The Places That Make Places *Places*, Nam-Viet Edition

We could use more businesses that spark ordinary joy

My latest piece over at Greater Greater Washington is out, on Arlington, Virginia’s Nam-Viet Restaurant. It’s notable because it’s the last Vietnamese business in the Clarendon neighborhood, which was once known as “Little Saigon.”

My wife and I ate there after we both saw a local news item about the restaurant, noting its 40th anniversary. It seemed like just the kind of place I would appreciate, in terms of a local story, along with the fact that I like Vietnamese food. And we had a really nice dinner there.

Like, frankly, the majority of restaurants, the food was not amazing. But everything was good. The prices are on the higher end, although they’re probably about as low as they can go in Clarendon, which is now a fairly dense, heavily developed, and trendy neighborhood along the Metro line, not far from Washington, D.C. Places like Nam-Viet—little family-owned independent restaurants, not chains or part of a “restaurant group”—are less common in these newer, more expensive areas. (It’s often observed that some of the best food at the best value is in dumpy old strip malls out in suburbia, and I believe that is largely true. Not for any clever reason or anything, just because restaurants are a tough business and that real estate is cheap.)

I shared this photo of the menu:

And wrote:

Nam-Viet feels a little like a diner, with a big menu and big portions, presented nicely, but basically informal and homey. This already looks like a large menu, but it has another side!….

There’s a real neon sign hung over the bar, a fancy cocktail menu, newspaper clippings, and portraits of important political and military customers from over the decades.

It feels like a real, lived-in place. There’s a sense of…texture. Whatever it is, it’s the same sense of mental interest I get just walking around a little town, looking at the irregular lots, alleys, the rear ends of the buildings; there’s a three-dimensionality to it. It’s a little like how the artwork in an ornate church gives you something to look at.

You can also tell that Nam-Viet is an older place, because it’s different than most of the Vietnamese restaurants in the area (except a few in the Eden Center shopping center—which is where a lot of the old Little Saigon business owners migrated).

The newer Vietnamese restaurants in the region tend to have pretty simple, pared-down menus¹: typically pho and vermicelli bowls/rice plates, maybe banh mi and one or two other specialties. A handful go a more upscale/inventive/elevated route, like Nue Elegantly Vietnamese, in downtown Falls Church, Virginia (another expensive area).

The big, varied menu at Nam-Viet might just be because the place served a more knowledgeable largely Vietnamese clientele back in the day, or it might be a bit of an old-fashioned restaurant format that has fallen out of favor. But when I say it feels a little like a diner, I really mean that.

There was almost a sense of déjà vu for me, even though this isn’t “my” culture or cuisine, or even a terribly familiar restaurant menu to me. It felt like a familiar kind of restaurant, exactly the kind I remember from my childhood and which feels less common today (or maybe just less common where I live now).

I wrote further:

This restaurant is something instantly recognizable to me. It’s the Jersey diner with the kind senior waitresses in their semi-retirement; it’s the strip-mall pizzeria with the pasta and Italian specialties menu, not that different from all the others, but yours, because you went in once on a whim, went again, got to know the owners.

A business like this has particular people behind it, and even though everything isn’t perfect, that discernible human element more than makes up for it. There’s nothing slick or Instagrammable or trendy (well, there is a little bit—Nam-Viet sells Vietnamese iced coffee with Pokémon-shaped ice cubes).

It’s almost refreshing to not think that much about what Yelp rating the place has, how it compares to other restaurants, are the flavors exactly on point, etc. In a lot of ways that was never quite the point of eating out; the familiar, homey atmosphere of a restaurant counts for something.

These kinds of humble neighborhood establishments are the opposite of trendy, social-media-famous places or chef-driven experiments. Those are the sorts of places you often try once to check off a mental collection list. A neighborhood restaurant is the kind of place you go back to; at its best it’s the kind of place that feels like an extension of your own world, that’s just there.

This is a point worth emphasizing. I further wrote, quoting a nice essay on neighborhood restaurants from Andrew Miller:

The whole is more than the sum of its parts. And as you get to know these kinds of places, as they contain and retain your memories, they grow in significance. Maybe what we call “being rooted in place” is not a physical thing, per se; maybe it’s more a feeling of being tied to and bound up with what’s around you.

And establishments like Miller’s favorite pub, or Nam-Viet, play a considerable role in that. You don’t need that many places like this in a neighborhood to give the overall place an anchor, a continuity across time.

I think this is one of the things that people sense about new development: there really is often a “blandness” and “sameness” to a lot of it, a squeezing out of the local character that makes places feel like places. And I think a fair amount of what manifests itself as NIMBYism is really just the layman’s idea of how to keep places feeling like places.

The problem with NIMBYism is that you can keep a place’s outward form completely unchanged, but you will still lose your neighborhood character, because prices rise, people move away, and the economic landscape for business owners will become more difficult as a place feels population pressure². If a community is desirable and people want to move there, it will change. It can change by growing, by accommodating people, or it can change by watching its character seep out of its form.

How to square this with the slick, sleek, blank feel of so much new development? Can we welcome new people and keep the little quirky delightful small businesses? Some of the challenge is financing that favors big, familiar projects over quirky small ones. Some of it is just the newness of new development.

For example, among D.C. urbanists, every once in awhile this photograph circulates, of the Petworth neighborhood:

Apparently the date is unknown, but it is between 1920 and 1950. It actually looks “flat” and “blank,” almost like a computer rendering. It looks like exactly what people mean when they talk about “cookie-cutter” architecture. But today—with mature trees, different uses of the tiny front yards, paint jobs and exterior decoration—that sameness is much less apparent. Maybe these homes were built at a higher level of quality than they would be today—but people at the time probably also said the same about the past. You never how the future will look at something. It kind of works itself out. Urbanism and YIMBYism are largely about trust in people and trust in the future.

All of this is to say that it’s a good thing that Clarendon has grown from an aging roadside landscape into a genuinely urban population center. But places like Clarendon would be even better if they could retain more legacy businesses like Nam-Viet—which they have, but only that one—and if they could more easily incubate new ones.

Above all, urbanists should not be seen as holding existing communities in contempt, which I think they sometimes are. Whether from the right, as attacking established communities in the name of abstract social justice, or from the left, as attacking and displacing the poor for the sake of big developers. None of that matches the way places change over time.

It is a shame that Clarendon is no longer Little Saigon, but now Eden Center is. That same place persists in a different form. We can dwell on the loss—view every change in what felt like our world as something being taken away—or go with the flow. And of course, at the same time, do what we can to make every place a little better.

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Related Reading:

Snow White And The Nine Grills

Northern Virginia Is a Real Place, Revisited

Buffet Chronicles: Bigger Isn’t Always Better

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1. However, Pho 75, opening a year before Nam-Viet, serves only pho, and is one of the first D.C.-area pho shops. So the simple-menu Vietnamese restaurant isn’t necessarily new, but it’s much more common now than large-menu places like Nam-Viet.

2. I’m assuming here a place is growing or is in high demand, which is true of most of the D.C. area, and is true, almost by definition, of places experiencing a housing crisis. Often, the people living in those places don’t perceive this growth or desirability, and the housing crisis feels like an invented outside narrative. Often, those residents have been around so long that the nature of their community in the broader region has shifted without them realizing it.