exist sapsửaThis is a non-traditional Vietnamese restaurant in Denver, and its most popular dish is cabbage. It may sound basic, but for chefs Anthony “Ni” Nguyen and Anna Nguyen, the simple plates represent the mindset they are around their meals.
“You don’t need the most quirky equipment, tools or technology to make something meaningful,” Ni said in June. “We had a piece of cabbage, we grind it, burn it, and then put it on the mayonnaise. Everything from start to finish was intentional. It doesn’t matter whether you have 1,000 ingredients or cool technology – it has to make sense for someone.”
He enthusiastically added: “This will never stand out from the menu. It’s the dish that covers all of us at Sapsửa.”
This dish is called bắpcảiluộc, and it was something Ni’s mother cooked for him when she grew up in California. “That’s just cooking cabbage and rice,” he said. “That’s one of my favorite things. It’s humble. This is what we do with food here: It’s very simple, but very impactful.”
NI and Anna met nearly 14 years ago at the International Culinary Center in San Jose, California. Anna is studying pastries, and NI is studying salty cooking. According to Anna, starting from their date at a restaurant in Ethiopia, “you can say we will be together forever.” Shortly after they started their date, opening their own restaurant became a shared dream. The idea has taken many forms over the years, but they have always wanted to do something that can match their talents.
“I never really thought about my career until I decided to cook,” Ni said. “So seeing her is like this new world is open. We’re talking about food and flavor and a lot of stuff. It’s never been my dream of her, or, ‘It’s more important than yours.’ It’s like we help promote each other’s dream.”
When the pandemic hit, fantasy began to consolidate. The couple is now married and lives in Los Angeles. They are opening a new restaurant with Nancy Silverton, which stopped when Covid-19 closed. “You could only plant so many shallots on the windows until you thought, ‘Okay, what are we doing now?'” Ni recalls “So we decided to play the restaurant and come up with a mock menu. It was so fun. When we first met, it was the same energy.”
The cost of living in Los Angeles is unsustainable, so Anna recommends returning to Colorado where she grew up. Her family still lives there and can help support the idea. When she called her father who had a business for many years, he offered some advice from sages. “He said, ‘You can do this only once.’ “He’s like, ‘You either do this for someone else, and that’s the track we’re on -‘or you can roll dice and do it for yourself. ‘”
At the time, the cooking scene in Denver was stagnant due to the pandemic. The city has welcomed new restaurant openings over the past few years, but there are some obvious omissions. Nguyens can see the potential of a modern approach inspired by NI parents, who immigrated from Vietnam in the late 1970s.
“California has such great Asian cuisine,” Anna said. “Denver does the same, but that’s much less, so we think if we come to Denver, maybe we can really have a chance to make a difference for people. We can bring this first-generation dining experience to a city with a considerable Asian population, which is mainly represented by very traditional food.
After moving to Denver in November 2020, Anna and NI began to conduct recipe testing in their parents’ kitchens. One of the first dishes that appeared was cabbage. In the following years, SAPSửA hosted pop-ups in many local places, while Ni worked for Pho King Rapidos Food Truck for a day and Anna worked for Etalia Foods. It’s challenging, but the couple focuses on the possibility of a “moment to be” sapsửa in Vietnamese. Finally, in 2023, SapSửA opened the door at East Colfax in the former theater of the beloved ragged bookstore.
“Denver completely embraced us from the beginning,” Anna said. “It’s so empowering because we think we’ll be ourselves anyway, but we’re not sure how it will be received. Maybe it’s going to take years to go like big sour, spending big sour, lots of fish sauce, minced meat, but people crave it.”
“Honestly, people responded very well to things on the menu, like pig ears,” Ni added. “They went crazy about it, and I don’t think so. People in Denver are actively looking for our strange dishes. For a month, we had a burger on the menu and no one ordered it.”
SAPsửa regularly exchanges dishes in and out, but the method is consistent. About 70% of the menu is inspired by the food he grew up with his parents and what you find in Vietnamese restaurants, NI says. The other 30% come from the chefs he works with. A famous figure in the menu, Trứng Vàtrứng combines rice, soft scrambled eggs, trout roses and brown butter sauce. It’s very satisfying and rich in flavor – the kind of dish you might return to again and again. It was conceptualized by one of the chefs, Ben Carolan.
“We always encourage chefs to put their stories or culture into their food,” Ni said. “It’s part of empowering our chefs and chefs to be really a chef. We want people to get out of here and be better people than when they come in, not just better chefs. Ultimately, your career is a marathon, you’ll learn a lot of tips, a lot of recipes, but what we’re happy here is that you’re going to be a good person yourself and you’ll learn a good person first.”
The feeling of storytelling is inherent in all of SAPSửA’s products. The restaurant often shares stories with images of specific dishes on Instagram. NI starts doing this as a way to deal with “impostor syndrome and self-doubt.”
“When we first opened up, a lot of self-doubts came up,” he recalled. “What I was saying to Anna, ‘I don’t remember five mother sauces. How could I be a chef?’ I felt very self-conscious about it and I wanted to be able to rely on one of my strengths, and that was to be able to tell a story, I realized if I tend to be vulnerable and tell people how fragile its horror is, and how fragile you have to be and how powerful you have to be.”
Anna leads the allegations of desserts, also inspired by Vietnamese flavors and dishes. But she also had her own influence. Most popular is ChèChuối, a variant of banana pudding that combines coconut and peanut with traditional Nilla Wafers. Anna developed her childhood, as well as a Vietnamese tendency to combine multiple textures into her dishes. She drew inspiration from Vietnamese dessert shops in Orange County that offer a bag of crushed peanuts and sesame seeds.
“For me, banana pudding is the sum of our marriages,” Anna said. “Sometimes, there are dishes I’m really making the idea of rooted in Vietnamese food, and I’m rarely, sometimes it’s appropriate. But I have a lot of memories about eating banana pudding. I want to do something in that world, do something in this world, use a lot of bananas in Vietnamese desserts. I think that’s another one.
Initially, NI and Anna were worried that Vietnamese in Colorado might not like their unconventional approach to food. But the reaction is exactly the opposite: many diners feel that they are finally represented by the existence of Sapsửa. The mix of cultures reflects those who have one foot in each country (e.g., NI).
“I never felt Vietnamese or American,” Ni said. “But when I saw it here with my parents, they were having dinner, they were laughing, they asked for Thai chili, it felt good. You don’t have to be Vietnamese, you don’t have to be American, you can be American. In this building, I feel like I’m a thing that exists.
Over the past two years, NI and Anna have not only established SAPSửA, not only an essential restaurant, but also an advocate for inclusion and community. They regularly work with the tattered cover and the nearby Sie Film Center, which includes a recent group called “Asian Enoughs Asians.” The couple’s achievements do not mean owning a thriving restaurant. It also means cheering up the people around you in the kitchen and dining room.
“We have close ties to many organizations and we really believe,” Ni said. “We are taking the time and the platform to make Denver a great place.”
Anna added: “For us, what is successful is if the people inside your wall are happy and taken care of. Are your guests happy? Are they back? Are the employees happy? Are their lives happy? Are their lives beautiful? If we can live a fulfilling and complete life outside the restaurant because we trust our employees, I think this is the highest mark of success.”
