Amaya Lam
I was born in 2004, fifteen years after my family’s cafe in South Philadelphia initially opened. My first destination out of the hospital was Cafe Cuong. My grandparents were holding me in the middle of the cafe and soon enough, the regulars of the cafe that already referred to themselves as my “aunties” took turns holding me. The cafe had become my second home. When I wasn’t with my mom and grandma, I was staying with my dad who was still living above the cafe floor. Being a part of the cafe became a typical part of my routine as a child.
I would come down from the second floor with my backpack on to the cafe floor and wait while my dad made me breakfast to take me to school. The early morning chatter from the regulars filled the room. All of them were Vietnamese and would greet me and say other things in Vietnamese I couldn’t quite understand. They were talking loudly to my grandparents behind the counter about their daily news and commenting on the random tennis game playing on the TV. The loudness would be striking to anyone else that would walk into the cafe, but to me it turned into background noise, something as natural as music playing in the back.
A Beginning
At that age, I was blissfully unaware of what my grandparents, father, and uncles had gone through. It was 1983 and the Vietnam War had ended and the country was still reeling from living under war. My grandmother, Dung Kim Nguyen, and grandfather, Chinh Lam, made the decision to come to the United States with my father and his three brothers. They boarded a small boat, crowded with other Vietnamese immigrants so packed they held onto my father and uncle’s shirts so they wouldn’t get lost in the crowd. They all headed towards their hope of an American Dream from that boat. They landed in Philadelphia.
Photo provided by Lam Family, 2006
Once they arrived in Philadelphia, they rented a house where they lived and worked various jobs to keep my father and his brothers in school. Eventually, in 1989 after years of hard work, my grandparents bought a property on 8th and Catherine and founded Cafe Cuong, specializing in banh mis and Vietnamese iced coffee for income. Simultaneously, they continued to raise their four sons in the two floors above and tried to assimilate them into American culture. At the time, the cafe was one of the few Vietnamese establishments in the area and started to gather its own customer base and presence.
The cafe smelled like all the perfect parts of a banh mi, a Vietnamese hoagie. The fresh bread picked up from Sarcone’s, a local bakery 2 blocks away, was the most noticeable as there were 5 bags filled with rolls. I loved the familiar smell of the grilled pork my grandfather cooked in the back along with the fresh aromatic cilantro. The bitter and strong smell of coffee made me scrunch my nose at the time, but I always got rid of it by smelling the sweetened condensed milk right beside it. No matter how many years had passed and the older I got, this morning was always promised.
Photo taken by @monmoney267 on IG
A Growing Community
9 years after I was born, my little brother was born to my dad and my step-mom. My grandparents and all the customers were so excited to have yet another baby in the building. My uncle who lived on the third floor of the building had his daughter the year before. With a new babies in the house, our floor was now filled with baby toys and next to all the baskets for banh mis that had been washed were baby bottles.
I was tall enough to reach the cash register at this point so I began to man the register and had fun playing a role in the store. My grandparents thought it was good practice for counting and learning basic maths and I found it fun and the customers found it endearing. I remember a new customer would come in and they saw me behind the counter and laughed as they handed me their money and would always say something along the lines of, “I see they’re starting you off early!”. From being behind the counter so young, I had grown used to seeing new and old faces everyday. Oftentimes someone new, and usually not Vietnamese or some type of Asian, would come in and I would have to act as the main translator to my grandparents. Through these simple interactions, my family, especially my grandparents, had felt more assimilated into American culture through customers. At the same time, I could see how the new customers learned and experienced a new culture from this same interaction and eating at the cafe.
3 years later, my second little brother was born and I was 12 years old, a full Lunar zodiac cycle older than him. Somehow everything had changed but it still felt the same. My dad and grandfather still got into daily arguments and my dad still made me breakfast sandwiches every morning. Years passed and the regulars would comment on how they almost didn’t recognize me because of how big I had gotten. I never told them how I thought they still looked the same to me. In the 12 years since I was born, the cafe has raised three children who always knew the comfort of their grandparents’ cooking, who from birth already had adoration from dozens of people we were unrelated to, simply because of what the cafe meant to them.
