A still from Mam, directed by Nan Feix and starring Jerald Head (left) and Nhung Dao Head (right). (Photo courtesy of Loveboat.)

B ack in 2016, Jerald Head met his future wife, Nhung Dao Head, while visiting Ho Chi Minh City. As the couple told the writer Mayukh Sen, he approached Nhung with his shaky, beginner’s Vietnamese—and she mistook him for a college student. It was a meeting that changed their lives: A few years later, Dao moved to New York, and the two worked together at the Greenpoint restaurant Di An Di, where he was the chef de cuisine. Now, the couple run a trio of businesses—Mắm, Lai Rai, and Phê—that are at the forefront of Vietnamese food in New York. 

Raised in San Antonio, Texas, Jerald was working at a higher-end restaurant in his hometown when he was invited by some cooks to eat Vietnamese food. It was his first time. “I went and had the bún bò huế with coagulated blood… and from that point on it really opened my eyes to a whole new world of flavor and a cuisine that I really fell in love with,” he told me back in 2019. Born in a small town, Nhung was 10 when her family moved to Saigon, where she said they couldn’t afford to eat out.

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