I actually came for a food story, for the chicken. It’s the only dish they serve at the Boat in Seattle’s Little Saigon. But before I could even order, I was greeted by the owner, Yenvy Pham, and promptly whisked out onto the street with a new mission: visit all her favorite vendors in the neighborhood. In 2026, Little Saigon is embattled, to say the least, faced with the reality of a drug and homeless crisis unfolding on of their doorsteps. But a tour with a James Beard finalist restaurateur through the neighborhood—one her family has helped steward for decades—didn’t sound like a losing proposition. So, with an empty stomach and a curious mind, I followed Pham out the door.
As we walked, Pham revealed herself as a veritable Little Saigon wiki. She would point at a building and give me the Carfax: who owns it, who their kids are, what ethnicity, and what other businesses they own.
Pham’s own family has a deep-rooted history in the Seattle food scene. Often credited with opening the city’s first phở shop, her family now owns and operates the Boat, Phở Bac Súp Shop, Phở cific Standard Time, and Hello Em Việt Coffee and Roastery. And they like keeping business in the community.
“One thing about Vietnamese people and Little Saigon, we all use each other,” she says. “I stick to my people. We have been for the last 40 years.”
I learned how true that was at our first stop, WT Seafood Market, where Pham exclusively sources her picks of the freshest fish, geoduck, and lobsters that the shop has to offer. It’s a family affair–one of the fishmongers at WT is the brother of the chef at the Boat. It’s this kind of closeness that makes the connectivity of the neighborhood feel alive and electric.
But this is a community at a crossroads, dually beloved by its people and neglected by its city. And given her surface area on the block, Pham has certainly earned the right to an opinion on the subject, and one she holds closely is that human-to-human communication could solve so much.
“No one likes to be dismissed. No one likes to be told to GTFO,” she says of the illicit drug and alcohol use taking place around us as we walked. “There’s a way to deescalate by talking to people. Like, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Please don’t do that here, I’m running a business.’”
“It’s different for me because I’m in it,” Pham said as we arrived at the next location. “I live here. I know how to talk to people.”
We’d go on to visit almost a dozen of her businesses, including P&S Food for rice rolls, her own cafe and roastery Hello Em for a caffeine break, Seattle Nails Spa Supply just for fun, and a special visit to Lam’s Seafood warehouse, where Pham got us access to see true Little Saigon history.
Hiding in the back, behind her Hello Em coffee beans, live the famed Viet-Wah lions that once stoically guarded the grocery store entrance for over 40 years, before it tragically burned down. They were handcrafted by a local Vietnamese family in the 1980s and became synonymous with memories of the neighborhood for decades. So when Pham was in Chicago for the James Beard Awards, and learned of the fire at Viet-Wah, she immediately made arrangements to save the beloved icons, mobilizing her network back home to evacuate the statues to safety. We snapped some pics before returning to the Boat.
Walking past some especially grim parts of the neighborhood, it’s easy to feel sorry for what’s unfolded. But that’s not the spirit of the folks who live and breathe this place. Pham herself is done waiting around for any sort of change to come down the pike. She knows no one is coming to save Little Saigon, so she and her friends are saving it themselves.
“This is the future space of the Landmark Project,” said Pham while hugging the manager of Dong Hing, where she exclusively buys her meat.
The Landmark Project is an ambitious, $70 million endeavor driven by Friends of Little Saigon and the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda). The goal: inject a new sense of community into this pocket of the city. Pham described the plan for a mixed- housing and creative/community space with a shared kitchen for use by a variety of vendors. The Landmark Project has also paid Dong Hing to comfortably relocate in the neighborhood.
All of this—plus a new food hall in the works by the Thanh Son (Tofu) family and the reimagining of Little Saigon Creative—feels like the start of a new chapter for Little Saigon, and exemplifies the forward-looking spirit I’d come to grasp while on this impromptu tour.
“I just want to hang out in my ’hood. What’s wrong with that?” she told me. “I want to have it alive and activated, lively. How hard is that to ask for?”
We finished back at the Boat. As I processed the previous two hours, Pham served me the marquee cơm gà mắm tỏi, a dish heaped with pressure-fried chicken coated in a brown butter fish sauce with fried garlic, golden turmeric rice, and pineapple pâté Maggi sauce. Perfection on a plate.
Though complex on paper, the dish is really just chicken and rice. Pham’s solution for the neighborhood is just as simple: Be a neighbor. Talk like neighbors. Treat others like neighbors. For her, this goes for both the folks on the streets and the folks inside—also for the people in charge. I believe her. Somewhere between the geoduck and the garlic chicken, I started worrying less about Little Saigon. Pham’s already on it.