The cafe acted as a root for all our family, no matter how extended, to have a place in Philadelphia. My grandfather alone has 11 siblings, making it impossible for me to know all my family members. Sometimes someone who I don’t even recognize will come into the cafe and mention they are my cousin and I simply learned to accept that it’s probably true. At family gatherings, my extended family would often refer to my brothers and I as “from the cafe”. We were so intrinsically linked to the cafe others automatically grouped us together, and given time, I did too. When introducing myself to people, I would say “I’m from the cafe” and they would instantly have a grasp of who I was and the family members I was most connected to. My younger brothers were woven into the cafe in the same way, our identities meshing with the place that brought us all together.
Soon enough, our family outgrew our singular floor in the building and my dad, step-mom, two brothers, and I moved out of the cafe and into our own house. Even though we had left, the cafe remained the same. My uncle who lived upstairs with his family eventually moved out and all the rooms collected dust on the furniture and the items left behind. While the upper floors became unrecognizable with our disappearance, the cafe floor looked unchanged, besides a new paint job my dad undertook. My dad still worked there so we constantly visited. My uncle got married and he and his wife decided to have their Vietnamese wedding tea ceremony in the cafe, an obvious choice.
Photo taken by Amaya Lam
The Future of the Cafe…
Over time, my dad and uncles eventually took over the cafe as my grandparents grew older and slowly entered retirement (though like most older generation Asian people, they have a hard time sitting still and not working, so they still come by and make the house mayo). With this sense of new leadership, the cafe began to adapt more to our current times. My uncle created an Instagram account for Cafe Cuong and soon enough they had accumulated followers. More and more traction was created online.
No doubt this online presence led to the past year being monumental for the cafe in terms of recognition from the city. The Philadelphia Inquirer released a new annual feature called “The 76”, where they list the most vital restaurants in Philadelphia that year. Cafe Cuong was fortunate enough to make that list and was featured on the Philadelphia Inquirer website. Soon after, 6abc did a TV spot on them in light of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The 6abc filming crew came to the cafe and did short interviews with my family as they saw the work they did there and cut to older photos when the cafe was first founded.
I know this feature was by no means a breakout or viral story, but it was my family’s story. The feeling of pride I got seeing my family and their hard work professionally recognized was immense. I had always known about what the cafe had meant to the neighborhood and the people in it. It was an integral part of the community and provided a space for people to gather and experience my family’s culture. It was one thing to recognize this myself, but to see various news outlets recognize it felt more official to me. Everything that I had felt throughout my childhood felt validated.
Like any major city, Philadelphia has its prominent ethnic enclaves throughout the city. From Philadelphia’s Chinatown to Italian Market, these communities have given the city diverse character. While not directly in the neighborhood of Little Saigon, Cafe Cuong resides near it and is a part of the Vietnamese immigrant population that has established an identity within Philadelphia. It’s a place for both immigrants to gather and celebrate their local culture and people outside this demographic to enjoy and experience this cultural identity.
To this day, Cafe Cuong largely looks the same as it did when it opened in the late 1980s. Although my grandparents have mostly retired, the cafe still holds their dreams and ideals from when they first came to Philadelphia. It holds a space not only for our own family, but for other Vietnamese immigrants and people in the community as a whole. The same way other Philadelphia buildings and spaces hold historical value and significance, places like my family’s cafe hold this same significance. It’s part of the city’s history, but also the history of a family and people’s personal stories. Their hard work and sacrifices are responsible for much of the richness of culture in Philadelphia. The things that make Philadelphia loveable to both locals and visitors, the restaurants, food and togetherness, are able to be found through immigrants, namely a place like Cafe Cuong.