“I’m actually in trouble with the City because of how honest I am on the socials,” Vince Vu deadpans, feigning concern. We’re seated around a tiny table in the front window of Anh Ơi Bake Shop at Sixth and Jackson, and the unvarnished candor I’ve come to know from his IG stories starts pouring out of him right from the jump. “They were like, ‘Actually, you know, as a Restored cohort member, it’d be really great if you could, like, run your ideas between us first?’”
He breaks character, grinning. “I was like, ‘No! What are you talking about? I’m not gonna do that. I don’t even say anything crazy online, guys.’ I’m just like, ‘Hey, it’s tough out here. Come in! Hello! I am selling sweet treats!’”
Behind the friendly face of this neighborhood baker is a skilled political strategy leader, community activist, and storyteller who knows how to light a fire and call folks to action. And after the sweet treats, that’s kind of the entire point of his shop.
Vu opened Anh Ơi Bake Shop in May 2026 as a place to sell his own Vietnamese-inspired cookies and cakes, as well as those of rotating guest bakers. The concept is a collaborative effort—he devotes a tall wooden shelf apiece to fellow Asian American bakers and their creations.
Whatever’s happening inside Anh O’i on any given day,
it’s always hyper-creative, and it’s always about to change.
He snagged the 94-year-old storefront—in the historic former Osami’s Barber Shop space in Seattle’s Nihonmachi (Japantown)—as part of Seattle Restored, a program run through the Seattle Office of Economic Development, the Seattle Good Business Network, and Shunpike. The idea is to rent out and thereby revitalize previously empty retail spaces, then sublet them to new businesses rent-free for six months. He says he actually found the long-empty space himself, then worked with Seattle Restored to secure it via the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, aka SCIDpda. Seattle Restored’s participants also receive marketing help, enjoy professional photography of their wares, benefit from a citywide media campaign to help boost them up, and are connected with the property’s owners to negotiate a possible future lease. It’s a bullpen for entrepreneurs to try out their ideas, workshop their products, and tweak their business plans accordingly.
The timing seemed great: Anh Ơi would open just in time for the FIFA World Cup. “And we all know how that went,” Vu quips. Famously, the soccer-fan foot traffic that was promised by the city failed to materialize in the CID. That’s when Vu took matters into his own hands and started telling it like it is—via social media. In late June, he kicked off a reel by telling the camera, “I think the World Cup games in Seattle caused my business to have the worst sales day that it’s ever had.”
The FIFA crash and the viral-ish reel that followed were just the beginning of Anh Ơi’s online media blitz. Today, Vu is harnessing as much marketing reach as the socials can bring him, mostly via reels. These include his takes on popular memes with CID themes inserted, and installments of “The Anh Ơi School of Business,” where he “explain[s] business lessons I learned because I was forced to.” Other times, he’s just telling us that persimmons are in season and to look out for all the delicious pastries about to happen.
Another quirk of the project: Everything in the store is prepackaged. “Yeah, my production isn’t here,” he explains. “I bake my own stuff in SoDo, and I buy the wrapped pastries from the other vendors and then sell them here. I’m just shelves. I’m a grocery store.”
The treats themselves are as fascinating as his business model. Gaze at each shelf in Anh Ơi and read all the different placards with the bios of the bakers and the photos of their faces, and it’s like they’re baking little diary entries for us. On the day I interviewed Vu, baker Cindy Vuong, who operates as Sweet Dream Bakes, had pineapple bun cookies and lotus mooncakes filled with salted egg yolks on her shelf, while Alison Shiu from PãoBāo Bread was selling Portuguese-Chinese snacks like corn focaccia buns dressed with dried shrimp chili oil and sesame cookies loaded with spicy Huang Fei Hong peanuts. (To my chagrin, her char siu chouriço bao had sold out—that’s Portuguese chouriço sausage and char siu, aka Chinese barbecue pork baked inside a crispy-crusted milk bread bun.) La Chinita’s Cocina melds Mexican and Muslim Southeast Asian flavors—among owner Philicia Saephan’s goodies is an ube-s’more brownie topped with beef-gelatin-based halal marshmallows. And Vu himself makes a strawberry corn milk cookie and a fried banana cookie that both go crazy and sell out consistently. These shelves are essentially a personal to-do list for me.
There’s a self-serve cooler case in back for things like durian ice cream and canned cà phê sữa đá. The shop also has room for a coffee/tea cart, where several different pop-uppers—like Muni Cafe, whose menu includes, for example, a matcha latte crowned with a cloud of banana cold foam—have camped out for six-week stints.
When asked how he curates his gallery of bakers, Vu says he began with people he’d met in the farmers market circuit. “I’d popped up at lots of different events, festivals, markets… and you quickly figure out who the competitive vendors are and who the chill ones are, who are very collaborative, very open. When I opened this shop, I called all the chill ones and was like, ‘Hey, I love your stuff. Let’s sell together.’”
