The quietest mogul

Meet Duyen Le, the low-key restaurateur who built a tiny noodle stand into the Starbucks of Vietnamese food

by Kelly Horan Jones

Tonight, an artist in Allston will eat tripe. On Newbury Street, a weary shopper will eat beef tendon. And in Harvard Square, students and parents and the odd out-of-towner will slurp their way through a selection of intensely flavored and very inexpensive noodle soups they'd probably never heard of just two years ago.

These parallel dining adventures come courtesy of Duyen Le, the accidental noodlemonger from Vietnam whose Pho Pasteur restaurants have taken pho, the steaming soul food of northern Vietnam, from Formica tabletops in Chinatown and Dorchester to higher-rent neighborhoods where, not so long ago, the prevailing notion of ethnic food featured spaghetti carbonara.

Le may be the quietest titan of the Boston food scene. He has opened as many local restaurants as Todd English, and everyone in Chinatown knows his name, but he's more likely to slip in and out the back door than he is to make his presence known at the bar -- and here on Newbury Street, where we're sitting in a restaurant filled to capacity with people spooning up his beef broth and twirling his vermicelli, it's a safe bet he's rarely recognized at all.

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Amid power pastels and lots of black, Duyen Le -- wearing a white oxford shirt, a geometric-patterned tie, and khakis -- is a lone speck of conservative dress. At his Newbury Street store, jumping up now and then to greet a customer, clear a table, or pack a takeout order, Le is all nervous energy and perfectionism. The heat of an early summer day shows on his forehead; he dabs it with a napkin and settles in to tell his story.

As he does, the serious look behind his fingerprinted glasses melts into something that could almost be described as mischievous. Did he ever think success would come so quickly -- or at all? "Of course!" he replies, smiling broadly, somehow conveying both confidence and modesty.

Le speaks carefully, and if bragging ever occurs to him, it doesn't today. He can't discuss his rapid expansion into the Boston food scene without mentioning his debt to the fellow immigrants who helped him. And when he talks about his wife and three children, he sounds like a family-values politician who actually means it. But beneath the self-effacement, Le is a savvy entrepreneur whose marketing skills have turned Vietnamese street food into a hit with the Sonsie set.

It may seem as though the pleasing coral walls, the smashing color photography, and the flattering light of the Newbury Street store are as essential to Le's pho as the perfect simmering time and the right ingredients. But it wasn't always that way: it started with the soup.

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The 47-year-old Le didn't plan to be a restaurateur at all. When he immigrated to America with his wife and children in 1987, Le planned to follow the lead of a childhood friend who'd become a successful computer engineer in Boston. He learned English and studied computer science and business at Middlesex Community College in Lowell and, later, at UMass Boston. By 1990, the former vegetable transporter was well on his way to a comfortable life as a techie.

That is, until his wife, Thu, who was working as a waitress in Lowell, noticed the profits to be made in the restaurant business. "My wife is the reason I do so well," Le says. "So when she told me about restaurants, I listened." He started looking around, and soon he found a dingy little pho shop on Kneeland Street. Pho Pasteur was a prime candidate, Le says: sparsely patronized, poorly managed, and uninviting. By 1991, Le, whose given name translates roughly as "charisma," had raised enough money to buy the shop himself. "Le was a terrific networker and had the support of the business community," recalls Hien Nguyen, who manages the six-and-a-half-year-old Pho Bolsa, on Washington Street.

Le added seating for 12 more customers, bringing the capacity up to 30; then he gave the place a good scrubbing and instructed his new staff in the delicate art of customer service. "The other owners didn't pay attention to how they treated their customers," Le says.

Mainly, though, he was determined to improve the pho. "I got up every day at five to go to the markets in Chelsea," Le recalls, looking amazed at the memory of it. His life and work in rocky and notoriously infertile central Vietnam had given him a fierce appreciation for produce, and he went to the Chelsea markets in search of the perfect onions, the greenest basil, the most pungent ginger; he returned to his restaurant's impossibly small kitchen to see that everything -- including pounds and pounds of beef bones and marrow, oxtails and flank steak -- was simmered together in just the right proportions for no less than 12 hours. "I did that every single day for two years," Le recalls. "I just couldn't afford deliveries."

