Ramie is making some of the Northwest’s most ambitious Vietnamese food

Restaurant review

The best bite at Ramie, the Vietnamese nouvelle cuisine restaurant that opened on Capitol Hill last year, is also one of the most brilliant Indochine fusions I’ve ever eaten: the hot vit lon custard.

A riff on a classic at The French Laundry in Napa Valley, Calif., the dish begins with a decapitated eggshell; the kitchen then nearly fills the shell with an egg custard, steams the pale custard until it sets, then tops it with a float of duck stew. Eat it with a small spoon, finishing each bite with a taste of rau ram herb for a peppery ending to balance the custard’s buttery richness.

At Ramie, the chef stews duck scraps and bones into a ragout to replicate the DNA of this classic Southeast Asian morsel. This contemporary take on one of Vietnam’s most divisive delicacies, the duck embryo, makes that dish more approachable by replicating some of its gamy intensity without the squeamish visuals of a beak and webbed feet.

This clever avant-garde riff reflects the heart of Ramie’s project — reconfiguring Hanoi fare and esoteric Vietnamese countryside classics with French and Old World cooking techniques and flair. And now it’s the most innovative Vietnamese restaurant in Seattle.

IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that, about a year since Ramie opened, pho and banh mi have yet to make cameos on the restaurant’s rotating menu. Like many other ambitious Vietnamese American chefs, siblings Trinh and Thai Nguyen know that Western eaters like those classics — but at Ramie, the brother and sister are more focused on writing their own definition for neo-Vietnamese cuisine in the 21st century.

Let’s back up a bit (say, 50 years). Washington state has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the United States; the Puget Sound region is dotted with pho houses and banh mi shops. After the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, Gov. Dan Evans welcomed the first wave of refugees to Washington state. Those refugees set up small restaurants around Seattle’s Chinatown International District, Rainier Valley and beyond, laying the foundation for a vibrant food scene. With time, the Emerald City became a hotbed for Vietnamese cuisine.

Now, fast-forward: In the 21st century, Seattle’s Vietnamese culinary landscape has been largely shaped by two families: the Phams, of Pho Bac fame, and the Banhs, of Monsoon and Ba Bar. Both inspired dozens of copycats that mimicked their menus, showcasing comfort fare from the southern Saigon region.

At Ramie, the Nguyen siblings are part of a new wave, joining peers like Berlu in Portland, Doi Moi in Washington, D.C., and The Pig and The Lady in Honolulu — these are chefs who want to redefine and stretch the boundaries of modern Vietnamese dining.

The Nguyens are living examples of this history of Vietnamese food in the Northwest.

The siblings cut their teeth at their family’s noodle house, Pho T & N in Poulsbo. In 2019, the duo ventured out on their own, opening Ba Sa in downtown Bainbridge Island. This bistro may have been an incubator for what was to come at Ramie, as Ba Sa also tweaked the dishes of their homeland, usually with an added French treatment. Think rabbit roulade and Vietnamese beef stew in a red wine reduction.

RAMIE IS THE NGUYEN FAMILY’S coming-out party in Seattle, and it is unlike any other Vietnamese kitchen around Puget Sound. While the siblings preach some familiar tenets — farm-to-table and head-to-tail dining — their menu seems particularly interested in deconstructing, retooling and updating lost classics and comfort food.

The North Vietnamese ceviche salad gets remade as a hamachi crudo. It’s accompanied by a salty kumquat-fish-sauce sorbet, as well as garlic chips and pickled ramps to spoon over the top.

A charred mackerel arrives with a pineapple-cucumber chimichurri, as well as a ginger sambal and fish sauce for a Mekong Delta-meets-Adriatic Sea bite.

The pedestrian-sounding salt-and-pepper noodle may be the kitchen’s best comfort fare, a nod to the famous butter-garlic version created at Thanh Long restaurant in San Francisco. The egg noodles are made in-house and cooked al dente, and before coming to the table, they receive a coating of butter and a dusting of porcini mushroom powder and cured egg yolk shavings to form that intense, savory umami flavor.  

You can also find some Viet deli staples here, though Ramie’s versions hardly resemble that which wilts under a heat lamp. Made to order, the silky banh cuon rice roll is chewy and gussied up with a puree of tiger shrimp head. The beignet-esque banh tieu, flecked with sesame seeds, emerges from the deep-fryer piping hot and ready to be smeared with whipped butter, honey and fleur de sel.

NOT EVERY CREATIVE attempt works. The turmeric-dill rockfish with fries — call it Hanoi-fusion fish and chips — was mushy when I tried it the first time and only marginally improved when I tried it a second time. On another plate, the wagyu beef tartare, an intended homage to the grilled bo la lot, was so overseasoned that it bore little resemblance to that famous dish.

And the dining room needs more warmth to match the pleasures on the plate. The surfaces are hard, the walls don’t have a lick of décor and the acoustics can make the space quite loud.

But the food and drink stand up to all of this. The Nguyen siblings clearly have chops and an encyclopedic knowledge of both nouvelle Saigon fare and countryside classics, and they know when to wield a freer hand for a modern audience.

Duck blood pudding, for instance, is a dish that has never caught on in the West. So Ramie gives it a vegetarian makeover that should find a broader appeal — as a radicchio pudding with a peppery Vietnamese herb pesto and a symphony of crunch from honey-roasted walnuts, rice crackers and roasted peanuts.

Shared entrees hover around the $25-$30 range, and with drinks, the bill after tip may run you close to $180 for two. But Ramie also runs one of the best, cheapest and longest happy-hour deals on Capitol Hill (5-8 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday), with standout dishes like the rack of coffee-glazed pork ribs ($12) or Ramie’s distinctive slider ($8), a patty dripping with au jus that has been tweaked with layers of paté and a béchamel made from Laughing Cow cheese. Arrive early on weekends or go on a weekday to score one of 24 coveted seats in the lounge.

Ramie’s desire to push classic flavors to new heights extends to the drinks menu, too. Instead of tired tiki tropes, you’ll find a real showcase of Vietnamese bounties like lemon grass, bitter melons and passion fruit mixed with gin, tequila and vodka. And the well-curated wines-by-the-glass list is absurdly good and cheap ($10) during happy hour.

The flavors at Ramie will be familiar to anyone who has traversed from District 1 in old Saigon to the famed Hoan Kiem District in Hanoi. But I doubt even the most seasoned traveler has seen elevated Vietnamese dishes presented quite this way — at least in Seattle.