“So, they have this Ukrainian market in Fife,” Lisa Bi explains as she sets down an elaborate, herb-strewn ice cream sandwich, the dessert on her August pop-up menu. “It’s called Emish Market,” she goes on, “and they have delicious, delicious butter. I love their selection of butter. All of them—the Ukrainian butters are so rich and incredible.”
In 2022, while working as an EMT in Atlanta, Bi launched Ba + Mẹ (“Dad + Mom” in Vietnamese) as a way to reconnect with her family through cooking Vietnamese cuisine. Her experiences as an emergency worker during the COVID-19 pandemic “prompted me to reflect on my own relationships,” she says, “particularly with my parents, which had been strained. And I recognized that their love language was food.”
In 2023, Bi brought the whole operation to Seattle, to our city’s immense fortune. Her pop-ups aim to build community and celebrate Vietnamese culture through both her monthly menus of absolute bops and her vivacious, funny-as-hell personality.
“It was always a sign of approval from the OGs when their response was ‘cung béo béo.’”
Presently, she’s in residency on Monday nights at Human People Beer in Roosevelt. She also supplies Pioneer Square’s Parlour with pastries from her other pop-up, Béo Béo Bakery. The latter features breakfast-type fare and displays Bi’s skills as a pâtissière, while Ba + Mẹ is her way to showcase “Vietnamese home food”—meaning Viet dishes that we don’t usually see at restaurants in the US—which she then improvises upon using stylings from Southern food, modern American food, fast food, PNW produce, and whatever the hell else she feels like.
Back to that ice cream sandwich: It’s hiding a surprise. I pick up one half, to reveal a bright golden blat of jackfruit milk on a pool of blueberry sauce, looking like a big purple-and-yellow fried egg. Bi has confettied the whole thing with snipped-up Thai basil and flakes of chamomile flowers, “so you get a little floral whiff as you’re biting into it.” There are three different ice creams in play here: vanilla bean, jackfruit, and brown sugar, all layered on top of each other to form stripes when it’s cut in half, like the stratified face of a desert mountain. It’s a whole hell of a thing.
Bi has more to say about it. “And the piece of cake on either side is ooey-gooey cake, from the South! Which is like powdered sugar—too much powdered sugar, honestly—and cream cheese, all whipped up with a bit of that rich Ukrainian butter.”
The richness is a theme in her life, Bi says—so much that the name of her pastry pop-up, Béo Béo, is the doubled-up word for “fatty” or “creamy” in Vietnamese. (Béo béo is also a euphemism for a chubby person.) “When I would bring some pastries home to my family, it was always a sign of approval from the OGs when their response was ‘cũng béo béo.’”
“I always try to make my food pretty rich,” Bi adds, “and then every once in a while, someone will be like, ‘Wow, um, so… this has a lot of fat in it?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, is that an issue??’ That’s what I always go for: extra spices, extra fat, extra flavor. Extra everything!”
That ice cream sandwich is just a jumping-off point from the current menu, of course. Bi is a perpetual motion machine who continually cranks out dazzling food ideas on an endless throughput: a new menu every month for Ba + Mẹ and new pastries every week for Béo Béo.
My first encounter with Lisa Bi was in 2022, at Ba + Mẹ’s first night popping up at Capitol Hill pasta-’n’-cocktail bar Donna’s, when she served what ended up on my list of the best things I ate that year: buttery, flaky handheld pot pies filled with Vietnamese chicken curry that I later nicknamed “chickeny Ding Dongs.” Since then, she’s been out here coming up with total fucking jams like:
A Southern-style chess pie made with sesame and Ovaltine.
An extra-buttery cover of a Hot Pocket filled with chả trứng hấp (a Vietnamese meatloaf made from pork, scrambled eggs, wood ear mushrooms, and vermicelli).
A cheesecake made out of chè thái, a Vietnamese dessert made from jelly cubes, fresh fruit, and coconut sauce, replete with a parrot cracker crust (IYKYK).
A silky Vietnamese-style egg custard made into a savory breakfast sandwich, anointed with soy-saucy onion jam, pickled mustard greens, and American cheese on a housemade Hong Kong–style milk bun.
