This Vietnamese restaurant has taken over New York's food scene with one pungent ingredient.

With its signature dish called bun dau mam tom, Vietnamese restaurant Mắm has carved out a unique space for itself in New York’s expansive dining scene.

Husband-and-wife duo Jerald and Nhung Dao Head initially opened the restaurant as a limited pop-up shop during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were eating a lot, cooking a lot, and we had the opportunity to take over a friend’s restaurant,” Jerald explains.

Rave reviews of their signature dish spread quickly among the Vietnamese community, giving the couple an opportunity to expand the pop-up operation into a 4-day-a-week brunch service in Chinatown.

In early 2023, Mắm was featured on Pete Wells’s ‘The 100 Best Restaurants in NYC’ list published in The New York Times.

“We were just doing it for fun, expecting a couple of tables here and there, and it just blew up into something that we never imagined,” says Jerald.

All ingredients for their signature dish are made from scratch, from the tofu to the blood sausage, and the restaurant has a distinct street-side seating area reminiscent of street food stalls in Vietnam.

The dish features a selection of proteins like pork belly, tofu and blood sausage alongside blocks of vermicelli noodles. The assortment is served with a side of pungent shrimp paste that Nhung says is controversial even among the Vietnamese community.

“This is not for everyone,” says Nhung. “But people who come here and have never had that, we always encourage them to try it. Give it a chance and get to know it, and you’ll see another color of Vietnamese cuisine.”

“If I were blindfolded, I would have thought [the dish] was from Vietnam,” praises one patron eating at the restaurant.

Mắm is open every Friday through Monday with a rotating seasonal menu.

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