Quynh Nguyen and Gian Carlo Reinardy are bringing the cuisine of North Vietnam to the U.S., one flavor-packed, culturally rooted dish at a time.
Descending the stairs into The Paper Bridge’s subterranean dining room in Portland, Oregon, feels like crossing the threshold into another city. It evokes the Cầu Giấy (“paper bridge” in English) neighborhood of Hanoi, where married chefs and co-owners Quynh Nguyen and Gian Carlo Reinardy met.
Most Vietnamese cuisine in America reflects the culture of South Vietnam, where most immigrants to the U.S. have historically come from. The menu at The Paper Bridge offers a whirlwind culinary tour of the lesser-known stars of the country’s Northern cuisines: Dinner might start with bánh mì que hải phòng, finger-size banh mi sandwiches from Vietnam’s third-largest city, Haiphong, followed by grilled skewers of galangal pork and curry leaf, quivering cubes of fermented tofu, or spice-rubbed king oyster mushrooms in a nod to Sa Pa, a northwestern city at the threshold to the Himalayas known for its skewer joints.
Each dish draws on Nguyen’s decade of studying Vietnam’s ethnic subcultures — she received a master’s degree in traditional dance before pivoting to cooking — and the couple’s shared passion for storytelling. Nguyen grew up in Hanoi; Reinardy moved there from Milwaukee with the intent of taking a break from a culinary career but ended up working as a chef. They met in 2013 through Nguyen’s uncle, who owned a beer garden that Reinardy frequented.
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On dates, they made a game out of dissecting their favorite dishes. Eventually they married, and the running joke became a shared vision of bringing the diverse cuisine of North Vietnam to life in the United States.
They started with a focus on a foundational ingredient: rice noodles. In their research, Nguyen and Reinardy found that few Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S. make fresh rice noodles. (Most use dried.) They studied with dozens of noodle makers in Vietnam, read papers on the science of rice noodles, and consulted with the machinist who’d built their noodle-making machine.
In Portland, everything was different from Vietnam — the rice, the temperature, the humidity — and what came out of the machine was mush that would fall apart when cooked in water. “Because there’s no gluten to hold them together, you need very specific conditions for these gelatinized starches to crystallize in the right form,” Reinardy explains…