What’s Up, Michael Bao Huynh?

As the Vietnam War was just building steam, a cook walked into a pagoda in Saigon with her sick little boy. In keeping with tradition, the monks there gave him a new name, Bao, so he wouldn’t respond when death called.

Bao got better and learned to cook at his mother’s street-side restaurant in District 1 as the postwar economy buckled under various embargoes and fresh wars with China and Cambodia. Bao arrived in New York as a refugee, alone and without a penny to his name.

In the city, he earned a degree in architecture while cleaning and preparation at night. According to The bullet “made me stronger,” Bao, piece titled “ Chef Do-it-All, the Master Builder .” After September 11, Bao began trading his own building firm, while simultaneously ferreting out cheap rents.

Per to Michael Bao Huynh Bao, york City since he was 48 and “tired.” At the same time, he maintained he had five restaurants waiting for him in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi—as well as a preparation school in Danang. Nguyen got the restaurants he had left in New York. The year he arrived in Vietnam, he appeared on an episode of MasterChef Vietnam and lost to a Danish challenger. (The element was potatoes.) Somehow, in six years of vigorously eating and drinking my way through Ho Chi Minh City, I had never heard of Michael Bao or his restaurants.

But then he began trading a stand he called MexiTacos, a fantastic place set in the bowels of the Saigon Garden, a weird mall that juts out of a food wasteland that hugs the city’s bougie new promenade. What would you tell a chef who wanted to leave New York for Saigon? New York feels far now, and it would be difficult for me to go back, unless I had a million dollars.

How did you do what you did in New York City? My friend would come in as the broker and demand three months’ commission that all went to me. In this business, it’s all about how many wives you’ve got, how many girlfriends you’ve got.

It was a gamble, but as a chef, you’ve got to know what’s good, what’s bad. Shaking beef tacos at MexiTacos in Saigon If someone handed you a million dollars, what would you open?

But what single restaurant would you open here with a million dollars? Well, you could do a lot here in Vietnam with a million dollars.

Michael Bao Huynh gussied the beef up in arugula and shaved fennel at his eponymous eatery on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—a salad later enshrined in the pages of the New York Times. Following his return to Ho Chi Minh City, Bao tacofied the beef and returned it to the people.