How a Vietnamese bakery built a king cake empire in US city
NEW ORLEANS: It started with a handful of requests and 100 cardboard boxes.
Over the years, Huong Tran’s bakery, Dong Phuong, had developed a reputation for making the best brioche and mooncakes in the neighborhood. So it was only natural that customers began to ask about king cakes each winter.
A child needed one to bring to school. A host wanted to serve one at a party. Dong Phuong, which opened in 1982, had never offered the traditional Mardi Gras pastry, but in 2008, Tran decided to experiment. She and her daughter, Linh Tran Garza, developed a recipe, and they figured 100 boxes would be more than enough.
Garza can remember her reaction when the bakery sold its 100th cake. She was excited and that was that. Dong Phuong shut down king cake production for the season.
Today, Tran and Garza rule a Carnival empire out of a squat, brick building on the side of a four-lane highway 10 miles northeast of the French Quarter. In Dong Phuong’s industrial kitchen, crews of bakers finish about 1,600 king cakes per day, beginning with the first batch of dough on Dec 31 and finishing on Lundi Gras - the day before Fat Tuesday - which this year falls on Feb 12. They whip glossy, white frosting in mixers the size of baptismal fonts and fold and roll butter into dough at a breakneck pace. They bag cake after cake, filling orders for pickup and preparing boxes to ship as far as Canada and Hawaii.
In an hour, Dong Phuong can box up nearly as many finished king cakes as it baked in all of 2008. Garza, who supervises the business side of the operation, has scaled to meet a nearly insatiable demand. But as the bakery has gained recognition nationwide, not everything has changed. It’s still a pillar of the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East, with Tran overseeing the kitchen just as she has for the past 40 years.
“Everything in here is her baby, and she takes it personally if it doesn’t work,” Garza said. “She wants to make sure everything that comes out is perfect.”
King cakes have been a tradition in Louisiana and across parts of the Gulf Coast for centuries, and in the food-crazed city of New Orleans, they come in many forms. Sold each year between Epiphany (Jan 6) and Mardi Gras, most king cakes contain a small, plastic baby, meant to symbolize Jesus. In practice, the baby is a baked-in marketing device; end up with him in your slice, and you’re tasked with buying the next cake.
Traditionally, king cakes resemble cinnamon rolls in flavor and texture, but over the years, enterprising pastry chefs have introduced a wide variety of fillings - cream cheese, pecan, almond and strawberry, to name a few - and leaned on different techniques. Dong Phuong does a robust business selling brioche year-round, so it started out making cakes using similar techniques. But Tran found them too heavy for her liking, so she adapted, keeping the brioche base but laminating it - folding shortening into the dough to create layers. A few years later, Dong Phuong switched to butter, and the recipe has remained largely consistent since then. The result is a flat, round cake that’s slathered with cream cheese icing and dusted with sprinkles. It tastes like a frosted croissant.
At Dong Phuong, each cake takes three days to complete. First, bakers make the dough and freeze it overnight. They spend the next day laminating, and the dough goes back in the freezer. On the third day, the crew fills, shapes, proofs and bakes the cakes.
Dong Phuong shuts down the rest of its offerings almost entirely during Mardi Gras, limiting itself to just bread and a few other traditional items in addition to king cakes. Tran arrives at the bakery every morning by 7.30 and is there until 10.30pm, six days a week. Garza, who now lives in Dallas, flies in frequently to oversee the changeover of her family’s bakery into a hyper-efficient king cake factory. This year, she landed on Jan 2 and drove straight to the bakery, arriving as a crew of bakers was shaping the first batch of cakes.
Sitting at a picnic table near the entrance to the bakery, she scanned her phone. Dong Phuong’s cakes were already sold out online for both pickups and mail orders through Goldbelly, which meant customers had started to email and text Garza out of desperation. “Sometimes their stories get a little farfetched,” she said, laughing. “The best one I had, I think it was a priest, he was like, ‘I’m going to visit somebody on his deathbed and give him his last rites.’ ”
The priest got his cake, Garza said. She’s made exceptions for funerals, too, and she’s helped when a king cake enthusiast has driven in from out of state only to find Dong Phuong has sold out for the day. But it’s hard to discern the valid pleas from the fabrications, and Garza likes to remind customers that the bakery sets aside 400 to 500 cakes each day for walk-in purchases. Get up early, though: The cakes are usually gone by midmorning, as a line of wouldbe buyers snakes through the parking lot and out toward Chef Menteur Highway, the long, flat road that stretches through the dredged swamp back toward the heart of New Orleans.
Tran said in an email that she “never” imagined the king cakes would become this popular. “This is why I try so hard to make sure every cake is good,” she added. “I don’t want to disappoint our customers.”
