Nestled in a grassy lot across the street from a Walmart Neighborhood Market on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in Fayetteville, you might catch an unusually busy food truck. Swag Banh Mi, which officially opened less than six months ago, has defied conventional wisdom about the time it takes for a restaurant to catch on–finding a dedicated customer base and boasting an active social media presence. I spoke to Nhan Pham about how between the banh mi’s baguette, you'll find a story of one of Northwest Arkansas’ largest immigrant communities. And the story of his family:
Nhan Pham: “My uncle came over here in the 70s as a refugee, and he was accepted by a family here. Adopted. And he became a doctor, valedictorian of his high school. Very, very great man. And he brought everyone else over here in the 90s. Let me tell you a story.”
Josh Marvine: “Go for it.”
NP: “I asked my mom one time, what her first banh mi was in Vietnam. And like I told you, my mom grew up in poverty. Didn't have anything to eat–meat once a year. And so her first Banh mi, it’s less than 50 cents for a banh mi that's $7 here. In Vietnam, when you have no money, 50 cents is a lot of money. My mom's first banh mi was at a street food stall. And when they make the Chinese char siu barbecue pork, they have a sauce that's left over from it, right? And we use that sauce here as well to garnish our sandwiches, the little red that you see in there. My mom's first banh mi was just straight char siu sauce in the bread. That was it.”
JM: “So she's come a long way.”
NP: “We've come a long way. We've come a long way from that. It's a simple story. But I think it says a lot about how amazing it is, what my mom is able to do here. My mom grew up eating rice and salt, if even that, because of the poverty in Vietnam because of U.S. embargoes up until the 90s.
We just come from a long history of entrepreneurs. So that's what we'd like to do. You know, one day she just called me and said, she wants to start a food truck, get out of working for somebody and start working for herself. Around September 23rd, around 4:36 pm, on a lazy evening, I came up with ‘Swag Banh Mi.’ I called my sisters. They hated the name. Called my mom, she loved it. And so we ran with it. We bought the trailer from my uncle. My stepdad, great man, he built it from the ground up. There was nothing in that truck. There was nothing here in this lot. This lot had been vacant for years. And we just tried to make good food.”
JM: “What have you noticed about the really rapid success that this place has had, especially compared to what you hear about starting a lot of new restaurants?”
NP: “Right, the conventional wisdom is that a restaurant, or any startup business, will take one-to-two years, three years, [or] even more than that to really build a steady, loyal clientele. That's the conventional wisdom. But here, me and my siblings… I have three siblings, we're all young, we have a lot of friends, we're on social media. So social media has definitely impacted a lot. I do all the marketing on Instagram. So, that was really the kicker. Without marketing, we wouldn't have sold out on the first day and then, you know, kicked off our business the way we have now.”
JM: “And also, there aren’t a ton of places you get a banh mi around these parts, right?”
NP: “Right, that's the funny thing. Because when we started this, we knew this was something that we could do well. Especially my mom, she's brilliant at this. She's a brilliant chef. There's things we could do well, and we just decided to do them. Nothing formal. We weren't like, 'Oh, banh mi’s a niche in Northwest Arkansas that needs to be filled.’ We didn't think anything like that. It just so happened that it was that way.”
JM: “Now, a whole lot of people don't know the history of the Viet community here. What do you want people to know about that? And what is a little bit of that history?”
NP: “So the history, generally, for Vietnamese people here is refugees after the war in the 70s. Fort Chaffee, other places, [and a] huge population in Fort Smith because of its proximity to Fort Chaffee.”
JM: “And there's a lot of history in this sandwich, right? You have your French baguette…”
NP: “Right, yeah, you got the French colonial history. It is quite something for sure.”
JM: “What's your go-to order?”
NP: “My go-to order is between the ‘Saigon’ and the ‘Apocalypse Now.’ Those are the kinds of traditional Vietnamese sandwiches you find in Vietnamese street food stalls. The ‘Saigon’ is the Vietnamese cold cuts. So, it's got Vietnamese ham, Vietnamese head cheese, Chinese barbecue char siu pork, and pate from the French influence. So that's a very iconic sandwich for us. And then the ‘Apocalypse Now’ is the banh mi thit nguội. So, you know, a grilled meat banh mi. We do pork. That's the traditional one. And I just like them because they're the most comfort, you know?
JM: “I’m thinking now, about how so many Americans, when they think ‘Vietnam’ they just think ‘war.’”
NP: “Right. And when you look up ‘Vietnam’ the Google search query is the Vietnam War, right? I don't think about it too much anymore. But I have thought about that before. How when you look it up, people think it is just war. What's interesting is, despite that, in Vietnam, when you go there, there's no animosity whatsoever. There's no bitterness about the war. Part of it is, you know, the Chinese were there for 1000s of years. The French and Japanese were there for 100 years, Americans were only there for 20 years. So, kind of a blip on the map really, you know? There's no there's no animosity there. And I find that very interesting. It's a culture and spirit of moving on. So, I have thought about that before, and how unfortunate it is. But now, frankly, I don't really care. We're pushing Viet over here (in Fayetteville), you know?”
That “Pushing Viet” can be seen on Swag Banh Mi’s social media. New events, an experimental delivery service, and even memes all work to grow the banh mi from a sandwich to a brand in Fayetteville.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline by reporters. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
