DINING

NGON IS WHERE THE HEART IS

Hanoi street food meets Lowest Greenville

Story by RENEE UMSTED | Photography by JESSICA TURNER

CAROL NGUYEN never planned to be a restaurant owner.

After leaving Vietnam in 1978 as a refugee, she moved with her family to Australia. It wasn’t until 1995 when she returned to Vietnam, and she lived there a few years before migrating to Texas 20 years ago.

Her first business was a retail store, but it only lasted about a year. Eventually, she decided to open a restaurant, which wasn’t an unusual decision for her family. One of her cousins owns one in Vietnam, and her aunt has a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans.

The Cajun restaurant was where Nguyen learned the ins and outs of the business. And in 2013, she opened Crazee Crab in Grand Prairie. Seven years passed before Nguyen opened Ngon Vietnamese Kitchen. Missing the food she grew up eating, she wanted to do it right.

“I wanted to try some Vietnamese food

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The goi du du kho bo is a papaya and beef jerky salad topped with peanuts. Bun cha Hanoi is served with a side of sweetened fish sauce.

that I always had in Vietnam, but I wanted it to be my own way, my family recipe that I can’t find around here,” she says.

She picked a location on Greenville Avenue, noticing there were plenty of Vietnamese restaurants in the suburbs but fewer of them in Dallas.

Since opening in 2020, Ngon has already become a neighborhood favorite, claiming some “best of” titles in local publications.

“We have a lot of support from the community,” she says.

The one-page menu isn’t overwhelming. There are two salads, three curry dishes, six rice plates, nine noodle options and a handful of starters, sides and desserts. All of it is authentic, and some of the recipes, like the bun cha Hanoi, belong to her grandmother, who taught her to cook. The rest of the dishes were developed as Nguyen learned from professionals in Vietnam.

Pho, rice noodles in a savory beef broth, is one of the most popular selections, and Ngon offers it in a few varieties — with chicken, beef or seafood, as well as a vegetarian option. Another common pick is the shaking tenderloin, which is beef tenderloin, bell pepper and onions seasoned with black pepper and served with blue rice.

Nguyen says the food at Ngon is unlike food served at other Vietnamese places. Her restaurant prepares dishes in the style of northern Vietnam, which is saltier and uses different spices from the sweeter southern Vietnamese versions.

Ngon is also unique in its celebration of Vietnamese culture and events. For the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, which took place in September, the restaurant hosted lion dance performances and served holiday dishes: hopia cake, or mooncake, and a red bean pudding. Many Asian countries celebrate this holiday, but Vietnam’s take has its own traditions and legends. One version of a story tells of a man named Cuôi who clung to a magical banyan tree as it floated to the moon. It’s said that a close look at the full moon will reveal the shadow of a man sitting under a tree.

“I want people around here to know more about Vietnamese culture. People know about Chinese and Japanese a lot more than Vietnamese, so I want to introduce my culture,” she says.

Nestled between Gallo Nero and Bullzerk, Ngon offers indoor and patio seating on Lowest Greenville. Inside, Nguyen designed the space to be comfortable and welcoming.

“I love plants, so I have a lot of green around the restaurant,” she says.

The word “ngon,” without an accent, means “delicious” in Vietnamese. With the accent, ngôn changes pronunciation, and it’s the name of Nguyen’s mother.

“I think about my mom first because she’s the one who always supported me,” Nguyen says.

Nguyen plays active roles at the restaurant. She’s not just the owner; she’s also the head chef and waits tables, making menu recommendations to guests. Many people who’ve tried Vietnamese food before have come across pho or spring rolls. Ngon offers those, but Nguyen says she encourages people to venture beyond what’s familiar.

In the future, Nguyen says she hopes to open a second Ngon either in Austin, where her 25-year-old child lives, or in Florida, where she has a home. “I want customers to feel like they’ve come to visit a friend or family’s house,” Nguyen says. “So I try my best to make it cozy.”