Cyndi Nguyen, who lives near Dong Phuong in the Vietnamese enclave known as Versailles, has been a regular for years. She shops there year-round and dines at the attached, full-service restaurant. In recent years, she’s watched - and waited in line - as the king cakes’ popularity has crested, bringing business to the neighborhood and, at times, a hassle. “It’s great,” Nguyen said, “but also sucks a little bit.”
Tran comes from a long line of bakers in Vietnam. Her father owned a bakery, and her siblings still own bakeries in her home country.
“She grew up going, ‘I am not going to be a baker, I refuse to be a baker,’” Garza said. “She did one year in college in Saigon. … She was going to be a banker, she was going to dress in her nice suit and everything. And of course, then the war [broke out], so she couldn’t finish school.”
Tran and her husband,
De, arrived as refugees with their three children to the New Orleans area in 1980. They settled in the growing Vietnamese community in Versailles, and Tran began selling her baked goods in a local grocery store. Soon, the couple thought bigger, and they began baking out of the kitchen at De’s mother’s Vietnamese restaurant. They wanted the bread and pastries to reflect their heritage, so they wrote letters home to Vietnam, asking relatives to send recipes, and handwritten instructions arrived in envelopes from halfway across the world.
“It took months to send and receive letters back then,” Tran said. “And it was very hard and expensive to make phone calls. ... I was very happy when I receive a recipe because I know I would be able to try something new and have something new to sell.” Dong Phuong still sells banh pia, a bean cake, using the recipe that arrived in an envelope from Vietnam all those years ago.
Garza, who was a toddler when the family emigrated, said she barely remembers a time without the bakery. “We were always here,” she said. “The school bus dropped us off right there. This is kind of my childhood.”
New Orleans has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the United States, and it’s concentrated in New Orleans East, a large swath of drained marshland that is, in effect, an island, cut off from the city by the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal and surrounded by the massive Lake Borgne and the even more gargantuan Lake Pontchartrain. Geographically isolated, the neighborhood fostered a strong sense of community, and Dong Phuong was a household name. “They’ve always been that spot for us in the community, to know that you could get fresh bread there,” said Nguyen, whose family arrived from Vietnam in 1975.
De Tran died in 2004, and the next year, Hurricane Katrina forced the bakery to close for several months. When it reopened in January 2006, it was one of the first businesses in the area to welcome customers. “I don’t know if it’s because we had experience being refugees and were like, ‘Well, we’re not moving again.’ … Everybody was excited, because there was not much here,” Garza said. “I mean, we were only able to make bread. But it was something.”
When Tran and her crew of bakers made their first king cakes in 2008, Dong Phuong still catered mostly to the neighborhood. But over the next few years, word spread. The New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote a story about the cakes, and more customers began to make the drive from New Orleans proper. Jennifer Samuels was among them.
Samuels remembers her reaction the first time she tried Dong Phuong’s king cake: “It was a really good cake that nobody knew about,” she said. That was sometime around 2013 or ’14, and Samuels and her husband, Will, owned Pizza NOLA in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. They were looking for creative ways to drum up business after the rise of apps like UberEats and Grubhub had dented their business, and wholesale king cakes sounded like a viable, fun solution. Dong Phuong had the capacity to make more cakes than it could sell out of its storefront, and the pizzeria could help open up an untapped market.
In 2015, the partnership began, and thanks in part to Will Samuels’s social media expertise, demand grew so huge that Dong Phuong added multiple other wholesale locations across the New Orleans area. In January 2018, the James Beard Awards recognized the bakery with one of its America’s Classics awards, and the cakes ascended from cult favorite to viral. On Reddit, someone who identified himself as a Dong Phuong delivery truck driver shared stories of people reselling cakes for a profit and fistfights ensuing at delivery locations. That month, the bakery took all its sales in-house and reevaluated its distribution plan.
This year, demand is higher than ever. Dong Phuong is back in the wholesale game, and cakes are available at several businesses across New Orleans, as well as at the bakery and through Goldbelly, though securing a cake online was nearly as difficult as landing an Eras Tour ticket. At the bakery, the process grows more efficient each year, as crews of Vietnamese and Latino workers arrive in shifts day and night, making each cake by hand.
As elaborate floats roll down the streets of New Orleans, and tourists and beer and beads overwhelm the city, the Dong Phuong crew will keep pulling cakes out of their ovens, over and over until Mardi Gras. That day, the bakery will shut down, but the staff will return for a crawfish boil in the parking lot. After finishing more than 60,000 cakes, the bakers and support staff will celebrate, and then they will rest. The next week, Dong Phuong will reopen for business as usual.