On Jan. 2, I woke up early on bright, cold morning in New Orleans and borrowed my brother’s car, fighting traffic down Claiborne Avenue from Uptown, past the looming Superdome and over the eerie cities of above-ground dead at the edge of the French Quarter. Over the Industrial Canal. Through the dredged swamp.
It took a king cake to get me to New Orleans East, a place I’d only ever seen on maps and in news stories before I made my first trip to Dong Phuong Bakery in 2018. I’d spent months of my life, cumulatively, in New Orleans, but I’d never strayed far — and then, at a party, someone had offered me a slice of something sweet. It was more heavily frosted than the king cakes I’d had before, from Haydel’s and Gambino’s, and flatter. It tasted like a croissant filled with cream cheese. I couldn’t stop eating it.
Dong Phuong king cakes, I soon learned, were a precious commodity. You could hope to snare one at various wholesale locations in New Orleans proper — or you could get in the car and go for a drive. I wasn’t about to leave things to chance, so I began to make the drive at least once every Mardi Gras. In 2020, when I was briefly living in New Orleans, I went every week of Carnival season, sometimes sampling a new filling, sometimes sticking with tried-and-true cinnamon or cream cheese.
Every year, the lines got longer, snaking around the parking lot and out toward Chef Menteur Highway, the four-lane road Dong Phuong sits alongside. Driving along the highway, you could be in Mississippi or Arkansas or the bootheel of Missouri; there are semi trucks and warehouses, strip malls and filling stations. But when you reach Dong Phuong, you are squarely in New Orleans. There are king cakes stacked to high heaven, and the banh mi bread is shipped out to restaurants across the city to use for po’boys.
That January morning, the Dong Phuong parking lot was mostly empty. An employee sat at a picnic table out front, taking a smoke break. Dong Phuong is closed on Tuesdays, and this Tuesday, that was especially essential. The next day, king cake sales would begin, and chaos would ensue.
I was there to talk to Linh Tran Garza, the daughter of Dong Phuong’s founders, for a story for the Washington Post. I knew the basics about the bakery — about the demand for its cakes and its place in the robust Vietnamese community in New Orleans East — and that day, I learned more. I learned about Dong Phuong’s roots as a full-service restaurant, how the bakery started out of its kitchen, how the king cake operation underwent exponential growth.
I’ll stop there and urge you to read the full story. Here’s an excerpt:
Tran and her husband, De, arrived as refugees with their three children to the New Orleans area in 1980. They settled in the growing Vietnamese community in Versailles, and Tran began selling her baked goods in a local grocery store. Soon, the couple thought bigger, and they began baking out of the kitchen at De’s mother’s Vietnamese restaurant. They wanted the bread and pastries to reflect their heritage, so they wrote letters home to Vietnam, asking relatives to send recipes, and handwritten instructions arrived in envelopes from halfway across the world.
“It took months to send and receive letters back then,” Tran said. “And it was very hard and expensive to make phone calls. ... I was very happy when I receive a recipe because I know I would be able to try something new and have something new to sell.” Dong Phuong still sells banh pia, a bean cake, using the recipe that arrived in an envelope from Vietnam all those years ago.
Garza, who was a toddler when the family emigrated, said she barely remembers a time without the bakery. “We were always here,” she said. “The school bus dropped us off right there. This is kind of my childhood.”
Absolutely loved this story 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