A family-owned Vietnamese restaurant and the last remaining business from Clarendon’s Little Saigon community is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
Tucked in a storefront near the corner of Wilson Blvd and N. Hudson Street, Nam-Viet Restaurant — started in July 1986 by the late Nguyen Van Thoi and his widow, Ngoc Anh Tran — carries on the legacy of what was once a hub of Vietnamese immigrant-owned businesses that opened in the neighborhood following the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Today, the founders’ son, Richard Nguyen, helms the restaurant where he grew up working with his parents and sister, Jennifer. Over the years, the Nguyen siblings say they’ve watched generations of families frequent Nam-Viet, defying the neighborhood’s present reputation for high business turnover.
“As long as [customers] keep on walking through the doors, we’ll keep it going as best as we can, especially with everything in this day and age,” Richard Nguyen told ARLnow. “If you look at the dining scene in Arlington, I think in more recent years, it’s kind of steered away from the mom-and-pop shops, and more of those high-end, corporate chains.”
From the 1980s-1990s, many of Little Saigon’s businesses were displaced due to higher rents and ramped-up development, in part driven by the 1979 opening of the Clarendon Metro station. Some migrated to Falls Church’s Eden Center.
“People always want to give you an idea of Clarendon, but the one thing they always forget is the Little Saigon era,” Richard Nguyen said.
Nam-Viet has stood the test of time, however. Its walls display decades of family and customer photos, glowing magazine features and signed portraits and letters from some of the restaurant’s high-profile political clientele, including several U.S. presidents and the late John McCain, who shared a connection to Van Thoi as a fellow Vietnam War survivor.
Van Thoi, who fled Vietnam in 1979 after being imprisoned during the Vietnam War, fostered a community for fellow POW survivors like McCain, hosting an annual reunion luncheon since the restaurant’s founding that continued until the mid-2010s.
Today, the Nguyens carry on the legacy of caring for service members by delivering meals to firehouses on Christmas Eve.
On the day-to-day, Nam-Viet continues to serve up a menu of Nguyen Van Thoi family recipes, crafted by Tran with influence from their ancestor’s home region of Cần Thơ in southern Vietnam.
Bowls of pho are made with 10-hour, house-simmered bone broths alongside crispy spring rolls and grilled entree platters — dishes the siblings say continue to hold nostalgia. These are joined by the restaurant’s signature “pad Thoi,” a savory, Vietnamese take on pad Thai named after the Thoi patriarch and stir fried with chicken, pork, beef and shrimp.
Aside from a couple of beef dishes that the restaurant removed last year in response to rising food costs, the Nam-Viet menu has largely remained the same over the years.
Amid inflation and other headwinds facing the D.C. region’s restaurants this year, Richard Nguyen said the 40-year-old business is continuing to push on. Despite the changing landscape, he said one bit of wisdom holds true.
“You don’t try to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “For the most part, you keep things as consistent as you can.”
