In Louisiana, if you find the tiny plastic baby in a king cake, you’re responsible for bringing the king cake to the next gathering. When Linh Tran Garza was growing up as one of the two Asian kids in her otherwise all-white school (the other Asian kid was her brother), she absolutely dreaded getting the baby.
“It was always a struggle,” she says. She and her family emigrated from Vietnam when she was a toddler and her parents hadn’t grown up with king cake. So the pressure was on. “You don’t want to bring in a bad one. You don’t want to bring in one from a grocery store. It’s so embarrassing—especially since you’re an immigrant, you want to fit in.”
Garza had no way of knowing that her mom would one day bake the most sought after king cake in Louisiana, and by extension, the country. Since opening in 1982, Dong Phuong Bakery in the New Orleans East neighborhood has come to dominate the king cake scene. The Trans have done what many immigrant-owned businesses struggle to do: break into the southern Louisiana food scene, not just as a Vietnamese bakery, but as the premier spot for something distinctly Louisiana. Dong Phuong’s influence goes far beyond Mardi Gras. They bake and deliver the hamburger buns and banh mi bread many local businesses buy in bulk. From traditional New Orleans-style po’ boys, to the sesame seed-coated brioche buns of juicy burgers, to the bread pudding at Chow Yum, a popular Asian-inspired fusion restaurant in Baton Rouge, southern Louisiana runs on Dong Phuong.
Humble origins
From the street, Dong Phuong Bakery is not an imposing building. It’s basically the furthest east you can drive before you’re out of the city, miles from the hustle and bustle of the typical tourist destinations. It would be inaccurate to say out-of-town visitors would breeze by if they weren’t intentionally looking for it because if not for Dong Phuong, they wouldn’t be out there at all.
Dong Phuong was founded by Garza’s parents Huong and De Tran. Huong’s parents had owned a bakery/cafe/noodle shop in Vietnam, but growing up, she’d never wanted to join the family business. “She’s a big fan of Jackie O. and her fashions,” says Garza, who has been the president of Dong Phuong since 2005. “She actually did attend college for about a year in Saigon to be a banker or work in an environment where she would get to wear those nice dresses…but of course, when the war hit, she had to quit. The bombs were falling.”
As new immigrants, the Trans had to do what they knew. De worked as a stocker at a grocery store, and Huong started baking little bean cakes, hopias and other treats to sell to the local Vietnamese grocery store. She wrote letters home asking for recipes, and after two months or so, she’d get a letter back and start the trial and error process of baking it for herself.
After Huong gained some traction with her small business, the Trans took the leap and bought out a little restaurant run by another Vietnamese family. It was called Dong Phuong.
The Dong Phuong king cake is born
The Trans kept the name and grew the business. Through the years, they’ve weathered many storms—both literal and figurative. De died in 2004. They had to close Dong Phuong briefly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, reopening pretty quickly the following year.
Shortly after that, Huong started experimenting with king cake. She started with their house brioche dough as the base, but it was too heavy and too thick to be a king cake. The cakes, which are an integral part of celebrating Mardi Gras, need to be light and flaky like the galette des rois pastries that inspired them, not a dense cake. Through trial and error, Huong perfected the Dong Phuong recipe, which has bakers laminating the dough to give it the layered effect of a croissant. In 2008, they made and sold 100 king cakes for the whole season.
Word spread. First among curious foodies, chefs and those adjacent to the Vietnamese community in New Orleans East. Then to their friends, and as social media proliferated, people posted about it. “When you put that king cake in your mouth, and you bite in, you’re in heaven,” says Brandy Bourgeois, who was born and raised in Kenner, Louisiana and owns Flavors Snoballs and Ice Cream (also in Kenner), just outside New Orleans, and first tasted the Trans’ king cake around 2017. “It’s an experience to eat that king cake. It’s the best king cake—the best cake I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
The dough is buttery and has the crispness of a croissant, perfectly balanced with the whipped cream cheese icing that has just a hint of saltiness to offset the sweetness. Each cake is double boxed and sealed in a resealable bag to keep it fresh. “There’s no other king cake that even comes close to even being a knockoff of it. There’s no one. Many have tried,” Bourgeois says. “I don’t know what they put in it, but it is phenomenal.”