The elements of pho It smells faintly of cinnamon and its contents might make even the staunchest carnivore gasp: tripe, soft tendon, bone marrow. It is also uniquely delicious, decidedly filling, and addictively fun to eat. It is pho (pronounced "fuh"), the beef noodle soup from Hanoi that serves as breakfast, lunch, and dinner throughout Vietnam. Like sausage, pho isn't pretty to make. It's not easy, either: one basic recipe we found involves 23 ingredients, starting with 5 pounds of oxtail and 5 pounds of beef bones, and ending with six hours of simmering. And if that sounds like a lot of effort, both Duyen Le of Pho Pasteur and Didi Emmons of Pho République agree that the real flavor is revealed only after twice as much simmering time. The essence of pho is the broth. But in the end, the uniquely sweet concoction of star anise-accented beef broth, flat rice noodles, fresh herbs, and all manner of meat is determined as much by individual taste as by careful preparation. What you add to your bowl -- basil, mint, bean sprouts, meatballs -- is up to you. The plate of fresh herbs and selection of sauces provided in pho shops are there to ensure that no two pho bowls are exactly the same. The idea is to use them with abandon and experiment with the combination of spicy and fresh, savory and sweet flavors. There is no delicate way to slurp pho, but there is a right way, and sitting upright with exemplary posture just won't help. To really enjoy pho in all its glorious complexity, and to glimpse the reason for Vietnam's collective obsession with noodles, assume the position -- a determined slouch -- and arm yourself with both chopsticks and a spoon. DIY types with a big pot and some serious time on their hands can check out the pho recipe in Nicole Routhier's The Foods of Vietnam (Stewart, Tabori and Chang). For a general reference on Vietnamese cuisine, Didi Emmons recommends Binh Duong's The Simple Art of Vietnamese Cooking (now out of print). More pho recipes, including one for "pho da chien" or "quickie pho," can be found on the Internet at: http://www.godzilla.eecs.berkeley.edu.recipes/ ethnic/vietnamese http://www.wam.umd.edu/~andrewb/recipes.html.

The brighter quarters and better food didn't go unnoticed. Le's backers in the community helped swell the Vietnamese clientele, and Tufts Med School students from just across Kneeland Street were quick converts to Pho Pasteur's cheap, filling, and convenient meals. Soon, the ethnically diverse group inside Pho Pasteur was spilling out onto the sidewalk, drawing the attention of tourists and businesspeople and other curious passersby.

If success came quickly, so did rivalry: soon a shop called Pho Pascal opened its doors just around the corner on Washington Street. Rather than balk at the competition, Le bought it out. He renamed the new shop Pho Pasteur, hoping not so much to compete against himself as to create an annex for the overcrowded first shop.

The move worked; Pho Pasteurs I and II drew crowds and critical notice. And though they weren't the only pho shops in the neighborhood, they were the best known. Le was on to something.

Encouraged by the strong turnout of non-Vietnamese diners, in 1993 Le took his big bowls to Brighton Avenue in Allston. This time, he tinkered with the formula: if his Chinatown locations were essentially stripped-down outposts for ladling out soup, this time Le was going for broader appeal. He hired architect Don Lang to design a space that looked more like a neighborhood restaurant -- high ceilings, booths, a soothing color scheme. He expanded his menu to include vegetable and seafood dishes from central Vietnam; the river-fish cuisine of the southern Mekong Delta region; and vegetarian entrées in his country's Buddhist tradition. In the Allston store, it was possible to not eat noodles at all. One could order chao tom (delectably sweet ground shrimp molded onto sugar cane) and follow it with thit heo hoac ca kho, a French-influenced casserole of caramelized pork or fish that is at once delicate and rich. And for dessert, there were distinctive Vietnamese beverages of unusual fruit, such as jackfruit, guanabana, or durian, blended with ice and sweetened condensed milk.

It was a delicate balance -- could the restaurant attract a new clientele while keeping its Vietnamese customer base? -- but it worked. Le expanded the location twice before venturing into still pricier real estate, in Harvard Square.

The Harvard Square Pho Pasteur, unlike its predecessors, is quite consciously a destination restaurant. Located in the Garage, a building known for its selection of upscale fast food -- focaccia sandwiches, burritos, single-serving cheesecakes -- the space (designed, again, by Lang) has an almost tropical feel, with soft lighting, walls the color of butternut squash, and the kind of vaulted ceilings and multitiered layout that give one the impression of eating in a wide-open space.

