The Village of Versailles

Every Saturday morning, the vendors arrive to the market in Village de l’Est long before the sun breaks over Bayou Sauvage. They line both sides of the Ly’s Supermarket parking lot on Alcee Fortier Boulevard, their wares arranged in ice chests, on tables, or on the ground atop cardboard or tarps: blue crabs, dried shrimp, garden starts, house plants, prepared meals, produce, and herbs—coriander, lemongrass, water spinach, Thai basil, bitter melon, and snake gourds as long as your leg. It’s a tradition that goes back more than forty years—overseen by the Ly family, who in 2005 received the Southern Foodways Alliance Guardian of the Tradition award for their role in spearheading its inception and ensuring its continuation. By now, these vendors are the elders of the New Orleans Vietnamese community, as are many of their customers. They show up with flashlights, hoping to snag the choicest offerings, and they continue to trickle in until around 8:30 or 9, at which time everyone packs up and heads home.

On a recent such Saturday, just after dawn, I drove twenty minutes east from my home, down Chef Menteur Highway, to the fabled market to see it with my own eyes. It was still cool at that hour, but the heat was threatening to come on strong. Customers and vendors were quietly chatting, perhaps haggling, and nearly everyone was speaking Vietnamese. Money and goods exchanged hands. Most of the vendors were elderly women. They wore loose blouses and pants and many donned a nón lá, a conical Vietnamese hat made of palm leaves. A seafood vendor named Thong Q. Phan told me that after the harvest one should expect more vegetables on display. It seemed to me there was already enough there in boxes and baskets to feed several families.

In response to a wave of job loss in the community of Versailles after the BP oil spill in 2010, community leaders sought out ways to fight food insecurity. One of the resulting initiatives was VEGGI Farmers Cooperative, a garden at the heart of the village, where aquaponics, greenhouses, and Vietnamese farming tradition meet to grow produce enjoyed throughout the community and across New Orleans.

Emily Kask

Phan came to this country, to this neighborhood, in 1978, he said, at a time when waves of his fellow countrymen and women were fleeing on boats and finding their way to the United States. Over the years, he saw the area grow into a formidable community, with a thriving fishing industry, which has, unfortunately, been knocked around and greatly diminished—first by Hurricane Katrina, and later by the BP oil spill in 2010.

Phan said that sales have been even slower lately, and he speculates that’s because gas prices have risen in recent months.

“The people have a certain amount of money,” he said. “They cut down eating to save money for gas.” As if by some karmic justice, a moment later, he sold a bag of frozen king mackerel to an older Black gentleman who lives nearby. The fish was cleaned and ready to cook. “Good eating,” the customer told me. He added that, besides fish, he buys his live chickens and ducks at the market, too.

Although Vietnamese Americans live in virtually every corner of New Orleans these days, the community’s heart and soul has always been in Village de l’Est. But you won’t hear anyone refer to the neighborhood by that name. Instead, everyone calls it “Versailles,” named after the Versailles Arms apartment complex, a housing project that housed many of the first arrivals from Vietnam. (The property was badly damaged after Hurricane Katrina and transformed by developers into the current 2 Oaks Apartments.) The Village of Versailles is one of the densest enclaves of Vietnamese-Americans in this country.

The neighborhood opened in 1964, a six hundred-acre section of drained marshland in the much larger development known as New Orleans East or “the East.” After the 1975 fall of Saigon, refugees began to resettle in the predominantly Black neighborhood. About one thousand families came first, nearly all of them Catholics (the Buddhists came later); the US government and Catholic organizations helped sponsor the move. The refugees were escaping persecution and seeking better lives, and they continued to arrive over the next several years, until the Vietnamese population peaked at roughly five thousand by the year 2000. Then came Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that resulted in community-wide devastation due to floodwaters and dispersion of its residents across the country. The recovery story of Versailles is told in filmmaker S. Leo Chiang’s 2009 documentary A Village Called Versailles, which captures the community’s remarkable return: Within a year, much of the city was rebuilt by its residents, and by 2008, over ninety percent of the community’s population had returned. The film also documents the community’s successful battle against the city’s efforts to open the Chef Menteur Landfill as a place to dump toxic debris from the hurricane, just miles from Versailles.

Still today, the community remains tightly-bound by its shared history and language, along with Mary Queen of Vietnam Church—established in 1983 as the first Catholic parish in the United States for a majority Vietnamese congregation. Today, if you drive the neighborhood streets, you’ll see poverty, to be sure, but there’s an undeniable, thriving middle class—large suburban homes with landscaped gardens in front and vegetable gardens in the back—and Vietnamese-American–owned law firms, pharmacies, jewelry stores, nail salons, community centers, grocery stores, and more: businesses meant to serve the needs of this tight-knit community.

In Versailles, or Village L'Est, touchstones of Vietnamese culture are integrated into the community's foodways, religious traditions, architecture, and landscaping.

Emily Kask

If at first the community was insular out of necessity, it was food that served as one of the earliest connective tissues to the rest of New Orleans. There is perhaps no better example of this than Dong Phuong Bakery and Restaurant.

In Vietnamese, the name Dong Phuong simply means “east”. The restaurant was originally founded by a Vietnamese family who gave the place its name, the Dong Phuong Oriental Restaurant, and soon thereafter, in 1980 or ’81 sold it to a woman who worked for them named De Tran. Tran’s son was married to a baker’s daughter called Huong, who’d been making her father’s traditional mung bean cakes and other treats in her kitchen to sell within the community. The family set up a small section of baked goods in the restaurant, but Huong had larger aspirations. In 1982, she opened her own bakery next door, which endures as the Dong Phuong Restaurant and Bakery known and loved today. In the four decades since, she has turned a once-small operation into a major food producer, one of the most celebrated in the Crescent City.