Queen of king cakes
The cake is so phenomenal that after trying the Dong Phuong king cake for the first time, Bourgeois immediately started buying it to use for their new king cake-flavored snoballs. Soon, people came in asking just for the king cake.
At the time, Flavors Snoballs was dying. Snoballs are a seasonal business. After October, no one’s coming in until March, Bourgeois explains, but the bills don’t stop. Around 2017, her house was in foreclosure, and she was three months behind on mortgage payments. So she and her teenaged staff would meet at her house at 5 a.m., drive half an hour to New Orleans East, wait in line, pick up the maximum number of king cakes (three per person), have lunch down the block and go through the line again. Sometimes she could get staff members to bring a friend or sibling on their king cake runs. Other times they’d change clothes or put on a hat just to buy a few more boxes of the laptop sized king cakes. “We got really good at it. We were getting like 60 to 70 king cakes and looting them in our car,” Bourgois says.
In 2018, Dong Phuong won the James Beard Award during king cake season, around Lent, and business exploded. According to Bourgeois, the line was down Chef Highway with about a mile of people in line.
After that, Dong Phuong invested in more equipment and brought in more staff for the season. These days, they have a staff of about 75 working three different shifts through Mardi Gras season, baking around the clock.
These days, Bourgeois doesn’t need to line up or put on disguises for the cake anymore. Dong Phuong made Flavors Snoballs an official reseller. She credits Dong Phuong for saving her business because many people who come in for the king cake become loyal customers year round. As a business owner, she attributes their success to their superior product and the way they treat their people—resellers and staff alike.
Every year, she picks up her king cakes, the people helping her out are the same ones who have been working there since she first started frequenting the bakery. They save her a little freebie like a novelty mug or knife that they give away on special days every year (she collects them). Dong Phuong’s customer service and employee retention tell her a lot about what must be going on behind the scenes, Bourgeois says. Customers still line up at 5 a.m. not just at the bakery, but all across southern Louisiana at official resale locations, just for the chance to buy a king cake.
Always remembering their roots
The trajectory of Dong Phuong’s rise coincides with several larger cultural trends: the rise of the Internet making it possible for word of mouth to spread across communities that might have otherwise remained disconnected, Americans becoming more adventurous eaters, and Asian food and pop culture becoming popular in the United States. “The world changed around them,” says Eric Baucom, owner of Michelin guide-recognized Killer Poboys in New Orleans. They use Dong Phuong bread in all their sandwiches because the banh mi loaves hold up to whatever they put on them, unlike other bread, which “kind of disintegrates.” “It’s easier to know about stuff that’s not right in front of you now,” Baucom says about word spreading online. “They’ve been producing great products, and when you do that, if more people are able to see it, it’s gonna blow you up, and I think that’s what happened more than anything they tried to do.”
Vu “Phat” Le, a restaurant owner in Baton Rouge, is from New Orleans East and Dong Phuong was a staple for him growing up in the 1980s. Despite Dong Phuong’s now viral levels of fame, Le said that their product, food wise and quality wise is still the same as when he was a kid. They don’t cut corners.
Dong Phuong is one of the most visible contributions of the Vietnamese community to Cajun cuisine, but it’s certainly not the only one. The sizable Vietnamese community in Louisiana that immigrated after the Vietnam War have added their own spin on boiled crawfish, po’ boys, fried seafood, and more. Garza says they added things like vegetarian options and king cake to their menu so that people would have things they recognized to try, but they don’t mess with their original menu items. Their products, including their award-winning king cakes, are developed and made by immigrants, and they’re proud of that fact.
They could upsize to a bigger location. They could open a second location closer to the heart of New Orleans and upcharge for banh mi. There’s definitely demand for it, but Garza says they don’t want to leave New Orleans East. It wouldn’t feel true to who they are. “This is where we started,” she says “And hey, people come to us.”
Garza lives in Texas now and has for many years, but she comes back every king cake season to help her mom, who still oversees the king cake baking at age 70.
And if the Vietnamese kids growing up in Louisiana get the baby in their classrooms, Garza says, “They can bring in the king cake from Dong Phuong and not be embarrassed that it’s from a Vietnamese bakery because we’ve made it to the point…(where they can) actually be proud that they’re able to get a Dong Phuong King Cake.”
This feature about Dong Phuong originally appeared in JoySauce.
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