Yen Vo and Jimmy Ly began with the good kind of lie. They met the way lots of couples used to meet: at a bar. Vo had moved to New York City from Houston, Texas and as she lamented to Ly, she couldn’t find anything to eat. At least, nothing that reminded her of what she ate growing up, mostly in Mississippi, where her dad had worked in the shrimping business. She missed thịt kho, a dish of tender, caramelized pork belly and whole eggs. She missed Vietnamese coffee. And most of all, she told him, she really missed beignets.
That turned out to be no problem, Ly explained. It just so happened that he made a stellar beignet. At the time he worked for his parents, who owned Paris Sandwich on Green Street, to which regulars flocked for the banh mi baguette on homemade bread Ly had learned to make in France. On a day when the restaurant was closed, Ly invited Vo by for his famous beignets. He made dough with care, rolled it out, and tossed each square of pâte à choux into hot oil. “The moment he threw them into the fryer, I realized he’d never made a beignet before,” said Vo. “They didn’t puff up.” Still, the ploy worked: "Any guy who is willing to go through all this trouble, just for a date? We can go on a date."
They were married five years later. Their house of Southern Vietnamese cuisine, Madame Vo, opened its doors a month after their wedding. (Ly had signed the lease without telling Vo, some weeks before the nuptials.) They wrote the menu based on the recipes they adored most from the women in each of their lives. The pho nam, which comes to the table at Madame Vo with a hulking, cushiony short rib protruding from its glassy broth, is a style of the soup from the region of Vietnam where Ly’s mother was born. But the short rib came from Vo’s side of the family. "The first time I had a bowl of pho at her mom’s house, she busted out a short rib. I was sitting there like, ‘Damn, this is amazing,” said Ly.