Huong still manages the day-to-day operations, while her daughter Linh Tran Garza acts as president of the company. The bakery now serves eighteen varieties of traditional and not-so-traditional bánh mì made with the Huongs' version of New Orleans French loaves—sometimes affectionally called “Vietnamese poboys,” a term that isn’t exactly accurate, though is sufficient to lure hesitant Louisianans to the sandwich. And once you’ve experienced one, well, there is no need for another case to be made for them.

Besides the brioches, steamed buns, tapioca, and other treats, the bakery sells around six thousand French loaves a day, Garza said, except Tuesdays—their day off. Those loaves and other goods are delivered to roughly eighty different restaurants and supermarkets around the city, and to Baton Rouge on Fridays. The bakery also exports bean cakes and other products across the country, mostly to the East Coast.

And then, there are the famous Dong Phuong king cakes.

Emily Kask

Remarkably, in an era of fast food, Huong’s king cakes are made by hand, and it takes two days to do it. This is even more surprising considering the recent demand for them during the short and hectic Carnival season, when securing one is akin to procuring a coveted Muses shoe.

The bakery started selling the storied cakes in 2010, selling only around one hundred that first year. By 2015, word had spread and the bakery sold seven thousand king cakes, “way more than we anticipated,” Garza told the Southern Foodways Alliance in an interview that year. It was more than double what they’d sent out the door the year before. Every year the demand has risen, and in 2018, Dong Phuong won a prestigious James Beard America’s Classics award, putting the business even more prominently on the culinary map; sales only ramped up from there. “Every year my mom and I turn our office into, like, a situation room, a war room,” Garza said of the weeks before Mardi Gras, “and kind of plot out the number of staff we need.”

In 2022, incredibly, the bakery sold around sixty thousand king cakes, Garza said. She laughed, as though in disbelief. “We’ve got it down,” she said. All the hard work, all the trial and error, has paid off.

Bridging all of these worlds—local food producers, farmer’s markets, restaurants, and the broader public—is a little nonprofit in Versailles called VEGGI Farmer’s Cooperative. In the wake of the BP oil spill, as fish populations collapsed and untold Vietnamese American workers lost their jobs, VEGGI launched, in 2011, with the intent to address the community’s needs. What better way to tackle food insecurity in a battered economy than to start an urban farm?

One of the village's most prominent institutions is the Dong Phuong Restaurant and Bakery, which serves the most popular king cake in New Orleans, in addition to traditional Vietnamese pastries and its famed "Vietnamese po-boys," or bánh mì.

Emily Kask

The group, led by a team of young Vietnamese Americans, leased a small acreage across the street from Mary Queen of Vietnam Church and started hashing out what could be done. They won some small grants and got the support of various organizations, including the church, and set about training a dozen out-of-work community members on how to utilize aquaponics and greenhouses to grow their own organic food. Soon the nonprofit was selling their crops across New Orleans.

Today, VEGGI works with a number of food producers and organizations on various projects, including a subscription-based Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) network, donating to a number of families in Versailles, and supplying produce to Marjie’s Grill, Mister Mao, Mosquito Supper Club, and several other trendy restaurants in the city. They also sell produce and some packaged food products at the Crescent City Farmers Market, things like pickled greens, infused oils, and the like—family recipes made by locals in small batches that are available nowhere else.

“Creating sustainable incomes through urban farming is the core of VEGGI,” Operations Manager Maddiy Edwards said, “and working with growers of different generations.”

I was able to visit the farm one recent afternoon and spoke to a young farmer while he watered crops. He echoed what I’d heard from a number of second-generation Vietnamese Americans who grew up in Versailles: the young people simply aren’t as interested in farming as their elders, like the woman pulling weeds not far from where we spoke, and so some of their foodways are in danger of being lost.

It’s true that many of the new generation are moving out, going to college, and finding jobs in health care or tech or other sectors, then moving away from Versailles for good. It’s the familiar, and lamentable, cost of assimilation. VEGGI, its organizers hope, is offsetting some of those costs. By intentionally acquiring agricultural and culinary knowledge from the neighborhood’s elders, and serving as a place to hold it as a thing of value, VEGGI not only provides a means of making a living in Versailles. It also helps residents of all generations to reconnect with their roots right here in New Orleans.

In addition to its role in reducing food insecurity in Versailles, VEGGI also utilizes the knowledge of community elders to preserve Vietnamese foodways for the next generation.

Emily Kask

Even with all of its hardships, Versailles isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. There are plenty of reasons to come home—if not to stay, then to visit—and evidence of such congregating is everywhere. Families, Buddhist and Catholics alike, still gather every Sunday at Dong Phuong, as they’ve done for decades. They dine at Ba Mien and Pho Bang and at the other restaurants in the area, whenever they get the chance. And every year, thousands gather on the grounds of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church for the three-day Lunar New Year (Tết,) festival. They come to see family and friends, to watch the dragon dancing, hear the musical performers, play games, stroll around and sample the fried bananas, grilled corn, tapioca, vermicelli, and all the rest of the familiar delicacies.

dpbakery.com

veggifarmcoop.com