A sticky-rice hash-brown patty wherein Bi takes Yukon Gold potatoes and hash-mashes them up with crispy sticky rice, presses them into the iconic McD’s oval hash-brown silhouette, adds Maldon Salt, fries ’em, and serves ’em with various Viet-adjacent dipping sauces and accompaniments, depending on her mood. (It’s inspired by the Shanghainese dish cí fàn gāo—chewy grilled rice cakes served at street markets.)
But then sometimes it’s the simplest thing. Béo Béo’s debut menu had a jasmine cruller on it, with jasmine flowers in the doughnut glaze, as well as a quiche “inspired by the breakfast my dad made, with eggs and tomato, topped with puffed rice.” And a madeleine made with chrysanthemum tea and passion-fruit curd. And something that included zhug—a green Syrian hot sauce—made with rau ram, aka Vietnamese coriander. So simple and so super smart.
Bi knows how to keep it old-school, too. A few months back, she did a bánh canh—sometimes called Vietnamese udon—entirely from scratch, including the super thick rice/tapioca noodles that she hand-pressed just for us, the porky collageny broth, and even the fish cakes and sausage, just to see if she could.
Which leads us to her current menu. At press time, her star dish has been a juicy classic roast chicken, and it’s like nothing you’ve tasted. Dressed with a honey/five-spice/soy-sauce elixir before it meets the fire, the chicken’s crisp, bacony skin gives every bite that eye-rollingly succulent quality. If that weren’t flavorful enough, the side of tangy green chili dipping sauce—tương ớt xanh, made with Viet sea salt, fresh lime juice, sugar, serranos, and green bird’s eye chilis—is the kinda stuff you want to take home a bottle of and slather your whole life in. “It keeps coming back month after month because people keep asking for it!” Bi laughs.
Ba + Mẹ’s August menu also featured an urban speciality, chả cá lã vọng: a turmeric-marinated pompano fillet that’s been transformed into crispy deep-fried nuggets and served over chewy rice noodles with galangal, dill, puffy sesame rice crackers, and a bright, funky sauce called mắm tôm made from fermented shrimp. The dish is a nod to the century-old Hanoi restaurant of the same name, and Bi follows the assignment carefully here. That shrimpy funk is ancient and powerful by itself, be warned, but there’s something about the rice cracker that distributes and transforms the pungent shrimp sauce into an ingredient within a dish, rather than the overwhelming omnipresent flavor. Like Roquefort and pears, the components balance each other out, and it all comes together harmoniously. Alchemy.
I could go on. Chef Lisa can’t serve a dish without zapping it with her colorful, innovative brilliance, changing up at least one detail in some ingenious way you’d never have dreamed of if it were you behind the stick. She’s also leveled up times a bazillion since starting her residency at Human People—now that she doesn’t have to make everything in advance and lug it around in her car and can keep equipment and ingredients on site—and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
“This food is for the kid who was embarrassed by the fish and durian her parents packed,” Bi tells me. “The kid who threw it in the trash so no one could smell it, just so she can have a ham and cheese sandwich to make others comfortable. It’s for the elders who made themselves small to assimilate but never stopped aching for balut and century egg. And it’s for everyone still figuring out where they stand in this culture, the bold, the unapologetic, the ones learning that there’s no single way to be Vietnamese. I’m cooking for all of them. Especially the kid I used to be.”
While currently running two different pop-ups at the same time, Chef Lisa Bi is dreaming of something bigger down the road. “The plan,” she says, “is to have a place in the future that is part small restaurant, part deli, and part bakery. So one side is Ba + Mẹ with Viet comfort food, and the other side is a Viet American deli and bakery, aka Béo Béo.” She also hopes to use her future restaurant to showcase textile and ceramic artists.
I’m sincerely sorry for Atlanta for losing Chef Lisa Bi, but am also so smugly, selfishly thrilled that we get to watch her flourish here in Seattle. It’s one thing to have a never-ending stream of wacky-fantastic food ideas flowing through your brain, but this lady then turns around and does them. She makes them. We get to eat them. We’re rich.
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