LA's Bé Ù Puts a New Spin on Vietnamese Takeout and Workers' Rights

Uyên Lê has always loved food. That’s clear from the moment you step into Bé Ù, her tiny takeout restaurant in Silver Lake, where she serves up traditional items, like bánh mì, caramelized pork and eggs, spring rolls and rice noodle plates. Her weekend specials are often based on recipe ideas from her family.

“Okay, which cousin is the best at the crispy pork skin?” Lê laughed. “Let me reach out to [see] which aunty knows how to make handmade noodles the best.”

Born in Vietnam, Lê and her family immigrated to Southern California in 1991 when she was seven. The transition to a new life in a new language was a challenge, especially for her parents. But Lê loved growing up surrounded by so much family in West Covina.

“We all stayed in one room together, my cousins, my sister and my brother. And I remember it just really being a blast,” she said. “It was like a slumber party every day. I remember thinking, ‘This is so fun to have your family around you all the time. It’s just like in Vietnam.’”

Lê remembers her uncle serving up Mì Quảng, a rice noodle soup with a thick broth, at family gatherings. “ I have just these core memories of food and what motivates me to cook food,” she said. “And it’s definitely family gatherings. When I say family gathering, it’s at a minimum, 50 people. And if the family members bring their friends, that’s 100 plus.”

After watching her relatives cook for such big groups, Lê dreamed of one day owning her own restaurant — one that family recipes and the eclectic food scene in the San Gabriel Valley would inspire. But that dream would take years and a pandemic to set in motion.

The First Ingredient: Community Organizing

During her final year at UC Berkeley in 2005, Lê found herself drawn to social and environmental justice issues. She traveled to the Gulf Coast, where she helped the Vietnamese community recover from Hurricane Katrina. That led to pursuing a master’s degree and eventually working with the UCLA Labor Center. Her work there focused on advocacy for worker’s rights, particularly day laborers and other low-wage workers in dangerous occupations.

“I worked to ensure that these jobs led to long-term apprenticeable careers for workers while also helping local businesses generate sustainable economic opportunities,” she said.

Lê eventually started to get burned out on community organizing work, though, and her love for cooking reemerged. So, she quit her job with an electrician’s union in 2016 to finally pursue a career in the kitchen.

Pivoting to Cooking

When Lê quit her union job, her initial hope was to create a Vietnamese food business that would not only be focused on the food she grew up with but also set a model for better pay and health benefits in L.A.’s restaurant industry.

But first, she had to learn the business. She got her feet wet working back of house as a cook in kitchens — including stints at Cassia in Santa Monica and Button Mash in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Then, an opportunity arose early in the pandemic that she couldn’t pass up. A location for a tiny restaurant opened up in a neighborhood she used to live in, on a mostly residential stretch of Hoover Street on the border of East Hollywood and Silver Lake. Her idea for the small space was to initially start as takeout only, especially since it was the height of the pandemic. She did some remodeling, and Bé Ù opened its doors in February of 2021.

Lê said she had plenty of apprehension opening during a global pandemic, especially given supply chain issues, inflation raising the price of ingredients, employees getting COVID-19, and the threat of new shutdowns.

She was also committed, though, to paying her workers well above minimum wage. These days, that means $20 an hour, plus tips, to start — even though that’s a stretch for such a small operation. She’d love to increase wages even more and provide low-cost group plans for health insurance. But with such small profit margins, it’s still a work in progress.

“I’ve been able to pay my staff. I’ve been able to pay my rent. And I’ve got some vendors who are nice, who are willing to extend credit out a little bit longer,” Lê said.

But inflation has forced her to raise prices on menu items.

“I had a lot of heartburn around it because I do want to keep things affordable in this rent-controlled neighborhood,” she said. “I do see this as a time when a lot of other people are struggling.”

But she also wants to maintain the integrity of her cooking, with almost all of her menu items made from scratch. “I’m not going to feed somebody something less because it’s cheaper. I’m going to do the right thing because this is where my pride comes from,” Lê said.

Trying to put equity into practice while still paying the bills

As she celebrates the three-year-anniversary of Bé Ù, Lê said she appreciates the support from the neighborhood and frequent customers. But she knows she has to figure out an expanded business plan to support a restaurant focused on both good cooking and workers’ rights.

Her latest idea is to open a marketplace and restaurant. It would change the supply chain model, highlighting the products of indigenous communities in Vietnam and building a distribution pipeline for sustainably grown ingredients like tea and rice.

“So many of the products that are on shelves now aren’t necessarily sustainable over the long term. [In terms of] how they’re produced, in terms of who’s profiting from them, in terms of how the ecology of the places is impacted,” she said. “And so the idea is [to] work with folks in Vietnam, but also local vendors and suppliers in our Southern California region.”

The pandemic highlighted age-old questions that so many restaurant owners face. Should we raise prices and possibly turn off customers? How do we pay employees more livable wages? And how do we survive to turn a profit?

Lê is determined to keep cooking up her popcorn chicken and rice porridge in a place where employees want to come to work.