{"id":17651,"date":"2015-11-23T09:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T17:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/the-pho-empress-of-anchorage\/"},"modified":"2015-11-23T09:00:24","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T17:00:24","slug":"the-pho-empress-of-anchorage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/the-pho-empress-of-anchorage\/","title":{"rendered":"The pho empress of Anchorage"},"content":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014<\/strong> Behind any steaming bowl of pho soup or fried rice at Pho Vietnam 8, a new Fireweed Lane restaurant, is Linda La, the mastermind behind the chain of Anchorage\u2019s Pho Vietnam restaurants.<\/p>\n

Pho Vietnam 8 is actually the fifth venture, despite the name. In Vietnamese culture, the number eight is associated with wealth and prosperity. What about five, six and seven?<\/p>\n

\u201cNot so good,\u201d La said in her latest restaurant in early October.<\/p>\n

La, 47, has founded about a half-dozen pho restaurants in Anchorage. While she no longer operates them all \u2014 passing ownership of all but one off to members of her family \u2014 the recipes, style and design are all hers. The chefs are all closely trained under her supervision and the sauces she developed, used for everything from pad Thai to spring roll dipping sauce, are made from secret recipes that she still prepares herself for each location.<\/p>\n

After almost 20 years in business, La still works seven days a week. She\u2019s saved enough to buy the building her newest restaurant is housed in and send her two daughters to college. Still, she and her husband, Minh Tran, show up for work every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like to work, I like to cook,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not lazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of that is her passion for food. La loves to travel, and wherever she goes, she and her family seek out the best places to eat. Mexican cuisine, in particular, is a favorite.<\/p>\n

A keen sense for business has also been instrumental in her success. Over the years, she\u2019s modified her Southeast Asian cuisine to American palates based on customer feedback. Her latest restaurant, for example, has a whole menu of vegetarian dishes based on local demand. In an effort to perfect it, she went back to Vietnam to study vegetarian cuisine with monks at a Buddhist temple in her hometown.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always looking at customers and trying to figure out what they like,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The popularity of pho \u2014 the traditional Vietnamese soup of rich broth, usually with rice noodles and meat \u2014 has been on the rise in recent years. In 1995, it was rare enough that an Anchorage Daily News article heralded one of the first restaurants serving the dish (its headline: \u201cAt long last, real Vietnamese\u201d).<\/p>\n

Since then, the cuisine\u2019s popularity has been on the rise, with 2008 marking a banner year for pho. La opened the first Pho Vietnam restaurant in June 2008 \u2014 six months after Spenard\u2019s popular Pho Lena restaurant also opened its doors.<\/p>\n

Of the 40 stories on pho in the Anchorage Daily News archives, about two-thirds were published after 2008.<\/p>\n

According to the Anchorage Department of Health and Human Services, today 16 restaurants have \u201cpho\u201d in the name, with many other Asian restaurants offering pho on the menu as well.<\/p>\n

\n

Coming to Alaska<\/strong><\/p>\n

La started Pho Vietnam as the cuisine was taking off but her success is about more than just lucky timing. Her younger sister, Lisa Lane, thinks it comes from a work ethic influenced by her immigrant roots.<\/p>\n

Lane said that when the family came to Alaska from Vietnam, they spoke no English and had almost nothing. Even getting to Alaska was a 10-year process, hindered by the anti-American communist regime that took over the country after the Vietnam War. That anti-American sentiment affected La in other ways too. She was barred from getting a college education in Vietnam because her sister, Lane, has an American father.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe always told me, \u2018I\u2019m going to do it. I\u2019m not going to settle for anything because we came here with nothing,\u2019\u201d Lane said. \u201c(La said,) \u2018I\u2019m going to make sure my kids have what I don\u2019t have.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

La grew up in Vinh Long, in the southern part of Vietnam. In 1989, she immigrated to Anchorage, where her half-sister\u2019s father lived, along with her two sisters and mother.<\/p>\n

She worked a number of jobs after coming to the U.S. She was a hairstylist, opened a nail salon and for a time worked as a \u201csky chef,\u201d catering airplane food.<\/p>\n

But La\u2019s passion was preparing her native Vietnamese cuisine. Her cooking was influenced by her grandmother, who used to cater weddings and other special events in Vietnam. She said that gave her an innate sense of how to cook.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s in my brain already,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not scared to go into the kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n

La said that in the \u201890s, the Vietnamese community in Anchorage was small. With few Vietnamese restaurants and people craving homemade pho, she started hosting weekend lunches.<\/p>\n

Pho, cooked all day in giant pots, is meant for sharing. What started as a gathering for family expanded to other members of the community. As the lunches grew, more people encouraged her to open a restaurant. So she did, opening Pho Saigon in the Dimond Center in 1999.<\/p>\n

Lane, her sister, said that when it first opened, business was tough. The mall had strict hours that weren\u2019t ideal for the restaurant. In the early 2000s, pho was still catching on with the general Anchorage population. Lane, who worked as a server, said she often had to explain what the dish was to customers.<\/p>\n

In 2004, La and her first husband divorced. Running the restaurant as a newly single mother of two was too much. So she sold it and went back to doing nails.<\/p>\n

But La said that didn\u2019t make her happy. So in 2008, with the support of her second husband, she went back to pho, opening Pho Vietnam in a strip mall on Denali Street.<\/p>\n

Since she opened Pho Vietnam, the popularity of pho has only increased. Her brother-in-law, Thomas Crandall, thinks Anchorage\u2019s love of pho stems from the city\u2019s cold, wet weather.<\/p>\n

La understood that demand too and tried to devise a way to get the food across the city. That meant expansion. A second restaurant opened in Muldoon, a third in Government Hill and another in Jewel Lake. At each one, she would get things off the ground and then hand it over to a relative. Part of the hand-off includes training the chefs.<\/p>\n

Jesus Gonzalez has worked with La for three years and she considers him her best chef. Gonzalez had years of experience cooking Mexican and American food but didn\u2019t know anything about cooking Vietnamese food before working with La. But she\u2019s a good teacher, he said, with a perfectionist\u2019s eye. Little things, like making sure each handful of rice noodles that goes into a bowl of pho is the right size (the size of La\u2019s small palm), were drilled into him.<\/p>\n

And while she\u2019s shared many of her food tips, there\u2019s one she hasn\u2019t shared: how to make the sauces.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s her secret,\u201d he said. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t trust me yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

La says she has no plans to stop working anytime soon but that Pho Vietnam 8 will be her last pho location. She\u2019s able to take care of her family, and after years of struggle, that\u2019s all she ever wanted to do in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so happy right now,\u201d she said. \u201cI just want to do enough for my family. One more may be too much.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANCHORAGE \u2014 Behind any steaming bowl of pho soup or fried rice at Pho Vietnam 8, a new Fireweed Lane restaurant, is Linda La, the mastermind behind the chain of Anchorage\u2019s Pho Vietnam restaurants. Pho Vietnam 8 is actually the fifth venture, despite the name. In Vietnamese culture, the number eight is associated with wealth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":17652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-17651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17651"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}