But they’re not the overlong stories of your colleague who just got back from holiday. At Nén Light, Summer Le’s stories weave between sacred trees, ancient paper, and cotton-candy Danang clouds. And if they become too much too, when they’re relayed by the waiting staff, you can dial them down from eager to quiet. It even says so on the menu.

Đọc bài viết bằng Tiếng Việt

“Maybe you’re on a date, or you’re having a business meeting, and you don’t want to be interrupted too much. Also, from our side, sometimes it’s hard to gauge the guests’ desire to know a lot (or a little) about what they’re eating, so we decided to include the level of conversation on the menu,” Summer Le explains. 

Light Is Everywhere 

With a menu this rich in detail, it’s worth opting for ‘eager’. But then, there’s so much to take in and eat at the same time. No wonder Summer Le called this, her second restaurant that opened in June, that was created after she and the team decamped from her hometown of Danang around the time of the pandemic, ‘Light’ – in the illuminating sense. “And light is everywhere, and it has a positive feeling,” Summer smiles. 

Right now, they’re serving their Sto:ry Menu #4. It’s already the second menu they’ve served in Saigon since they opened.

Sto:ry Menu #1 and #2 were offered at their first location, Nén Restaurant in Danang which famously welcomed Dominique Crenn, the star chef and owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. “We were fully booked that night,” Summer remembers, “and one of our team had turned Dominique away when her team had called for a reservation!” Once she realized who was wanting to visit, Summer quickly rectified the situation and had Dominique over for lunch.  

Nén Light’s Stories

For now, all of Summer Le and the team’s energy is focused on Nén Light. Although, Summer says, they may open up Nén Restaurant again in Danang one day – they’re from Danang after all.

They found the Nén Light building in District 1 at the start of the year. It had a tree in the yard, just like there is at Nén Restaurant, and so they set about turning it from a dilapidated shared house for low-income families with a cafe in the grounds, into this chic space with an industrial exterior and a single dimly lit, rectangular dining room.

In that hushed space, that’s dark like a theater stage before the performance begins, their Sto:ry Menu #4 is called ‘Origins – Về Nhà’. It aims to “portray Vietnam in a contemporary and respectful style.” And it does so across nine courses that begin with a betel and areca conversation starter and end with the Danang Sky served in two parts, Pt.1 with a sun-dried banana ice cream, and Pt.2 with cotton candy ‘clouds’. 

Summer Le says, each of the nine dishes is an idea. A capsule of marvel and memory.  And each menu is structured like a good yarn, with a turning point, and an ending. 

“Of course, when planning the menu, the intensity of the dishes we serve goes from lighter to heavier,” Summer explains. “And the storytelling goes on top, like icing on the cake.”

Sometimes, the dish begins with a vague concept. Like the fourth dish, where she wanted to create edible sheets inspired by handmade dó paper (or giấy dó), the same way seaweed is compressed into sheets and eaten as a snack. 

Eventually, she discovered a vegetable called mồng tơi that had just the right elasticity to help the sheets bind. In the dish, small squares of the mồng tơi sheets are interspersed with duck pate and grilled eel fish, creating a textually complex, umami-rich bite.  

“Also, in this menu, the fifth dish comes right in the middle of the nine dishes, and it’s also called Balance,” Summer explains. Balance also has five components, a rice roll that you slide through four colored sauces – a red gac fruit and chilli, a yellow eggfruit, a dark green fermented black sesame, and an even darker colored pesto – that feels joyful and childlike, like playing a colorful kid’s xylophone.  

And after that, the menu takes a twist with the sixth dish, Stormborn, an ode to the resilience of Vietnamese people and storm-lashed Danang. 

Practically, creating Stormborn meant “throwing a bunch of things into the fire.” And then serving the salvaged watermelon and almost burnt pigeon, with burnt coconut water. Around the watermelon washes a delicate prawn and egg sauce. And around the pigeon an orange and lotus sauce.

And then the Sto:ry Menu #4 reaches its climax with Home, the seventh dish. 

An Emotional Homecoming

The seventh course, when you’re heading home (or to the feeling of home at least), is conjured up with a saffron porridge paired with another dish of red cornfish. “That dish often induces an emotional reaction in guests,” Summer says. 

Porridge is that universally comforting thing. It’s the food mom serves when you’re feeling off-color. “Home should feel safe, comforting and forgiving,” Summer nods. “The first time we sat down and had the menu start to finish I also nearly cried at the home dish,” she remembers. “But we were so nervous. It’s risky serving a simple porridge as the culmination of the main menu, before our two dessert dishes”

Like the best creative acts, making a Nén Light menu is brave and nerve-wracking in equal measures. “But first of all, it has to taste good,” Summer smiles. “And once we know the taste is there, then it gives us some confidence to proceed.”

Packages Filled With Foraged Ingredients

Summer Le constantly reminds us that this is a team effort that includes “life-partner-in-crime” Leon. “Usually, I’ll come up with the concept for the menu. And then I’ll share it with Leon who will offer some pragmatic feedback.”

The team also includes their moms who have formed a formidable nationwide foraging team. “We have full coverage from north to south,” Summer laughs. “They go out into the countryside and gather whatever interesting things they can find. And so we get these packages filled with foraged ingredients. Then we have to unwrap them and decide what we can do with the things inside.”

The k’nia is a good example. It’s a kind of nut, in the almond family. And it comes from a tree that grows in the Central Highlands that’s considered sacred. Most Vietnamese people, it seems, only know of the k’nia from the famous song ‘Bóng cây K’Nia.’

After playing around, unsatisfactorily, with the k’nia as a milk for the third dish on the menu, they turned it into a savory ice cream, served with a curry mousse and some salty slivers of dry-aged chicken. 

And accompanying each dish is an eclectic pairing. There’s a Kid Muryozan Junmai Ginjo, then a Faiveley Bourgogne Chardonnay and then a funky orange natural wine, Mas Zenitude’s Wild Side. “Hung, our best friend and co-founder, is the sommelier now, although we had to persuade him and he was reluctant at first…”

There’s No End Of Tales To Tell

In fact, only a month after the latest menu’s launch, Summer and the team at Nén Light are already working on the next menu, Sto:ry Menu #5. “Can I tell you what it’s about? No. Not yet. And that’s not because I don’t want to. It’s because it could change a lot. And it will become something different by the time it’s launched.”

We wonder then, with Nén Light’s current menu taking in everything from sacred trees, to traditional paper, and fluffy Danang clouds, and Sto:ry Menu #5 that’s already in development, whether Summer Le will ever run out of stories to tell. “Only when I’m dead,” she decides, “or if I’ve fallen out of love with living.”

Photos by Nghia Ngo for The Dot Magazine unless otherwise stated.