been vacant since 2022, when Viet-Wah Market departed the CID after 40 years. The building was destroyed by fire in 2024. Redevelopment has stalled and the owners are suing the city.
Yenvy thinks it could become a public gathering space, what Little Saigon needs to be more of a neighborhood. To that end, she enlisted local architects who worked pro bono to create a vision board showing the city and potential developers a concept that includes housing along with space for recreation, maybe with a library, and definitely a market. “I want Viet-Wah back.”
The following excerpts from International Examiner’s conversation with Yenvy Pham are condensed and edited for clarity.
International Examiner: The CID Coalition has called you a gentrifier. How do you feel about that label?
Yenvy Pham: The Coalition likes to think I am a gentrifier and hate the unhoused community. It’s such an unnecessary division, I think. Community is just so sundry, there’s so many complexities and layers of a person, and one person’s outlook of what community means doesn’t fit everyone. It’s complicated. I just hope the younger generation understands that there’s room for everyone with all their ideas and all of their ways of doing it. There is no one size fits all of what it means to be a community. There has to be more empathy from each other and understanding. And we can’t just become complacent in it either or blame each other. That takes more time than just actually doing the work.
IE: You and your siblings updated and expanded on your parents’ original Pho Bac concept. In 2023, you and Quyen-Vy earned recognition from the James Beard Awards as finalists for Outstanding Restaurateurs. Aside from introducing cocktails, what other changes did you make that stand out?
YP: The rib pho. I remember my mom was arguing with me because she wanted me to cut the ribs into a more manageable size. I’m like, no, they want something that you could photograph. These are way more gelatinous. Usually people use short ribs, which are a lot meatier, but you know, Vietnamese people like chewy textures.
The metal bowls. When you hold porcelain bowls, it’s really hot, and it’ll always break. Mr. King, he was the best, a bleeding heart. He had to special import these bowls for me. [Editor’s note: King Yum Lee of Monarch Trading in Georgetown provided specialized, hard-to-find kitchen infrastructure and equipment, and extended credit to emerging immigrant and minority-owned restaurateurs when mainstream banks wouldn’t. After he died in 2019 at age 80 the company closed.] When we first introduced it people would say “Why am I eating from a dog bowl?” I’m like: It won’t break, it’s double insulated, it keeps soup so hot, it’s super light, how can you not love it? Now everyone is using it, so there we go, it’s practical.
IE: You and Quyen-Vy have a cookbook coming out in the Fall from Sasquatch Books called Phonomenal Nights: Vietnamese Shareables & Playful Cocktails for Any Gathering. Tell us about that.
YP: Sasquatch approached us. I didn’t want to do a pho book. That’s boring, that’s what I do for a living. The editor asked what do you guys do for fun? We do dinner parties for fun, and they said, just do a dinner party book about how the Phams eat and cook at home. I did food development. My sister did all the drinks. We kind of work together. It was a crazy process for two years. The book is really bold, really loud. It’s how we entertain. It’s about gathering, and yeah, we’re really excited for it. There will be a big party at Sup Shop to celebrate. Open invite, no reservations, everyone come. It’ll be the third of November this year.
IE: What do you grow in your garden?
YP: My favorite plant to grow in Seattle is sorrel. It’s sour and herbaceous. It only dies maybe a month or two out of the year, so it’s always around and it goes so well with Vietnamese food. In the cookbook there is a wrap section where we take grilled meats or fish or whatever, and we make spring rolls out of them with sorrel.
IE: What are your essential pantry items?
YP: Fish sauce, fried shallots (I incorporate them in everything), and Thai chili.
IE: Where do you like to take out of town guests?
YP: For a bar, I would take them to Persephone [in Columbia City], my favorite Amaro bar in the city. They don’t have a menu. You can have the amaro as a spritz or on rocks with the orange twist. My favorite is a Black Manhattan. I love Persephone.
Off season, I like to go to Elliott’s Oyster House because they have the best buying power in the city. They will always have 30 types of oysters. They have the best horseradish. When I go to Elliott’s, I get sourdough, butter, clam chowder, and a garden salad, and I eat like a zillion oysters.
