Good Thief, offers great cocktails and modern Vietnamese snacks

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Good Thief

Where: 3336 Main Street, Vancouver

When: Dinner, Wednesday to Monday

Info: 604-428-3336. goodthief.ca

The cocktail-forward Good Thief has just opened next door to its savvy, award-winning sister restaurant, Anh and Chi. Cool and confident, they both add to the texture and colour of our vibrant restaurant culture.

Good Thief behaves like the youngest child — a slightly rebellious funseeker. “The menu immerses guests in nhâu, a cherished Vietnamese tradition of gathering to eat, drink and engage in spirited conversation,” the website says. “It’s about clinking glasses, enjoying each round, and forging bonds among family, friends, and even strangers — a celebration of togetherness.

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While the food at Anh and Chi is modernized authentic Vietnamese, the new kid is more travelled and genre-bending, ‘thieving’ ingredients and techniques from other Asian cuisines. The guardian of their Vietnamese soul and keeper of the flame is ‘Mom’, as the staff at both restaurants call Ly, the matriarch of the two-generation Nguyen restaurant operators, an archetypal refugee family who fled Vietnam and rebuilt lives in a strange country. Their restaurants are the family history of resilience and strength through pain, horror, grief (the father, Hoang Van Nguyen, died at 55 and his photo graces one of the walls). But more recently, it’s writ in joy and fulfilment and meaning. “It’s important to know where you’re going, where you come from,” says Amélie Nguyen, who was in her mother’s womb as her parents escaped to Malaysia in 1980. “My mom remembers seeing a green apple she wanted to eat when she was pregnant with me and salivating. She couldn’t buy it. It was rough.”

With that kind of DNA, she and brother Vincent feel compelled to build an extended family with their employees. Vincent left medical school to help run his parents’ restaurant, Pho Hoang, after his father passed. “We were raised to value where we came from, appreciate that we’re here and remember the sacrifices our parents made for us,” says Amélie. “We pick people who really value family. Everything we do is to make a community. It’s our way of honouring their sacrifice.” Some of their team has been with them for eight years, since they rebranded from Pho Hoang, which had opened in 1985 and was long regarded as one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the city.

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Previous generations were like stepping-stones to Anh and Chi and Good Thief: their father had taught business at a university in Vietnam and their mother and grandmother ran a pho shop, known for playing music like the Beatles and antiwar songs, banned in Vietnam at the time.

For the eating part, the snack style menu has a Vietnamese backbone but borrows without guilt. “Back in the day white people were doing Asian fusion and appropriating,” says Amélie. “Now, we’re reclaiming our identity and borrowing beautiful European techniques. Our team is from all over the world and we love for them to bring in their cultures, too.”

Good Thief’s chef is Jonathan Lee. He was previously the exec sous at the Blue Water Cafe and he, too, comes from a restaurant family. “My dad ran a sushi restaurant in Vancouver and I grew up running around the kitchen,” he says. Mom, though, has the final word. “It’s amazing to work with her. She works so hard. She’s the first person in the kitchen. She can smell my oxtail braise from down the hall and know if it needs adjusting.”

The nhâu style food really is delicious. It can be as simple as pommes frites with Thai green chili aioli. Hold it! It’s actually not that simple. Preparation follows the three-Michelin Fat Duck method, a four-step process for a satisfying exterior crunch — steaming, freezing, blanching, and finally, the frites hit the fryer.

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I loved the B.C. sidestripe shrimp with clarified tamarind, pomelo, mango and ngò ôm (an Asian herb). “This dish kinda got me the job,” Lee laughs. When he cooked it for Amélie, it transported her to a sour fish soup she loves. The bone marrow with pho chimichurri and a baguette from Tommy’s Whole Grain Bakery baguette is luscious and for Amélie, it’s another trip. “It takes me back to nights of scooping fat off the pho broth as a kid with my cousins and eating the bone marrow with hoisin and mom’s chili oil,” she says.

Transport power for me is a riff on the famous Cha Ca La Vong which I had in the original restaurant in Hanoi (lots of copycats now) while the stern matriarch sat with us at the storied upstairs hole-in-the-wall cooking white fish, marinated in turmeric, galangal, lemon grass and fermented shrimp paste mixture under a mountain of dill, with folded dongs (Vietnamese currency notes) fanning out between her fingers. At Good Thief, it’s halibut with turmeric soubise, dill, and shavings of turnip and fennel.

Lee, schooled in Blue Water Cafe’s annual ‘unsung heroes’ seafood menu, is comfortable with squeamish-making ingredients and so you’ll find balut and frogs’ legs, common Vietnamese nhâu dishes. In Vietnam and the Philippines, balut is commonly a boiled embryonic duck egg but at Good Thief, it’s a starter-size quail embryo egg from Abbotsford, peeled, and served with a spicy tamarind sauce, peanuts and rau ram (Vietnamese coriander). The tamarind sauce helps the beginner. Quite honestly, the flavours are mild and egg yolky. “This is what we eat but there’s shame because it’s not accepted in Canada. It’s a balance of being Vietnamese and honouring what I love eating,” says Amélie. As for frog’s legs, Mom’s spicy tamarind glaze makes it a popular item at the restaurant.

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Oxtail, with a pho-flavoured demi-glace, is a tender, aromatic, delectable dish. Lee wraps seasoned meat in caul fat before braising. And for vegetables, order the Athiana Acres organic beets with blood orange and rice patty herb vinaigrette.

At the bar, there’s serious cocktail activity, making for the clinking of glasses part of the evening. Beverage director Ben Kingstone’s drinks are complex, technique-driven and a deft balancing act. They include “loads of molecular gastronomy,” he says. “The entire menu showcases cool, unique techniques.”

The Pho Dac Biet, the signature cocktail, for example, began as an idea to honour Pho Hoang, the origin restaurant. Its making is too complex to describe in this column but includes Mom’s pho spices and herbs, pho-flavoured rice noodles, and fat from the Anh and Chi’s pho pot, frozen to clarify a resulting broth. Another drink infuses red clay into aged rum through a distillation process. “We thought ceramics are an important import from Vietnam,” Kingstone says.

Good Thief imbues the joyous chapter in this family’s journey. Amélie says she recently asked her brother Vincent, head of operations for the restaurants, what he’d now say to himself as the child who watched his parents’ struggles and sacrifices. “He started to choke up and said he’d say that everything is going to be OK,” she said.

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