Description:

Dong Phuong means “east” in Vietnamese. Dong Phuong Bakery is East both geographically and culturally. Out in the swamplands along Chef Menteur Highway in 1981, an immigrant Vietnamese couple named De and Huong Tran started their restaurant and bakery, baking the pastries De learned in her father’s bakery as a child in Vietnam.

Today its wholesale business supplies crusty French bread for many a poboy served in New Orleans restaurants and neighborhood joints. During Carnival season, there’s always a line in the bakery adjacent to the restaurant of loyal customers waiting for a Dong Phuong king cake! There are other goodies in the bakery too, exotic steamed banana cake with coconut sauce, or a Vietnamese version of a fig newton, with coconut or mung bean fillings. The banh mi, or “Vietnamese poboys” are made fresh to order while you wait in the bakery.

On the other side, the restaurant serves up steaming bowls of spicy, savory beef pho, or Vietnamese crepes, banh xeo. Try a rice plate with grilled pork chops and an egg on top, or Chinese-style dishes like Szechuan-style shrimp. You’ll see young Vietnamese-American families with their kids, New Orleans businessmen, a few tourists, or whoever is craving a pho fix that day. Dong Phuong demonstrates what New Orleans does best:  mixing up another culture’s food into the big gumbo pot that we call home. In the same way that New Orleans has assimilated food cultures from all its immigrant populations for three hundred years, it’s embraced Dong Phuong Bakery and Restaurant.