Inside, colorful paintings of Vietnamese scenes-brought from Vietnam-look over a couple dozen tables that are often filled around noon. VII Asian Bistro, open since 2013, is a smart-looking noodle shop in an L-shaped shopping strip.
These days, many locals swear, the best bowl is around the corner. Pho Lien Hoa is Oklahoma City’s oldest noodle shop, and it still attracts a regular crowd for its steaming bowls of slightly sweet Saigon-style pho. The most popular Vietnamese dish in the city-like everywhere else-is pho, the beef noodle soup first made in the late 1800s outside Hanoi by combining a Chinese-style rice noodle with the French colonials’ fondness for beef. Oklahoma City’s Vietnamese offerings stay faithful to traditional recipes, including VII Asian Bistro’s hu tieu nam vang.
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Now, locals from across the city come for meals under $10 and cafe sua da (Vietnamese ice coffee, served with condensed milk), while restless home chefs chase down ingredients they’ve seen on TV cooking shows at Super Cao Nguyen, a sprawling grocery overlooking a recently added Vietnam War Memorial that features flags of both the US and the former South Vietnam. The city’s Vietnamese community helped rescue a once-blighted neighborhood and spark a full-blown foodie scene in the Oklahoma capital. Soon, new restaurants appeared in Oklahoma City, serving Vietnamese cuisine’s yin–yang blend of wildly varying ingredients-sour with lemon, hot pepper with sugar.
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But they knew how to cook generations-old recipes, too. Most of these residents came to the state with literally a couple of dollars in their pockets and held jobs paying under $2 an hour. But they also settled in Oklahoma, now home to more than 16,000 Vietnamese–Americans. In the quarter-century following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, about one million Vietnamese refugees and immigrants resettled in the US, mostly in California and Texas. Here, ornate “Asian District” signs in landscaped medians mark an area with noodle shops, international groceries, tofu shops and boba tea cafes.
That’s certainly the case in Oklahoma City’s Asian District, comprising a half-dozen blocks centered on old Route 66 at North Classen Boulevard and NW 23rd Street a couple miles north of downtown. You know you can look forward to having a good bowl of Vietnamese beef noodle soup, or pho, when you can smell its bone-rich broth simmering from outside a restaurant.
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