By the time Le opened his newest restaurant, on Newbury Street, in March of this year, it was already a known commodity. Boosted by word-of-mouth reviews -- and, as in Harvard Square, by prices considerably lower than at the surrounding restaurants -- the Back Bay Pho Pasteur had instant cachet and drew capacity lunch- and dinnertime crowds. It's fair to say that Le's humble Vietnamese cuisine had made an impression on the arbiters of chic. The irony, of course, is that they were the last to catch on.

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Hard work and business sense are all very well, but it also helps to have the Zeitgeist on your side. It may simply be Vietnamese food's time.

Didi Emmons, co-owner and executive chef at Pho République, in Central Square -- a neighborhood better known for its nan than for its noodles -- attributes the vigor of the Southeast Asian invasion to a confluence of factors: a growing familiarity with and fondness for the exotic; the new status of eating as a pastime; and the inherently healthful qualities of Vietnamese cuisine. "People finally like to talk food," she says. "They're becoming curious about it and finally seeing the excitement in it. And frustrated doctors are saying that you have to eat lighter."

As Bostonians have continued to open their minds and lighten their plates, pho shops have crept out of their ethnic enclaves and into the mainstream. In Allston, the Dorchester shop Pho Hoa opened a branch on Harvard Street; this fall, just one year after the Central Square restaurant's debut, a new Pho République will open in the South End.

Still, Le's was the breakout act. One long-time observer of the Asian restaurant scene likens Le to Joey Crugnale, the CEO of Bertucci's, who did for brick-oven pizza what Le is doing for Vietnamese soup. Crugnale (who also franchised Steve's ice cream) attributes his own companies' successes to the way he took the common and made it uncommon; asked whether that same philosophy can work for Duyen Le's noodle soups, he sounds cautious. "Bertucci's offered variety, and people told us they loved that," says Crugnale. "But you know what we still sell the most of? Pepperoni. And it was always vanilla at Steve's. People still want the familiar. So can he do it? I don't know. People want the experience of it, but that doesn't mean they'll keep going back."

If the thousands of gallons worth of pho that Le's restaurants serve each week are any indication, though, beef broth and tripe may be the pepperoni of the late '90s.

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There is, some say, a certain prophetic quality to pho. Meatballs portend a rocky time ahead, tripe foretells emotional troubles, and so on. And as I sit alone in a crowded Pho Pasteur on Kneeland Street at the end of a long day with Duyen Le, I wonder what might signify success. I decide it must be the gloriously emerald -- money-colored? -- Thai basil, and that Le must have eaten his fair share.

Just then, the cashier directs me to the kitchen, where an aluminum ladder dangles rather perilously from a tiny, rectangular hole in the ceiling. "Mr. Le is calling you," she tells me, prodding me toward the ladder. "There?" I point, apprehensively. "There," she smiles, mysteriously. I worry that I have asked too many questions.

I climb the ladder, feeling the amused gaze of the two cooks attending to the hunks of meat bubbling directly below me. All the while I'm convinced that I will suddenly and violently plop into the scalding stew. But when I make it to the top, Le is there, smiling. He wants to show me his ingredients, he says, swearing me to secrecy. I give my word, and Le measures out several brown paper bags full of what look to be amber-colored rocks. "These are for all the restaurants," he says, clutching a bag as if it were some hard-won loot. "I only keep them up here. Only here."

He looks proudly around the cramped, stuffy room, and I suddenly feel reassured. For as much as Pho Pasteur is about creating rarefied settings and custom-fit comfort zones for the non-Chinatown clientele, the essence of the enterprise, it seems to me, is still Le's inherent passion for food.

Le wipes his brow and ushers me down the ladder and out of the kitchen before I can even register my fear of falling. On our way out of the restaurant, Tai Vantra, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who is there for a late lunch, stops me to offer this insight: "Duyen Le is a capitalist empire builder!" He laughs, gives Le an avuncular slap on the back, and returns to his noodles looking very satisfied.

That he is, I think, but this emperor's got a soul.

Kelly Horan Jones, a freelance food writer and television producer, suffers from a mild addiction to noodles. This is her first article for the Phoenix.