Saratoga Business Journal photo
By Susan Elise Campbell
An authentic Vietnamese restaurant, Mama’s Pho House, has come to Malta. Mama is Nga Nguyen ( “Graceful Win”), whose first restaurant fulfills a lifetime dream.
Pho is the brothy noodle dish that has gained popularity everywhere. Already customers are coming up from Albany and down from Lake George and Montreal to visit her restaurant since the September 10th opening, Nga said.
“There has been no Vietnamese restaurant past Northway Exit 9,” she said. “Malta is a good location and I love it here.”
When Nga cooks, her dishes link her love of food, family, and her youth during the Vietnam war years.
“Pho is an international dish, like a meatball, and everybody loves it,” she said. “It contains fresh protein and spices and herbs like anise, clove, ginger, Thai basil and cilantro.”
“Pho helps you sleep well and warm up and feel good,” she said.
“When we were sick growing up we would eat pho and it made our stomach feel so much better,” said her daughter Sandy, who makes her home in Florida with Nga’s only grandchild.
“Or when you’re in college and party really hard, have hot pho broth first thing the next morning,” Sandy said.
Nga said she often puts fresh bean sprouts into her pork, beef and chicken dishes for the added protein. All these proteins are common in Vietnamese cooking and Asian ingredients are available locally, she said.
Nga’s mother is Vietnamese and her father is an African American serviceman. When Nga was 15 years old in 1982, she was accepted under a government program to emigrate to the United States.
In 1988, she traveled with her mother and two brothers to Thailand for a week before going to the Philippines as refugees for about a year. Here they were taught to speak English. By the time the family arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1989 Nga was 21 years old.
“That was the year I began to see in my dream that I would have own a restaurant in America,” said Nga.
But first they moved to Massachusetts, where Nga married her first husband, met her “best friend who is like my only sister,” and had her three children.
“After my divorce, I wanted to start over somewhere and my good friend got me a job doing nails at a salon in New York,” she said. “All my kids went to school here.”
Years later the same friend was encouraging Nga to start Mama’s Pho House, and so were her husband and adult children.
Sandy, the oldest, worked on the interiors and designed the menus over the four summer months before returning home to Florida.
Daughter Amanda, a nurse in Massachusetts, helped out the first week with the grand opening.
Son Bill, the youngest, is working front of house as manager and will soon return home to Texas.
Nga does all the cooking but gets help from her husband, Doan Van Ha, with some of the “heavy lifting, prepping food, grilling, and dish washing,” she said.
It’s hard work that Nga said she “loves so much” that she is “not ready to come home at 11 o’clock at night.”
“I am so happy to be cooking all day, every day,” she said.
As a young girl, Nga started her day at market gathering ingredients, cooking dishes at home, and returning to the streets to sell them. Any profit she made supported her mother, stepfather and two siblings, Sandy said.
“Cooking was not just a means to survive but a profound act of love and dedication,” said Sandy. “Every meal Mama makes is an invitation to a piece of history, art, and heart.”
Sandy said her mother was bullied as a girl because her skin color made her different from all her neighbors and that she is “so proud of what Mama has done.”
Nga laughed when she said she hopes to bring another restaurant to Saratoga one day, but for now that vision remains in her dreams.
“I am very happy to welcome everybody to my restaurant,” said Nga.
She is working with the Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce to have a public event in honor of the opening.
Nga never was able to meet her father.
Mama’s Pho House is located at 1106 Ellsworth Boulevard.
Learn more about her story, the restaurant’s full menu, and hours of operation at www.mamsphohouse.com.