Living in Vancouver in her mid-20s, Jeanette Tran-Dean was struck by the similarities between the food she grew up with and the food her Guatemalan friends ate. “I’d go over for their grandfather’s birthday party or something and they’d have, like, a tamale wrapped in a banana leaf,” she says. “I was like, ‘Vietnamese people wrap everything in banana leaves.’” Another friend’s mom regularly made the Central American-style quesadilla, which is a lot like a sweet, cheesy, rice-flour pound cake—and a lot like the Vietnamese cassava-coconut cake called banh khoai mi nuong.
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It would take a pandemic to do it, but the two cuisines were finally introduced in November when Tran-Dean, who’s worked in fine dining kitchens all over the city (among them Grace, Oriole, and Smyth) put her head together with her friend David Hollinger, a pastry chef who works at Aya Pastry.
The showstopper on the focused eight-item menu is the banh bao, a sweet, puffy steamed dumpling “as big as a toddler’s head,” according to Tran-Dean, stuffed with Vietnamese pork-mushroom filling, herbaceous Guatemalan longanisa sausage, and a pickled quail egg. “It’s like several different experiences all in the same big package,” says Hollinger.
“It’s a natural pairing.”
“It muddles it,” says Hollinger.
328 S. Jeffersontheruindaily.cominstagram.com/gionggiongpops April 2-3, 11 AM to 5 PM April 9-10, 11 AM to 5 PM
