They say foods brings back memories.

For me, it’s Phở!

Not just the taste —
but the steam, the smell, the warmth rising into your face on a cold morning.

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Because the first memory I ever truly owned…
was a bowl of Phở.

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I was seven.

Hà Nội winters had just begun to bite.
I would sit on the small metal seat at the front of my mother’s bicycle, my hands wrapped around the cold handlebars as she rode through the morning markets.
After gathering ingredients for dinner, she would always stop at a small street-side Phở stall — nothing fancy, just a pot, a smile, and steam rising into the sky.

 

That bowl was comfort.
That bowl was home.
And I didn’t know then…
it was the calm before my entire life changed forever.

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The Night Everything Changed

Not long after those quiet mornings with my mother, everything changed.

One night, she woke me gently and told me we were leaving.
No explanation.
No time.

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We traveled back to Hải Phòng, her hometown, where she asked me a question no child should ever hear:

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“Do you want to stay with me… or go back?”

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I chose her.

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That choice put me on the back of her bicycle in the dead of night, riding through mud fields so dark it felt like the world had disappeared.
I lost a sandal somewhere along the way — but there was no time to cry.

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We reached an old wooden fishing boat, its boards creaking, its sails patched by hand.
That boat carried us into open water, and for a month, the sea became our world.

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Rice stretched thin.
Vegetables only when we were lucky.
The women — including my mother — hidden below deck for reasons I wouldn’t understand until years later.

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When we finally reached Hong Kong, the refugee camp gave us hot rice and warm food.
After weeks of fear and uncertainty, that simple meal tasted like safety — like hope.

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We stayed there for two years before a church in Edmonton sponsored us.
Canada became our new home, even though everything — the food, the weather, the language — felt foreign at first.

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Growing Up in Canada — Growing Up Without Phở

We lived with my uncle when we first arrived, and eating out was rare.
Later, when we moved to Nanaimo in the ’80s, there were no Vietnamese restaurants —

no familiar smells, no street-side bowls, no traces of home.
Ingredients were hard to find.
My mother stopped making phở.

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And honestly… I was a kid.
I ate too much McDonald’s to miss it.

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It wasn’t until years later, when we moved to Vancouver, that she made phở again.
Most restaurants served Southern-style Phở — good, comforting

— but not the Hà Nội Phở I remembered from that cold winter morning on her bicycle.

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So my mother brought her version back.

 

Soon after, my father was finally able to rejoin us.
He carried with him the deep culinary roots of Hà Nội —

the discipline, the technique, the quiet mastery passed down through generations.
Together, my parents rebuilt the flavours of home in a new country.

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When Jenny married into our family, those traditions were passed on to her as well.
In our culture, the daughter-in-law becomes the heart of the kitchen —
the one who carries the family’s flavours forward,
the keeper of its comfort.

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The Bowl That Built a Business

When Jenny and I moved to Salmon Arm to open Hanoi 36, we had one mission:

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Recreate the bowl of Phở I tasted before my life changed forever.

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The steam.
The broth.
The warmth.
The soul.

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Not just a recipe —
a memory reborn.

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Over the years, we refined that broth together.
We honoured the original flavours.
We protected the techniques my parents passed down to us.
And somehow…
we built a dish that carried my family’s history in every spoonful.

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People began asking if they could bring that feeling home.

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That’s when Hanoi at Home was born.

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A Phở kit isn’t just food.
It’s a moment.
A story.
A piece of my childhood —
the last peaceful memory before the journey that shaped my entire life.