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Photographs by Justin Fox Burks
Located on Summer Avenue near Mendenhall, Lotus specializes in Vietnamese dishes like banh cuon, served by Victor Bach, and sweet and sour fish. The fried catfish, a Chinese New Year specialty, is available year-round by special order.
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Photographs by Justin Fox Burks
Located on Summer Avenue near Mendenhall, Lotus specializes in Vietnamese dishes like banh cuon, served by Victor Bach, and sweet and sour fish. The fried catfish, a Chinese New Year specialty, is available year-round by special order.
In Memphis, where personal stories about Elvis seem commonplace, Joe and Hanh Bach’s connection to the King still delights me. But as with most good stories, some history will help.
The couple, who opened the first Vietnamese restaurant in Memphis almost 40 years ago, fled Saigon in 1975, a month before the city’s fall to the North Vietnamese Army. From Guam, they traveled to California and then to Arkansas, where Joe, who had worked as a photographer and translator for English-speaking journalists, helped at the Ft. Chaffee processing center to relocate other Vietnamese refugees.
A few months later, Joe, Hanh, and their young son Han moved to Memphis under the sponsorship of All Saints Episcopal Church. Joe attended Memphis State, and Hanh worked as a server at the original Nam King. Although the couple didn’t open their own restaurant until 1981, Hanh catered on the side, sharing wedding cakes and Vietnamese home cooking with neighbors and friends, including the late Lester Hoffman, Elvis’ longtime dentist and recipient of a signature pink Cadillac.
Justin Fox Burks
For the Bach’s five children — daughter, Kimberly, and three more sons, Solomon, Victor, and Bernard — Hoffman and his wife Sterling became adopted grandparents. They championed Joe and Hanh, as well, co-signing the loan to buy their restaurant on Summer Avenue, located across the street from the original Holiday Inn. Joe and Hanh named the restaurant Lotus, a symbol, they explain, of loyalty, family, and a beautiful flower that grows from the swampy mud.
“The Hoffmans, they loved my cooking,” says Hanh as she tells her story before dinner service begins. Then she jumps up to retrieve a portrait of the Hoffmans, frozen in time like the restaurant’s beaded curtains, bamboo wallpaper, and colorful mural of palm trees on a bucolic beach. For a second or two, the energetic chef is wistful, but then she lights up again. “We are very lucky,” Hanh says. “Many, many people love our family.”
Scroll through online restaurant reviews, and customer comments confirm Hanh’s words. People who ate at Lotus as children still eat at the restaurant today, with their own youngsters in tow. A relative newcomer (I’ve only been going to Lotus for about 10 years), I am nonetheless an ardent fan, along with half-a-dozen friends who head to Lotus annually to celebrate back-to-back dinners for New Year’s: the first on December 31st and the second for Chinese New Year sometime in February.
Served over a long weekend, the menu for Chinese New Year is spectacular with dishes like fried potato nests filled with scallop, shrimp, and crab and steamed baby squid filled with mushrooms, pork, and vermicelli and sliced in half like mysterious stuffed eggs.
Other New Year’s dishes are equally memorable: an impressive catfish, fried whole head-to-tail and plated like it’s swimming off the platter; and bacon-wrapped shrimp garnished with chopped peanuts and served in a copper-colored sauce made with applesauce, sweet potato jam, and a little vinegar and sugar.
For most dishes at Lotus — both special occasion and day-to-day — a flick of sugar knits together the cuisine’s signature flavor profile of spicy, salty, sour, and sweet. Citrus and fresh herbs — lemongrass, mint, ginger, cilantro, and basil, both sweet and purple Thai — are integral, too. During the warm months, Hanh grows a garden behind the restaurant, and handfuls of aromatic herbs and peppers season her soups, stir-fry, and dipping sauces, all house-made. (Pro tip: The heat index of the pepper sauce at Lotus can merit a pirate flag warning.)
“We use all kinds of hot peppers: Thai peppers, Indian chili peppers, the ones my brother grows, the ones my sister grows,” Hanh explains. “We use a different mixture, but the peppers are always fresh.”
Self-taught by decades of practice, Hanh’s cooking style is unique, influenced by her family, her homeland, and her longtime customers. Growing up, she learned from her mother, who worked as a private cook for a French family in Saigon. Today at Lotus, boneless chicken or duck stuffed with parsley, garlic, onions, olives, chestnuts, kidney beans, and ground chicken and pork pay tribute to Hanh’s upbringing. The off-menu dish — call a week ahead to order — is rich, earthy, and absolutely French. “No Vietnamese. No Chinese,” Hanh explains.
Other Lotus dishes, however, reflect a melting pot of influences. “Yes, my mother’s cooking is Vietnamese, but she was doing fusion before anyone even called it fusion,” says Han, who recently relocated from Hawaii to help his parents at the restaurant. Han is the most gifted cook among the children, says his brother Bernard, and like his siblings, he grew up in the restaurant. “At age 6, I’m sure I was the youngster server in Memphis,” Han says, laughing.
Looking back, Han remembers the family’s frequent drives to New Orleans to buy ingredients unavailable in Memphis and the initial resistance of customers to authentic Vietnamese food. “In the beginning, my parents had a very hard time,” Han says. “People only knew dishes like sweet and sour pork, so my mother had to mix in Cantonese.”
As customers grew knowledgeable and newcomers moved to Memphis, Hanh introduced more authentic Vietnamese cuisine. Marked with asterisks on the menu, the Vietnamese dishes are among the restaurant’s most popular. Vietnamese vermicelli is shrimp, onions, bean sprouts, and tiny bits of pork stir-fried with Hanh’s curry, which is a little spicier than most. Fragrant and vitamin-packed, lemongrass dishes made with proteins and vegetables taste bright and healthy like just-picked mint. And then there are the soups, such as roasted pork noodle, an irresistible combination of plump wontons, paper-thin slices of pork, and a mound of spring green cilantro floating in the middle.
Order the restaurant’s pho, and while you merrily slurp up noodles with your head in the bowl, Joe will likely stop by with a sample of beef bone marrow in a small ceramic bowl. “Here taste,” he will say, melting the marrow between his fingertips. “We cook the bone broth four days.”
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Banh Xeo ($9) Translated as “sizzling shell,” Banh Xeo is a savory rice pancake stuffed with shrimp and ground pork, fried crispy, and sprinkled with house-made fish sauce. It is my favorite dish in Memphis. (Big statement, but true.)
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Cube Tender Butter Beef ($15) “It’s our version of American steak,” explains Victor Bach, Joe and Hanh’s son, about the tender cubed sirloin, stir-fried with onions, butter, and garlic and garnished with chopped lettuce and tomato slices.
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Rice Noodle Soup Combination ($10) A cure-all for any ailment, the combination soup includes three kinds of protein — pork, beef, and chicken — in slow-simmered stock studded with vermicelli, green onions, bean sprouts, and garlic.
