What’s next for Rose VL, Portland’s Vietnamese soup destination?

Visit Rose VL, Portland’s two-soups-a-day destination, and you wouldn’t know the duo behind it had ever given a thought to retirement. Here’s William Vuong, puttering around the pristine dining room, smiling at babies, showing a customer the proper way to eat cao lầu, the noodle dish that made waves when they added it to their Saturday menu last year. And there’s Christina (Ha) Luu, carrying out a precisely arranged soup in a white bowl decorated with pink roses, tapping out Instagram posts with her beautifully manicured nails.

But yes, it turns out, rumors that the couple have taken a half step back are partly true. Vuong, 79, who faced gallbladder surgery last year, is technically retired, an event that would loom larger for Portland’s food scene if he weren’t still at the soup restaurant so darn much.

Luu certainly isn’t retiring. At 72, she continues to oversee the kitchen at Rose VL, introducing new soups and fine-tuning others, keeping an eye on every detail even as she begins the process of handing the restaurant’s reins over to her children.

Vuong and Luu’s original Southeast 82nd Avenue restaurant, Ha VL, one of America’s most celebrated Vietnamese soup destinations, has been owned and operated by their second son, Peter Vuong, since 2015. Steve Vuong, their fifth son, and Helen Huynh, their daughter-in-law, are training to take over Southeast Powell Boulevard’s Rose VL. And later this year, Vuong and Luu hope to open a new restaurant with their fourth son, Han Vuong, in Beaverton. It’s a big step for a family that faced massive trials just to make it here in the first place.

Luu and Vuong’s journey to America will echo that of the many immigrants who arrived after the Vietnam war, though it was no less harrowing for it. Vuong, a language teacher by training, spent the war as a special forces commander working for the United States embassy in Saigon. In April 1975, just days before the fall of Saigon, he went to meet an American general who had promised him and his family safe passage out of the country. When he arrived at the meeting point, the general was gone.

“He left me behind,” Vuong said. “It cost me 10 years in prison.”

Vuong toiled for a decade in prison, bullet fragments from a Viet Cong ambush still lodged in his wrist, as Luu struggled to raise their growing family.

“The communists kicked me out of my home,” Luu said. “I had no house, no car, no money. I had four boys, my first son was only eight years old, and I was six months pregnant. They didn’t want my son coming back to school, because they said, ‘He’s the son of CIA.’”

After Vuong was released in 1985, it would be another seven years before he and Luu were able to leave Vietnam. During that period, their four oldest boys fled the country by boat, landing at Malaysia’s notoriously crowded Bidong Island refugee camp. Eventually, Vuong and Luu paid to send the then-teenage boys to America, one-by-one, to Oregon, where they were sponsored by a former student of Vuong’s. They weren’t reunited until the early 1990s.

“I sent four boys by boat to the United States, and I didn’t know where they were,” Luu said. “Long time every night I cry, pray with God every day.”

Vuong and Luu opened Ha VL in 2004 as a deli, serving a simple menu of Vietnamese sandwiches. Early on, the couple wanted to add soup to the banh mi lineup. But instead of making one large pot of broth to supply a long menu of soups -- a common model at neighboring Vietnamese restaurants -- they would start with just one.

One soup became two, then a dozen, rotating six days a week, two a day, each with its own set of labor-intensive ingredients and unique broth. Soon, critics were descending from New York, changing travel plans to stay longer so they could try more of Luu and Vuong’s soups. In 2015, the couple handed Ha VL off to Peter Vuong, their second of six children, all boys, and opened a second outpost, Rose VL, with many of the same soups, only served on different days.

Outside of Europe and America, small restaurants that serve just a handful of dishes are common throughout the world. Before the war, Luu’s mother ran a restaurant in Hanoi that served only one: beef phở. Ha VL and Rose VL’s unique menu is born of that tradition. In fact, the delicate beef noodle soup served Sundays at Ha VL and Mondays at Rose VL comes from her family recipe, though -- with even more delicacy, perhaps -- Luu credits much of her cooking skill to her mother-in-law.

