+ By Terese Schlachter + Photos by Karen Davies
Every six months, Bé Hai sends 50 kilos of jasmine pandan green tea to Annapolis. It’s grown in the central highlands of Vietnam. Growers rely only on sun, rain, and soil to naturally create the herbs found in a five-dollar pot of green tea at Nam Bros Pho in Eastport. Two dollars goes to pay for the shipping, and three dollars goes back to Hai.
“Bé Hai takes care of the tea. We take care of the family,” says Jennnifer Dagout-Nguyen, the restaurant’s owner. “Family is everything.”
Dagout-Nguyen grew up in North Carolina among family members who were more about song than food. She started singing at the age of 12. Her father, who was raised by Black and Indian parents, was a US Army soldier and had served in Vietnam, where he met her mother. By the time her father was able to bring his beloved to the United States, they had already started a family. Their two oldest daughters came just a year apart. Dagout-Nguyen was next, followed by three boys. Her father played the guitar, her brothers and sisters sang, but she was the lead. One day, when she was 15 years old, her brother-in-law showed up to the band with a friend. “I didn’t like James [Nguyen] at first. I thought he was uptight,” she says. She married him when she was 17 years old.
Vietnamese tradition holds that young brides move into their in-laws’ home, and Dagout-Nguyen complied with cultural expectations. The result, one could say, is Nam Bros Pho.
“My mother-in-law taught me to cook,” says Dagout-Nguyen. Her mother-in-law is a small woman, now 85 but a powerful influence. “She taught me to make pho—hers is sweet because she was from the south.” Northern pho has fewer spices and is eaten with a donut. Dagout-Nguyen’s pho (pronounced fahw-AH, the voice rising slightly on the second syllable) is made with cloves, nutmeg, coriander, ginger root, and cinnamon. Cloves are thought to have healing powers; cinnamon is believed to have medicinal value. Cooking is caregiving. It bonds generations. While her husband is strictly a back-of-the-house guy, steaming, stewing, and aggressively cleaning kitchen appliances, the two oldest sons, Nick and Aiden, keep the dishes moving. The youngest, Mason, is too young to work. The boys’ first initials, in birth order, spell NAM, hence the restaurant’s name. Another relative does the accounting. But the front of the house is all Dagout-Nguyen.
“I know most of the customers by name,” she says. “They are like family. Any older person can be mom or dad.” She calls a few of the gentlemen who come in alone “Pop.” Her own father passed away about four years ago, she says, of Agent Orange-related cancer. During that time, Dagout-Nguyen was just getting the paperwork together to open the restaurant, a dream that began in a nearby nail salon, where she filed and polished and made sure her shop clients felt at home. When she invited a client and her husband home for dinner, the woman declared that, if Dagout-Nguyen went public, she would be sure that everyone knew about it. So, one or two days per week, the nail tech would bring meals into the shop for customers. The well-manicured crowd loved it, and soon Dagout-Nguyen was selling food from her car in the parking lot of the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center. When she heard that another Plaza staple, Ahh, Coffee!, had fallen victim to the COVID-19 pandemic and shuttered, she called the Plaza’s owner, who at first demurred.
But Dagout-Nguyen worked hard, putting together a pictorial proposal, eventually winning the owner’s approval. Then there was the matter of making the space pho friendly. The Nguyens hired a contractor, who died suddenly before the work could be finished, so they became their own general contractor. With everything stalled by the pandemic, appliances they’d ordered had to be put on hold until a problem with the electric meters was slowly resolved. Not only were they charged a restocking fee for the goods, but, due to pandemic-related inflation, they had to repurchase the equipment with a 20-percent price increase. All the complications and delays added up—what was supposed to cost $275,000 wound up costing $475,000.
“We were bleeding money,” says Dagout-Nguyen, “but I was not stopping. What would that teach my children?” It all paid off in November 2022, when Nam Bros Pho’s soft opening was packed with people who were thrilled to try the nail tech-turned-restaurateur’s offerings.
In the kitchen, the small refrigerator and freezer (both just 27 inches wide) dictate fresh ingredients, as there’s little storage space. Pho is served from one pot while the next day’s is simmering. There’s fish sauce—made by layering fish and salt in a clay jar, then fermenting it underground for two years—in everything. There’s very little gluten and a bit of MSG. The “chef’s surprise” is whatever Dagout-Nguyen makes for her lunch that day. And if you ask her for a recipe, she’ll hand it over immediately. “I figure if they have success, then I am a good teacher!”
The restaurant has been open officially since February 2023, serving every day until 8 p.m. except Wednesdays. But it might close earlier. A two-pot turnover kitchen operation means that when the broth is gone, it’s gone. On the front door hangs a sign telling customers the hours of operation. On its back, scribbled in chalk, are the words “out of pho.” Those words are usually flipped street-side Thursday through Sunday, well before closing time.
For more information,
visit nambrospho.com.
