"At Van Ða, the menu acts as something of a survey course in Vietnamese cooking. It’s divided by headings that sound almost like the titles of academic papers, covering a range of styles and city-specific dishes—“Street Food: Sidewalk Classics, Reinvented”; “Saigon: Bold, Modern, Driven”—and the perspectives and specialties of the two chefs, who both happen to be women. (Van Ða means “warrior woman.”) The most unusual section is largely attributable to the owner, Yen Ngo, a Vietnamese-born chef in her late forties who moved to the U.S. in 1980; it’s called “Hue: Ancient, Refined, Royal,” after her parents’ home city, which was Vietnam’s imperial capital from 1802 to 1945 and is famous for traditional dishes that don’t tend to travel abroad, including bite-size delicacies akin to Chinese dim sum." - Hannah Goldfield
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