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live & let write

A FORMER CIA ANALYST TURNED SPY-THRILLER AUTHOR

Story by RENEE UMSTED Photography by YUVIE STYLES

DAVID MCCLOSKEY WANTED TO BE AN ASTRONAUT WHEN HE GREW UP.

“Between some combination of being very tall, which precludes you from being an astronaut, and also being very afraid of heights, I realized that was not going to fly,” he says. At some point, he stopped trying to figure out what he wanted to be. It wasn’t until college when he decided to choose a career related to international relations and foreign affairs. When the CIA came to campus to talk about its internship program, McCloskey didn’t think he’d be selected. “It’s one of those things where you’re like,

‘OK, pretty easy for me to apply, relatively speaking, and I’ll never get it, but why not try,” he says.

McCloskey didn’t just get to see the inner workings of an agency shrouded in secrets. He also wrote a book. Alone, each of those experiences could be considered special. But together, they’ve placed him in an exclusive club, one with John le Carré and Karen Cleveland on its roster.

Working for the CIA allowed him to travel and pursue interests. Before he could start, he needed a security clearance, and at age 19, took his first polygraph test. After completing two summers as an intern, McCloskey graduated from college and joined the agency full-time. He spent eight years as an analyst, working mostly from Virginia but also taking trips to the CIA’s stations in the Middle East. Job responsibilities included briefing senior White House officials — including the president — ambassadors and military officials and providing classified testimony to congressional oversight committees.

After leaving the agency, he earned a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. A few months later,

he and h i s wife moved to Uptown in Dallas for his new job at McKinsey & Co., a business management firm that advises companies in a range of industries. As a consultant, McCloskey worked with clients involved in national security, aerospace and transportation.

There were a few months between graduation and the first day at McKinsey, so he started writing, seeking to process experiences from his time in the CIA. McCloskey had witnessed the tumult of the Arab Spring and the Syrian war from field stations in the Middle East. He had also worked for a while in the Counterterrorism Center, focusing on the jihad in Syria and Iraq.

“I wrote a lot. Most of it was very bad,” he says, adding he’s enjoyed writing since elementary school. “I put it on the shelf, did the McKinsey job for a while and then came back to it and realized that I really wanted to write something that I would enjoy writing and other people would enjoy reading.”

Only a couple characters and sentences from the draft written in the three-month period before he started at McKinsey made it to the final version. He didn’t start taking steps to craft a publishable work — soliciting feedback on drafts, thinking about plot, searching for an agent and publisher — until 2019.

Years passed between the two writing periods.

“I was doing a consulting job here that was pretty intense, and there wasn’t a whole lot of creative or emotional energy left at the end of the day or the end of the week to devote to writing,” he says, having by then moved his family from Uptown to Lakewood. The neighborhood, with its “laidback” feel, was closer to White Rock Lake and friends. Writing seven or eight hours each day, McCloskey was “mostly done” with Damascus Station in about eight months. The process was delayed when publishing houses stopped acquiring new submissions because of the pandemic, so his book wasn’t picked up by a publisher until summer 2020. The CIA’s Publications Review Board returned a sanctioned version of the book within five days. An editor at W. W. Norton & Co. helped him through a rewrite, and the publisher purchased the book. The first print run included 17,500 copies.

Damascus Station relies on McCloskey’s experience and insider perspective as a former analyst. It tells the fictional story of Sam Joseph, a CIA case officer who is trying to avenge his colleague who was captured and killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s secret police. Joseph is sent to Paris to recruit a Syrian Palace official, Miriam Haddad, who is beginning to feel uneasy about supporting the regime. She and Joseph fall in love, beginning a dangerous and emotional adventure.

McCloskey is already working on his second book. For a while, he pursued a storyline set in the Big Bend region, but the idea didn’t pan out.

“I’m still doing a U.S.-Russia spy novel, but it’s pretty much all set in Russia, Langley and Europe,” he says. ”It’s focused on the next phase of the U.S.Russia spy conflict and imagining what that might look like.”

Photos courtesy of Maestri Studio & Michael Cagle Photography

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