Suzanne Nuyen's Bun Bo Bae: The Vietnamese Home Cooking That Never Made It to the Restaurant Menu
Suzanne Nuyen of Bun Bo Bae, the NPR journalist and Vietnamese American recipe developer preserving her family's home cooking
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Bun Bo Bae Everyday Vietnamese home cooking from a journalist preserving her family's table, one recipe at a time bunbobae.com
Suzanne Nuyen spends her mornings telling a national audience what is happening in the world. As the journalist behind NPR's Up First newsletter, she writes the briefing that lands in inboxes before sunrise. The rest of her hours she has spent on a quieter project: writing down the dishes her Vietnamese family actually eats at home so an oral tradition stops being only oral.
That project is Bun Bo Bae, the cooking blog she launched in January 2019 from her apartment in Washington, D.C. The name is a pun on bún bò Huế, the spicy beef and pork noodle soup from the central Vietnamese city of Huế, where her mother's family is from. The story behind the blog starts earlier, on a sophomore-year study abroad in Paris, where Suzanne lived alone for the first time and called her mother in the Chicago suburbs to ask how to cook the dishes she missed. Her mother, she discovered, did not have recipes. She had only what her own mother had taught her, by feel, across years. Measurements were not part of the curriculum, so Suzanne, the journalist, did what journalists do and started writing it down.
The Dishes That Never Made It to the Restaurant Menu
What sets Bun Bo Bae apart from the English-language Vietnamese food internet is not a single recipe but an editorial choice. Most coverage of Vietnamese cooking circles around the same dishes that travel well on restaurant menus: phở, bánh mì, summer rolls, lemongrass chicken. Suzanne works in the opposite direction. She focuses, in her own words, on easy everyday Vietnamese recipes you would not find in restaurants. There is a ground-pork-and-tomato sauce her dad makes on weeknights. A chayote and egg stir fry. A pork rib soup with potato and carrot. A century egg congee. These are what is on a Vietnamese dinner table on a Tuesday, and almost nobody writes them down in English in this much detail.
Around that everyday core she keeps the showpieces in rotation: a four-and-a-half-hour bún bò Huế project, written with process photography that lets a first-time cook compare what is in their pot to what should be in their pot at each step. Bún riêu, the crab and tomato noodle soup, gets the same treatment, as does a chả giò recipe that makes a hundred egg rolls at once on the theory that you should freeze most of them.
The pedagogy is consistent. Her mother, she has said, taught her to "measure with my heart." The recipe cards still give weights and times, but she keeps reminding cooks that the food will tell them when it is ready if they let it. It is the same impulse, in a different register, that drives Heifa Odeh's Palestinian preservation work at Fufu's Kitchen and Omayah Atassi's Syrian recipe archive: translate the mother's hand into a written record before the record is needed.
Two Recipes Worth Exploring
Spicy Vietnamese Beef Noodle Soup (Bún Bò Huế)
Suzanne Nuyen
Bún Bò Huế A four-hour lemongrass and beef-bone broth from her mother's family in central Vietnam bunbobae.com
This is the family recipe from Huế that gave the blog its name, written for a cook who has never assembled a lemongrass-tinted bone broth before. The headnote opens with a short history of Huế as the capital of the Nguyen Dynasty from 1802 to 1945, then the recipe walks step by step through par-boiling pork feet and beef shank, simmering for hours without letting the broth boil cloudy, and finishing with a chile-lemongrass-sate oil that turns the broth its signature color. It doubles as an argument for a regional noodle soup that, as Suzanne notes, has not quite made it into the mainstream the way phở has.
Vietnamese Ground Pork in Tomato Sauce (Thịt Băm Sốt Cà Chua)
Suzanne Nuyen
Thịt Băm Sốt Cà Chua Her father's 40-minute weeknight pork-and-tomato sauce, served over rice, noodles, or shredded lettuce bunbobae.com
The perfect counterweight, and a study in why this blog matters. The recipe takes 40 minutes. The ingredient list is ground pork, tomato, onion, garlic, shallot, fish sauce, scallion. When NPR's Ailsa Chang interviewed Suzanne about the blog in November 2023, this was one of the dishes Suzanne pulled out to describe on air, calling it a versatile pork-based tomato sauce she reaches for any time she is feeling lazy. It is the kind of dish that almost certainly will not be on any Vietnamese restaurant menu near you, and that almost certainly is on the table in many Vietnamese American homes tonight.
Why It Matters
There is a quiet thesis in Bun Bo Bae, and Suzanne stated it plainly when NPR asked her to write about why she started the blog. Heritage, she wrote, is about mixing what she has been taught with her own experiences, and cooking up something entirely new. The everyday recipes she writes down are not museum pieces. They are her mother's, then hers, and then whoever cooks them next.
Like Maryam Jillani's archive of Pakistani regional cooking at Pakistan Eats, Bun Bo Bae quietly fills in a map that English-language food media has left mostly blank. Phở is on every restaurant menu. The chayote stir fry, the ginger-braised chicken, the tomato-pork sauce that almost every Vietnamese kid grew up eating? Those needed someone to write them down.
Explore Bun Bo Bae: bunbobae.com
Sources:
- NPR essay — Food blogging reminds me of what I'm capable of and how my heritage is my own
- NPR All Things Considered — The joy of NPR's Suzanne Nuyen's Vietnamese cooking blog
- Bun Bo Bae — About
- WAMU Dish City — When the Pandemic Robs You of Seasonal Joy, Make Mooncakes
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Complex of Huế Monuments
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