New York's Hue Night: A Handcrafted Banquet's Tribute to the Empire City

The lights dimmed, just as the desserts arrived.

Servers filed out of the kitchen, carrying faintly glowing lantern boxes through the dim restaurant, each box topped with jewel-toned sweets. The chatter around the shared long tables gradually quieted, as traditional Vietnamese imperial court music filled the room.

On the other side of the world, in central Vietnam, the June Festival of Hue was in full swing, while inside the WSA building in Lower Manhattan, another celebration of the former imperial capital was taking shape: a love letter to Vietnam's richest and most refined culinary tradition.

This dinner was the eighth edition of Ăn Cỗ — a Vietnamese banquet series hosted by Thu Pham Buser and Taylor Buser. The name means "to attend a feast," and over the past few years, the couple has built a loyal following in New York by presenting regional Vietnamese cuisines rarely seen on American restaurant menus. Previous dinners have explored the floating markets of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam's islands, and jungle regions. The latest edition, focused on the former imperial capital of Hue, is their most ambitious yet.

"Hue is the culinary innovation capital of Vietnam," Thu, a chef and food stylist, told me. "The central region is the source of many of our national dishes." For centuries, chefs, artisans, and craftspeople flocked to this imperial city, where the royal court rewarded the most sophisticated techniques and presentations.

Taylor, dressed in a traditional maroon áo dài, introduced each course throughout the evening, while you could catch glimpses of Thu commanding the team in the open kitchen, wearing wide-leg blue and red trousers. The dinner began with three signature Hue steamed dumplings — the kind you'd "pick out as they walk through the small markets of Hue": the translucent shrimp dumpling bánh bột lọc, the soft purple taro dumpling bánh ít trần filled with mung bean paste, and the silky banana leaf-wrapped dumpling bánh nậm, served with fried shallots, scallion oil, and spicy fish sauce.

These dumplings were so delicate it was almost a shame to touch them. Most of the recipes Thu relies on exist only in home kitchens, not prepared for 300 diners on five consecutive nights. Scaling up meant weeks of dough testing, and she admits, "The dough was not easy to work with." In the end, her team handcrafted about 2,500 dumplings. To make them, she recreated scenes from her childhood at her mother's restaurant, setting up a four-person station she dubbed the "dumpling factory." "One person cuts the dough, the next flattens it, the third fills it, and the fourth seals it," she recalled, describing the assembly line rhythm she watched her mother and aunts use while cooking together.Next came bánh ép cassava crêpes, a chewy street snack stuffed with lemongrass-grilled beef, papaya, and pungent pineapple mắm nêm sauce, followed by a bright fermented shrimp salad with crispy pork belly, green mango, and a galangal-lime leaf cracker. The room grew louder as cocktails were refilled and guests swapped favorite bites. Across from me sat a man in a Knicks jersey, who said he and his wife had attended nearly every dinner. The series inspired them to book their own trip to Vietnam. Speaking with Taylor, he pointed out a particularly lively corner of the room: a dozen friends who had just reunited after a wedding in Vietnam, choosing Ăn Cỗ as a way to relive the celebration abroad.

The most lavish course was bánh canh bột xắt: hand-cut rice noodles in blue crab broth, topped with crab cake, quail eggs, Vietnamese coriander, and green peppercorns—accompanied by wet wipes and plastic gloves. Like nearly every other item on the menu, the noodles were made entirely from scratch. Thu’s team hand-cut about 65 kilograms of noodles, just one of many marathon prep steps in the pursuit of authenticity. “It’s a labor of love,” she said.

The handmade details extended beyond the plate. Crystal paper lanterns casting warm amber light on each table were made in Huế and shipped to New York, while a large screen played footage from the couple’s latest research trip to Vietnam—learning from family artisans and sourcing specialty ingredients.

The lantern dessert at the end of the feast was also born from that trip: on a night boat on the Perfume River in Huế, the pair lit lanterns. “Huế is so serene, and watching them drift away felt deeply soul-stirring,” Thu said. Inspired to recreate that feeling for the dinner, Taylor spent months prototyping glowing lantern boxes while Thu perfected the dessert inside.

“It was countless sleepless nights,” Taylor added. “If we didn’t know why we were doing this, it would have been incredibly hard. But we had this drive.” He himself was about to quit his full-time job to devote himself entirely to Ăn Cỗ. “If there’s only one thing in life,” he said, “you have to realize your vision, your passion.”

Servers moved through the room carrying those glowing lantern boxes, each displaying three sweet soups inspired by Huế’s riverside dessert stalls: sweet corn with salted coconut milk, purple sweet potato with tapioca pearls, and perhaps the evening’s biggest surprise—candied pork fat wrapped in pandan-infused tapioca dough. The Busers had structured the entire menu as “A Day in Huế,” ending where many of the city’s nights conclude—at the colorful vendors by the river.

Then the music started again. A classic Vietnamese folk song played, and a few tables began to sing along, spontaneously breaking into karaoke—exactly the kind of gathering the series’ name evokes.In this globally homogenized city, a feast like Ăn Cỗ offers an experience that goes against the grain: it does not pursue efficiency but embraces complexity; it does not replicate trends but delves into the local. When diners marvel at a handmade shrimp dumpling, or recall their grandmother’s kitchen because of a bowl of blue crab soup, food is no longer just for sustenance but becomes a bridge—connecting New York and Huế, connecting shared memories among strangers, connecting a city's eternal yearning for profound experiences.