The History of Dong Phuong
Sitting down with Huong Tran, the matriarch and co-founder of Dong Phuong Bakery, at a picnic table in the bakery's break room to hear the bakery's history firsthand is a food writer's dream.
Her daughter Linh Tran Garza, who manages the books, was there to translate some of the longer memories and more unique Vietnamese phrases.
Mrs. Tran and her husband De Tran founded the bakery as we know it in 1982. Like many Asian American businesses, Dong Phuong is the direct product of immigration and adaptability.
Mrs. Tran grew up in Soc Trang, six hours south of Saigon. "We had a family bakery in Vietnam. It was crazy busy—a lot of work. I grew up in that environment. Seeing my parents run it, I did not want to [do it]. I studied hard in school, and I wanted to work somewhere I could wear nice dresses, like a bank. I did learn, by watching, by doing, and, outside of study time, I liked to help. But running my own bakery was never the plan."
My Hiep Thanh, the family bakery in Vietnam, is featured in the mural painted on Dong Phuong's roadside-facing wall. It was at her parents' bakery that Mrs. Huong would begin a relationship with her future husband. She recalled warmly how Mr. De loved coffee, so he would buy it at the coffeeshop of her family's bakery and sit in there.
Mr. and Mrs. Tran left Vietnam in 1978 and, along with their young children, were refugees in Malaysia. A family friend sponsored them to come to New Orleans in 1980. Dong Phuong and its name already existed as a Vietnamese family restaurant. The family moved to Baton Rouge, and the Trans purchased it from them. The Dong Phuong complex originally housed separate Vietnamese businesses including a grocery, a tailor, and a jeweler.
Mrs. Tran was already baking "little things like hopia" in her home kitchen and selling them to local grocery stores. From her home kitchen, the baking moved to a small space in the restaurant kitchen. When it was evident the bakery needed its own space, the Trans sold the restaurant to a family member and moved the bakery into a former laundromat next door. As the business grew, the bakery expanded into more and more of the building.
Today, Dong Phuong provides breads, pastries, and baked goods to hundreds of New Orleans groceries and restaurants besides the goods they sell out of their own storefront in New Orleans East. Many of the recipes, particularly traditional pastries, are the same as those early days.
Mrs. Tran remembered how she'd use the postal service to mail family back in Vietnam for help with specific recipes. "It would take months. One month for a letter to get there, another for the response to get back."
We can't talk about Dong Phuong without talking about their famous king cakes. Mrs. Tran liked king cakes even before she started making them. A diabetic, she'd ask stores not to put as much sugar in them. Eventually, she realized her husband's brioche dough was similar enough, albeit a little denser.
She adapted it by making it a laminated dough with added butter to lighten and moisten it. "King cakes are round, and I couldn't find a graceful way to make it round. I found a way to shape and bend it. I also sew, so I made slits on the side to help it curve. This is the shape, and it's gonna stay that way." She also added, "You adjust. You adapt. Things happen. War happens. Hurricanes happen. My husband came up with the brioche dough that was the base for the king cakes. He wasn't a baker originally. He was an avid reader, and his plan, like my bank dream, was to be an engineer."
Dong Phuong's king cakes weren't developed to make a "Vietnamese-style" or award-winning cake. They were driven by need. "This was after Katrina. We had a lot of customers asking for king cake. [There were] new immigrants asking for king cake because their kid got the baby at school and needed to bring one in. That was the motivation, to give our community options."
A quote associated with Dong Phuong and attributed to Mrs. Tran is, "Everything that's savory has to have a pinch of sweet, and everything that's sweet has to have a pinch of savory." Mrs. Tran humbly admitted the quote is actually from her grandmother, a philosophy she inherited and follows.
In 2018, Dong Phuong won a James Beard America's Classics Award, bestowed upon "local restaurants that have timeless appeal." Mrs. Tran said the moment was shocking. "They called to tell us. They emailed first, and we thought it was spam." Once the shock wore off, Mrs. Tran remembers being excited and proud. Her husband and business partner, De Tran, had passed away in 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina.
"My husband took a lot of pride in running an honest business—no cheating or lying to customers. It's important we do it right. One year, the price of vanilla extract was very high, like $500 a gallon. We've never used artificial vanilla. He still bought the real stuff. I still adhere to that mentality. We're not going to skimp. As he'd say, 'Even if we can, doesn't mean that we should.' We live in our community. We're not an affluent community—lots of immigrants. Yes, we could charge a lot more, but we shouldn't. That's not what we want. We want to serve our community. We're not going to take advantage of any situations or raise prices astronomically. The only reason we ever raise prices is so we can pay our staff more."
When asked about any plans for the bakery in the future should she retire, Mrs. Tran and Garza laughed off the question, shrugging and joking that she'll simply live forever. "Nothing in our history has been planned, so we're just going along with it."
