When Jimmy Met Yen

After growing up in Long Beach, Mississippi and then moving to Houston for college — both cities with large Vietnamese populations — Yen had become accustomed to dining at high quality Vietnamese restaurants. So when Yen moved from Houston to New York City to pursue a career in fashion, she expected there to be incredible Vietnamese food, as New York has built a reputation for itself as the epicenter of cuisine in America.

Yen couldn’t find a Vietnamese restaurant like she’d envisioned, but she did find something else: Jimmy. The two first met in August 2011. Yen was thrilled to meet another person who identified as Vietnamese, and she eagerly asked Jimmy where the best place in New York City was for Vietnamese food. Jimmy unabashedly told her the best Vietnamese food in New York was at his mom’s house.

Love at First Bite

That evening, Yen sat down to dinner with Jimmy’s family for a meal of thit kho trung — caramelized pork belly and eggs. Yen was more than impressed, and immediately realized Jimmy hadn’t been joking. As Yen says, she fell in love at first bite, and Jimmy continued to win her affections with food.

Living up north meant living away from a lot of the food traditions Yen was accustomed to, and one day she had a craving for New Orleans beignets. Always up for a challenge, Jimmy invited Yen to his family’s sandwich shop to make some. Although Jimmy was unable to make the deep-fried dough balls as light and airy as they were supposed to be, the couple looks back fondly on the time they got to spend together in the kitchen of a quiet, closed restaurant.

A Foundation of Food

This is how Jimmy and Yen have built their relationship: on food. Getting to know one another, for them, meant learning about each other's food, culture, and families, and the inseparable bonds between those things. While Jimmy was excited to teach Yen about Malaysian food in Queens, Yen enthusiastically regaled Jimmy of stories from her Gulf Coast upbringing and the incredible Creole food down south.

Jimmy and Yen bonded not just over their shared experiences as Vietnamese Americans, but also through the differences in their experiences. The exciting deviations in their lives and the different cuisines both had been exposed to proved to the couple that there was a unique opportunity between them beyond romantic partnership. They began to wonder if their love of food could be translated into something more, something that New Yorkers could experience like when Yen had been invited to Jimmy’s family dinner.

Becoming Madame Vo

In early 2016 Jimmy and Yen welcomed their first child, Benjamin, into their family and began planning their wedding. Either through luck or fate, later that same year Jimmy found what he knew was the absolute perfect location for the restaurant he and Yen had been dreaming up for the past few years. While she was busy at work, he signed on the line to officially lease the space.

Yen was not happy — at least, until she saw the space for herself. When Yen toured what would become Madame Vo, she knew their restaurant was meant to be at 212 E 10th Street.

Madame Vo’s menu is a testament to each of their upbringings and the dishes that have helped define Vietnamese cuisine for them. Madame Vo’s double-fried, fish sauce-glazed wings are a Super Bowl Sunday recipe from Yen’s dad, Anh Vo, while the fried rice is Jimmy’s mom’s house favorite. Yen’s mom, Huoi Tran, is also a master of Vietnamese desserts, and the restaurant’s Banh Bo Nuongis are inspired by her recipe.

And, true to Jimmy’s unending affection for Yen, she became the restaurant’s namesake: Madame Vo.