Event: Spirit of Vietnam (Sông Cái Distillery x Madame Vo)
L to R: Dan Q Dao, Cassandra Lam, Daniel Nguyen, Chef Jimmy Ly
This week, the District One team celebrated the US launch of the first-ever Vietnamese gin from the Hanoi-based Sông Cái Distillery with a 3-course cocktail dinner at Madame Vo and panel curated by Vietcetera.
Guests enjoyed Chef Jimmy Ly’s signature bites including fried spring rolls, pomelo salad with tiger prawns, and 12-hour simmered short rib beef stew (bò kho) — paired with Sông Cái Vietnamese gin cocktails including a negroni, Vietnamese michelada, and original lychee-basil sour created by Madame Vo bar’s team, the Lotus Garden.
For our first-ever ticketed event (!), we wanted to tap into the cultural synergy of our client portfolio to create an authentic, community-oriented experience for attendees. The event sold out of both seatings in one week — a testament to growing interest and enthusiasm for Vietnamese cultural products and the many new, forward-thinking brands behind them.
During dinner, writer and District One co-founder Dan Q. Dao moderated a panel discussion focused on Vietnamese culture and identity. Curated by Vietcetera, the fastest-growing digital media company in Vietnam, the lineup featured Cassandra Lam (founder, The Cosmos), Jimmy Ly (chef-owner, Madame Vo), and Daniel Nguyen (founder, Sông Cái Distillery).
How do you spotlight the “Spirit of Việt Nam” in your work or brand mission?
In her role as a founder of The Cosmos, an organization and event platform which hosts conferences and workshops for AAPI women, Lam creates events and educational materials to help Asian American women to see themselves beyond of the lenses of colonialism, displacement, and trauma.
“Those things are all part of who we are, but they aren’t our totality,” she says.
For Nguyen, Sông Cái Distillery is his approach to changing the conversation about contemporary Vietnam — and bringing the dialogue to a global platform. From working with multi-generational foraging families to engaging Vietnamese folk artisans to design the bottle’s label, Sông Cái’s process fuses traditional Vietnamese culture with modern technology and distillation practices.
“We are really proud to represent Vietnam not only as a place to source ingredients, but as a place with a rich culture, place, people, and of course, gastronomy,” he said.
As first-generation Vietnamese American entrepreneurs, what are some of the challenges you face — and how did you overcome them?
A recurring theme of the night was perseverance and tenacity in the face of difficulty. Each guest speaker shared how their professional experiences were informed by their immigrant family’s ability to make it despite all odds.
Nguyen, for example, explained that Sông Cái must work extra hard to get their products approved by government agencies and regulators. “If our gin were coming from Japan, or Europe, there wouldn’t be any issue. There’s not even a category for what we’re doing — so we have to create it ourselves and be proud of our culture.
In a similar vein, Ly discussed how when he first founded Madame Vo back in 2017, he faced naysayers who didn’t believe that Vietnamese food could stand head to head with other upscale, gourmet food: “It was an uphill battle because there’s a stereotype that Southeast Asian food has to be cheap.”
Ly noted that though consumers were willing to pay $16 for a burger in New York City, it was seen as blasphemous that he charged that much for a bowl of pho due to racialized notions of food.
Despite facing an initial backlash on Yelp, Ly and his wife kept at it because ultimately what mattered was the reception he got from customers and their enthusiasm for his mission to take Vietnamese food to new heights. Now with a second location and a cemented reputation as one of Manhattan’s most sought-after bowls of savory soup, his efforts had paid off.
Some closing thoughts:
The night was a lively celebration of the past, present, and future of Vietnamese culture. From Madame Vo’s homestyle family recipes to the first-ever gin made from indigenous Southeast Asian botanicals: the wealth and richness of Vietnam’s traditions was on full display.
As a cultural agency that is 100% first-generation–led, part of District One’s mission is to amplify other first-generation founders. So we couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Madame Vo to help welcome Sông Cái Distillery’s Vietnamese gin to the States.