Visit the Vietnamese restaurants along the arrowhead formed by Northeast Sandy Boulevard and 82nd Avenue and you’ll find a similar selection of salad rolls, sandwiches, soups and grilled meats served over rice or rice noodles. These frozen-in-time menus, which look to appeal to both Portland’s large Vietnamese expat population and to those who know little more than phở and banh mi, tend to cast a wide net, featuring dishes from all over Vietnam.

Rose VL’s soup menu is no exception, though it comes to that geographic diversity a bit more organically. Luu was born in Kon Tum, in the central Vietnamese highlands, but her parents hail from Hanoi, home to that lightly adorned phở and a half-dozen other signature soups. Vuong comes from Huế, in Central Vietnam, birthplace of bun bo Huế, the famed spicy pork and beef noodle soup, and to mì quảng, a stunning soup made with pork, shrimp and turmeric-orange noodles submerged under a puffy rice cracker fascinator. And over the past year, daughter-in-law Huynh has experimented with a few favorites from her hometown in Southern Vietnam’s Soc Trang province, including a red curry, a beef stew and a fermented fish noodle soup with fish, shrimp and Chinese-style roast pork belly in a clear broth that customers doctor themselves with a fiery chile relish. That soup has found its way onto Rose VL’s regular menu.

But no dish has grabbed more attention than cao lầu, a noodle bowl rarely found outside of Hoi An. In 2014, Vuong and Luu visited the scenic central Vietnamese city, learning about the special ash and well water used to make the noodles. Vuong didn’t buy into the entire mythos -- “it’s just a story,” he said -- but they liked the dish enough to want to bring it home.

“The most important thing is the sauce,” Vuong said.

“If you go to Hoi An, you will taste a difference,” Luu said. “But come back and try ours, it’s better.”

On Saturdays at Rose VL, cao lầu has joined an already-formidable lineup that includes two of Luu’s best soups, the mi quang and a chicken curry in a turmeric-stained coconut milk broth. Rose VL’s take on cao lầu features udon-style noodles, super-tender pork and a tangle of herbs that must be tossed in the rich pork sauce hiding underneath before eating. Nearly 15 years into their restaurant career, the dish has proved a smash hit, popular with both customers and critics, landing a spot on our guide to the best new dishes of 2018. Vuong and Luu believe they are the only restaurant in America to serve it.

In their early days, Ha VL was most widely for two things: serving bún chả ốc, a pork broth soup with slices of snail-studded meatloaf, and for selling out most days before or just after lunch. In Vietnam, soup is often eaten early. Get to Ha VL early enough, you can still find crowds of Vietnamese men smoking and drinking strong iced coffee out front. The snail soup is still served here on Thursdays. But since taking over, Peter Vuong has added a few specials of his own to the Ha VL menu, including a noodle soup version of the beef stew bo kho.

Two years ago, Luu was recognized with a semifinalist nomination for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Northwest award, an honor she repeated (this time joined by Peter Vuong) in 2018, and again this Wednesday.

Luu said she’s been approached about writing a cookbook, something she’ll consider after the summer. In addition to their six sons, Vuong and Luu have 19 grandchildren, with a 20th expected next month. And sometime later this year, the couple and son Han Vuong hope to open a third restaurant, this one in Beaverton, near the Nike World Headquarters, where four of their six sons have worked. As with Ha VL and Rose VL, expect Luu to add a new soup or two to the new restaurant’s menu. Whenever it opens, Vuong and Luu will likely be on hand, helping the restaurant get up and running.

“We’re not retired yet,” Vuong said.

Ha VL is open from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. or sold out every day except Tuesday at 2738 S.E. 82nd Ave., # 102. Rose VL, which recently updated their hours, is open from 9 a.m. until 4:45 p.m. or sold out every day but Thursday at 6424 S.E. Powell Blvd. The new restaurant, which has yet to find a location or picked a name, hopes to open in Beaverton near the Nike World Headquarters.

-- Michael Russell