The first Vietnamese restaurant in San Jose was a taco place. I kid you not.
If we are to believe a 1977 Mercury News story, as well as the Vietnamese family who still operate numerous properties downtown, the corner of 13th and Empire should receive much more attention. There should be a plaque. But first, I need to shatter spacetime. Here goes.
“Since the immigration of almost 150,000 Vietnamese to the United States two years ago, more than a dozen Vietnamese restaurants have sprung up in the Bay Area, but until Rico Taco—that’s right, Rico Taco—there were no Vietnamese eateries in San Jose.”
That was January 1977. According to the Merc, Vietnamese refugee Hoa Thi Nguyen and her husband, Vo Viet Linh, opened up Rico Taco at the corner of 13th and Empire, serving 20 Vietnamese dishes along with a full complement of hamburgers, tacos, burritos and other fast foods.
Originally, as reported in the Merc, Mrs. Nguyen owned a small shopping center in Gia Dinh, a suburb of Saigon. Her husband taught high school French. They escaped with their children and, via North Dakota, arrived in San Jose. She worked as a housekeeper and he worked for an electronics firm. They eventually saved enough to rent Rico Taco.
At first, most of their customers ordered the standard digs. Then the word spread through the fledgling Viet refugee community that pho, banh cuon and cha gio were available, so by the time the Merc story came out, half of their customers were buying the Vietnamese dishes. The story included a beautiful photo of the family standing in front of a banner that said Vietnam Lunch & Dinner.
I am relaying this amazing story because it deserves to be household San Jose knowledge. Even though I spent many evenings with a plate of aloo saag at Swaad Restaurant, a killer Indian place at 13th and Empire, which is now renamed Peppertales, I knew nothing of the history. I noticed a faded sign at the back of the parking lot, left over from a taqueria that occupied the same building maybe 25 years ago, but the Vietnamese history of the establishment evaded me.
The crazy thing? To get this column, this history, I randomly stumbled into a cell phone shop at 314 E. Santa Clara, near Seventh Street. Hear me out.
The building at that address, right between Tostadas and Punjab Café, is owned by the same Vietnamese family who opened the original Rico Taco at 13th and Empire when it was the very first restaurant in San Jose that served pho.
The landlord at 314 E. Santa Clara, AnnMarie Lang, represents the current generation. She only spilled the history because I shuffled into the building, the cell phone shop, and started asking questions.
I remembered 314 E. Santa Clara decades ago when the entrance was essentially a hallway perpendicular to the street. Various businesses were located off the hallway. Many of the older Vietnamese strips downtown were like this. In this case, the building in question still featured an old sign that said Thang Long Shopping Center, leftover from a long time ago.
Nowadays the building was totally reconfigured inside and the hallway was no longer there.
“We changed all that because we’d get people that came in, not shopping at any of these places, and they’d just leave a mess,” AnnMarie said.
Now entrenched in history, AnnMarie and I then started talking about various tenants along Santa Clara Street, where we stood, including a few Vietnamese liquor stores. There was ABC Liquors and, farther down between Ninth and Tenth Streets, F&P Liquors. AnneMarie said landlords got rid of those places because they attracted riffraff.
“I was one of the riffraff,” I said. We both then laughed.
There we were. On Santa Clara Street. Between a Mexican place and a Punjabi place, in buildings owned by a Vietnamese family. And it all started with a Vietnamese taco restaurant in 1977, way over at 13th and Empire, a place now serving Indian food. This was the real San Jose, in my view.
As I left 314 E. Santa Clara Street, time and space continued to merge. And I was better for it.
