Mardi Gras is behind us but this weekend another giant annual celebration returns, one where a community sets the table with a bonanza of Vietnamese cooking and invites others to pull up a seat.
Tet is the Vietnamese celebration of the Lunar New Year, and biggest local celebration around it arrives Friday, Saturday and Sunday this week in Village de L'Est in eastern-most New Orleans East.
It’s held around the festival grounds of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, and it rolls out a giant joyous welcome mat for people to partake in Vietnamese culture and community in New Orleans.
It’s a free, family-friendly fest with music and fashion shows, games of chance, fireworks and dragon dances. But eating is so central to Tet, it can all feel like a giant food festival too.
Under block-long canopies, people knock back beers and pass around bottles of Sriracha hot sauce at shared tables filled with a mix of street food and homestyle dishes.
Vietnamese food is a gift to New Orleans, one of the many contributions from an immigrant community that has made this city home.
It is now robustly represented around the region, with staples like pho and spring rolls qualifying as widely-loved comfort food by plenty of people who didn’t necessarily grow up eating it.
But Tet is a master class in the depth and richness of the cuisine, and a heady plunge into its possibilities.
The food booths aren’t run by restaurants, but by different church ministries, and parishioners who often deploy family recipes. That means you’ll find the staple dishes but also food that’s not typically on restaurant menus.
The abundance of different flavors is part of the fun of this event, and the sounds, steam and aromas of all this open-air cooking add to the excitement.
Go with family or a small group of friends. Find a spot at one of the shared tables. Send somebody out to find a few dishes to share and maybe a stop at the beer booth.
And don’t worry about sampling the beef broth soups during Lent. The church provides a dispensation for this one. So happy lunar new year, and you’ll find me around the pho.
