Uyen Dang, her husband Able Hernandez and her mother Nghi Nguyen all share cooking duties at Me Va Con, their new Vietnamese restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. In fact, everyone who works there is either a family member or a close friend. Dang and Nguyen are from Ho Chi Minh City, but the menu doesn’t focus on a particular region.
Me Va Con’s menu is really a collection of their favorite dishes with some original recipes put together by Dang. “I’ve loved cooking since I was really little,” she told me during our phone interview. “I watched a lot of cooking shows on TV and learned from all those chefs.”
Dang met Hernandez while they were both working at Ohgane Korean BBQ on Broadway. In the small culinary network that links many East Bay restaurants together, Micha Oh, Ohgane’s owner, encouraged them to open their own restaurant. After Oriental BBQ Chicken Town closed on Telegraph Avenue, Dang and her crew took over the space and opened for business this past summer.
“I loved whatever my mom cooked for me in my childhood,” Dang said. “So I put everything on the menu which is typical food that a Vietnamese restaurant is supposed to have, and then I put some of my fusion dishes that I created myself.” Some of Dang’s recipes include tom yum pasta, kimchi pasta and a spicy shrimp ceviche.
Dang also decided to serve banh khot, which she describes as mini-pancakes, instead of banh xeo, a Vietnamese crepe. “My mom loves the crepe, but it’s too oily for me,” Dang said. She also dislikes the fussiness involved in assembling the bean sprouts and pork in a lettuce wrap, saying, “For me, it’s really inconvenient!”
At Me Va Con, banh khot is served on a hot plate. Each tiny pancake is shaped like a small flying saucer, open-faced and inverted, with all the ingredients already arranged inside the cup. No assembly required.
Pho, banh mi and bowls of bun are also featured on the menu. For Dang, without serving pho, “It doesn’t sound like a Vietnamese restaurant.” She considers it a year-round staple. “I wanted to make it as traditional as I can. We cook it carefully for more than 12 hours for all of the bone to absorb into the broth.” She also adds cardamom to the spice mix with cinnamon and cloves.
Although a bowl of pho sounded enticing on a cool autumn night, I opted for a clay pot filled with ginger chicken ($18). Dang confirmed that it’s one of the most frequently ordered dishes, along with the pork belly ($21). The chicken is braised and caramelized in a “sweet and savory secret sauce.” Thin slices of fresh ginger add a pleasant zing and crunch to each bite.
“In my country, chickens are raised by small families, not on a big farm, so the meat is really juicy,” Dang said. Vietnamese people also love to eat chicken with the skin and bones. “I found out that in America people don’t love to eat skin, and it’s inconvenient if it has bones.” Departing from that nose-to-tail approach, she decided to use chicken thighs instead.
Dang described the pork belly dish as a “regular, everyday meal, especially for Lunar New Year.” To celebrate the occasion, people will cook a big pot of braised pork and eat it for three days. “But here, I put different ingredients in to make it special and spicy because I love spicy food,” she said. She braises it with hard-boiled eggs, coconut juice, chilies and fish sauce.
When I had dinner at Me Va Con, banh khot showed up on the nightly specials menu, as did a spring roll with bright yellow slices of mango—another one of Dang’s recipes. But if Me Va Con succeeds, she’d like to expand the menu beyond pho and fusion towards “what Vietnamese people eat every day. I love my country’s food so much,” she added, “and that’s why I really want to bring those traditions to America.”
Me Va Con, open Wed-Mon, 11am to 9pm. 6101 Telegraph Ave., Oakland. 510.595.5338. IG:@mevacon_oakland. mevacon.menu11.com
