New York City Department of Technology, CUNY
Department of Hospitality Management
Janet Lefler Dining Room
MEMORANDUM
To: Professor Abreu, Dining Room Operations
From: Ananllely Segura
Date: March 6, 2019
RE: Pete Wells, A Beef Feast From Vietnam Gets a New York Showcase
Living in New York’s melting pot allows for many cultures to come together. Pete Wells shares how a New York based Vietnamese restaurant called “Madame Vo BBQ” does its best to show their culture and even add new elements to old traditions. As for environmental scenery inside the restaurant wells shares how it is more modern looking than your traditional Vietnamese restaurant. Wells also shares how Madame Vo BBQ shows upfront cooking methods like in your usual hibachi restaurant where the meat is cooked in the front of the house, in front of the guests. “New York City bureaucracy is unwelcoming to the tabletop charcoal grills seen in Hanoi, so an electric grill under a metal screen is embedded in each table“. Even though Madam Vo’s focus is on Vietnamese foods, trying things out of the norm or out of tradition such as a special sauce can be good for business, “an intoxicatingly good version of the pineapple-and-fermented anchovy sauce known as mam nem, and lastly a tamarind sauce, which suggests Madame Vo BBQ can follow or leap over Vietnamese tradition at will”. The owners Jimmy Ly and his wife Yen Vo offer more than one culture of food as well as incorporating the New York style into their atmosphere. Pete Wells states “They seem to be fluent not just in two languages but in two cultures, enabling them to serve dishes their families might recognize in a setting that outsiders might embrace”. Wells also shares the most popular beef theme Madam Vo BBQ has going on such as their sticky wings, “The wings at Madame Vo, sticky with caramel and fried garlic, are drive-straight-from-the-airport good”. Wells enjoys The oxtail congee, ” It frequently takes the form of a cloudy beef-and-rice soup…Everything about it is wonderful, even the scallion greens on top”. Lastly but not least is their boi tai chanh, “lean eye of round cut into thin pink sheets…fried shallots, raw red onions, chopped peanuts and slivers of fresh mint… Mr. Ly bathes the salad in tangerine-lime vinaigrette…splashes it with a bright-green, lemony pulp of fresh rau ram puréed in oil”. All the dishes are in someway out of the ordinary and pete wells addresses exactly which differences made on these dishes to make them their own mix of a Vietnamese and New York culture.
