Descending the stairs into The Paper Bridge’s subterranean dining room in Portland, Oregon, feels like crossing the threshold into another city. It evokes the Cầu Giấy (“paper bridge” in English) neighborhood of Hanoi, where married chefs and co-owners Quynh Nguyen and Gian Carlo Reinardy met.
The dining room at The Paper Bridge in Portland, Oregon.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
Most Vietnamese cuisine in America reflects the culture of South Vietnam, where most immigrants to the U.S. have historically come from. The menu at The Paper Bridge offers a whirlwind culinary tour of the lesser-known stars of the country’s Northern cuisines: Dinner might start with bánh mì que hải phòng, finger-size banh mi sandwiches from Vietnam’s third-largest city, Haiphong, followed by grilled skewers of galangal pork and curry leaf, quivering cubes of fermented tofu, or spice-rubbed king oyster mushrooms in a nod to Sa Pa, a northwestern city at the threshold to the Himalayas known for its skewer joints.
Each dish draws on Nguyen’s decade of studying Vietnam’s ethnic subcultures — she received a master’s degree in traditional dance before pivoting to cooking — and the couple’s shared passion for storytelling. Nguyen grew up in Hanoi; Reinardy moved there from Milwaukee with the intent of taking a break from a culinary career but ended up working as a chef. They met in 2013 through Nguyen’s uncle, who owned a beer garden that Reinardy frequented.
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On dates, they made a game out of dissecting their favorite dishes. Eventually they married, and the running joke became a shared vision of bringing the diverse cuisine of North Vietnam to life in the United States.
They started with a focus on a foundational ingredient: rice noodles. In their research, Nguyen and Reinardy found that few Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S. make fresh rice noodles. (Most use dried.) They studied with dozens of noodle makers in Vietnam, read papers on the science of rice noodles, and consulted with the machinist who’d built their noodle-making machine.
Fresh rice noodles, made daily, are at the heart of The Paper Bridge’s menu.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
In Portland, everything was different from Vietnam — the rice, the temperature, the humidity — and what came out of the machine was mush that would fall apart when cooked in water. “Because there’s no gluten to hold them together, you need very specific conditions for these gelatinized starches to crystallize in the right form,” Reinardy explains.
Bún (round) rice noodle batter is traditionally made with aged rice, which is hard to source in the U.S. Instead, Reinardy and Nguyen asked suppliers for their oldest stock of rice flour. They experimented with adding wheat starch, tapioca starch, and agar agar powder to help the noodles hold together.
Once a day, they fired up their noodle-making machine and tested their recipe in an arduous, three-hour-long cooking process. They shared their results with contacts in Vietnam, who offered suggestions: Try hot water; try warm water; try cold water. Try fermenting the batter. After six months, they cracked the code on the round bún noodles — only to have to start again with the flat pho noodles, which called for an entirely different machine and recipe.
A spread including bún cha hà nô (bún noodles and three kinds of pork in a fish sauce broth).
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
Parts of the dining room at The Paper Bridge evoke cafe seating in Hanoi.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
A calamansi gin fizz, one of many Vietnamese-inspired cocktails at The Paper Bridge.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
A selection of Dungeness crab spring rolls and fried stuffed rice cakes.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
The team at The Paper Bridge.
Credit: Food & Wine / Alex Lau
Today, The Paper Bridge has perfected its fresh rice noodles. Fat, tender, supple, and light, bún noodles star in soups like bún chả hà nội, where they swim in a sweet-savory spiced broth along with nuggets of housemade sausage, pork belly, and pork shoulder. Slippery, slurpy flat pho noodles get pride of place in regional styles of pho. (Try the pork and duck version from Cao Bằng.) Uncut noodle sheets are wrapped, spring roll–style, around roast duck, herbs, and lettuce, or deep-fried into a rectangular puff and topped with stir-fried beef and vegetables to make phở chiên phồng, a popular street food.
Nguyen and Reinardy return to Vietnam regularly. Each research trip yields a new dish to perfect, a new ingredient to showcase in a monthly special. A visit last fall sparked a set of pork skewers that highlighted the sweet, musky notes of fresh black cardamom, which Nguyen sourced from farmers sun-drying the spice by the roadside.
On their next trip, they hope to source regional versions of bánh cuốn, a savory pancake-like dish. Some restaurants in the U.S. make it, Nguyen says, but only the version from Hanoi. They’re already working on the batter.
“It’s going to be one of those ones where it’ll take us three months to get it down,” Reinardy says. “But it’ll be fun.”
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