Vu also recruits new bakers at farmers markets and other pop-ups, plus he gets new folks coming in with samples all the time. He says he always chats with prospective bakers and makers at length to see if they have matched energy, especially since he enjoys hearing people’s food stories. “What I really love is when someone’s like, ‘Oh, I made this because it reminds me of my mom,’ and I can be like, ‘Oh wow, really? Why? Tell me about your mom.’”
Whatever’s happening inside Anh Ơi on any given day, it’s always hyper-creative, and it’s always about to change. If you eat something you love, you can always check the shelf’s sign and follow the maker online to see where else they sell their stuff. In fact, that’s the whole idea: to be a marketing engine for the superhero pantheon of indie Asian American bakers.
“Government policies make it really hard to start
any business, especially a food business.”
How did Vu cook up such a clever concept? “I’ve been a baker my entire life,” he replies, “like as a subplot. I have a master’s in public policy, and I worked in politics—I worked for Dow [Constantine, former King County Executive]. That’s what brought me to Seattle. And then I worked in tech, and even then, I was baking on the side.
“But when I left tech,” he says, “and you hear this all the time, but tech left me completely spiritually defunct. I felt like I was doing evil. Like, ‘I’m an evildoer. I’m not making the world better.’ And that really bothered me.” He decided to do something not evil for a living instead and took a four-month sabbatical to Vietnam to figure out what that was. “I knew I wanted to do something tactile, with my hands. And I wanted to do something that’s very unapologetically me, which is something Asian American– and community-focused. So I sort of marinated in those ideas.”
From the trip emerged the idea for Anh Ơi. The name is Vietnamese for “hey, you,” specifically when addressing an older male. Per the shop’s website, “it’s a tender little call to someone you care about—a brother, a lover, a friend. It’s playful, it’s warm, it’s how we pull each other close.”
The shop’s concept was nudged along into reality by Vu’s background in government, and his years of tech and marketing experience have proved useful too. “I knew that government policies make it really hard to start any business,” he said, “and especially a food business. So I was like, ‘Let me do it in a way that gets around a lot of that stuff.’” Vu says that, by and large, people don’t know—and the city doesn’t make it easy for them to know—that they can start a food business in such a creative, nonstandard way. He suspects he’s gotten some superfluous attention from county health inspectors for publicly telling folks how it’s done. “It’s so funny,” he says, “because the city has sent so many inspectors here, and like, I worked for the government for 10 years. So like, try me, right? Please try me.
“I always tell people if I ever ran for office,” he says, “I’d be a single-issue politician, and that issue would be: We have to fix our small food business process. Like, people are getting crazy diarrhea from shredded lettuce and finding glass in their frozen bread, or whatever is happening from the big conglomerations. And yet you’re gonna come here over and over to try to pick on my tiny-ass business that hasn’t broken any rules?”
As of press time, Vu’s Seattle Restored tenancy expires October 15. What happens next isn’t totally up to him. “I really want to stay. It depends on Restored—I need their blessing.” Hopefully, he says, once he gets it, he’ll be able to coordinate with SCIDpda and the building’s owners directly going forward.
Vu isn’t shy about his jingoism when it comes to the CID, its rich history, and its scads of very beautiful buildings. When he was applying for the Seattle Restored program, the neighborhood was nonnegotiable for him: “This business makes no sense anywhere but the CID.” As such, he’s frustrated with the city’s lack of investment in the neighborhood. He points to a recent application filed by McDonald’s for the prominent former Bartell Drugs space at Fourth and Jackson. “I’m like, ‘Do you want that to happen to the CID?’ So, I tell my friends, ‘There’s a lot of space available here. The spaces are rough. But we can make them better! We’ll invest in the neighborhood—that’s what we do.’”
It’s a tenuous situation, Vu says, to simultaneously rescue a historic district from both empty storefronts and evil empires. “Honestly, the city should be throwing money at us. There’s great food here. We talk about it like it’s one of the gems of the city. These old buildings are great. Tourists come here—it’s one of their main stops. But the city won’t invest in it, and no one is moving here. Why not? The city could be helping us.”
The challenges of operating a business in the CID aside, Vu’s project sure seems like a success on paper. “I’m the most successful Restored installation they’ve had,” he admits. “I do really well here. But from a revenue perspective, it’s still incredibly difficult… I think the bigger thing I’m trying to highlight is that, hey, I’ve had all these supports, and I have a ton of community help, and I get money from these people. And still, even then, whew. It is rough out here.”
With Seattle rent, permit fees, and other operating costs sharply rising to more comedic and nonsensical heights every year, this city deeply needs more creative, unconventional business-building—especially the food kind. Something needs to change, as soon as possible.
To put a bow on it, Vu concludes: “Let’s challenge what the local food landscape looks like. Right? It doesn’t have to be just solitary genius jerk chefs out here. It can be small people you’ve never heard of, sharing ideas and helping each other make them real. That’s why I do what I do.”
