Vietnamese Immigrants in Washoe County Share their Culture Through Local Restaurants, While Students Connect at UNR Club Events

Long Thai, center left, looks toward his customers as he walks through the dining area of his Vietnamese restaurant, the Golden Dragon, in Reno, Nev., earlier this month.

Not far away, on the floor of a small office space within the University of Nevada, Reno’s Clark Administration Building, Vinh Nguyen recently sat on the carpeted floor to pray and read the Bible with friends, both in-person and online. 

Nguyen immigrated to the United States from Vietnam just over a decade ago in 2014, and is now a senior studying civil engineering at the university. Today, he is one of the over 2,000 Vietnamese people estimated to have made Washoe County their home.

For Nguyen, the freedom to learn in America stands as an improvement upon what Vietnam had offered him.

“For example, so basically over there,” said Nguyen, “you must have the permissions from the government and as well as for the permission from your family on what you want to do… However, in the United States, I like [it] the most because in the United State[s] I typically have the freedom of about anything that I can learn.”  

He likes to also share the positive aspects of Vietnam’s culture with those around him—recommending cultural foods such as the Vietnamese sizzling pancake, which he described as a specialty from his former home region of southern Vietnam, and introducing others to traditional Vietnamese board games like Vietnamese Horse Race Chess and Fish-Prawn-Crab, a game played during Lunar New Year celebrations. 

Annie Thai, another Vietnamese immigrant and student at UNR, is also seeking to share the culture of her homeland through her involvement as president of the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) on campus. Her family sought opportunity in the United States, fleeing poverty; yet life in America came with its own risk.

“So, growing up as, like, Vietnamese-American, I’ve always been, like, trying not to lose my culture,” she said. “Like, that’s something that I’ve always been scared of. . . . And I know a lot of other Vietnamese Americans that feel the same, and even, like, the international Vietnamese students that also are being more . . . assimilated to Western culture rather than, like, their own. So, I just wanted to bring, like, parts of Vietnam back to Reno, basically . . . for both the Vietnamese Americans and the international students.”

Founded on campus in October 2024, the VSA experienced a leadership transition this fall and is getting a fresh start, according to Thai. It has held multiple events thus far, attracting about twenty students to a smaller gathering and over ninety students at their largest gathering—a collaborative event with the Nevada Filipino Club and the Japanese Student Action Network. 

Thai says that students have the opportunity to speak Vietnamese at most VSA events and that more language-based events will be coming. As of 2024, Vietnamese was the fifth most prevalent language spoken in Reno, per a recent study.  

The club will also celebrate the Vietnamese Lunar New Year in February.  

Both students Nguyen and Thai further noted that they missed Vietnamese cuisine; and off-campus, several restaurants seek to answer their demand, including the Golden Dragon in Reno and the Sip of Saigon in Sparks.

Long Thai, the owner of the Golden Dragon, immigrated from Vietnam to America in 1984. He opened his restaurant just three months ago, hoping to bring authentic Vietnamese dishes to northern Nevada.

Inside his restaurant, patrons enjoyed the menu’s culinary offerings for lunch beneath the warm glow of hanging lights; and Christmas music added a festive atmosphere to the space.

“Well, I want to bring more—more about culture and diversity to . . . the city and the people so they can try out more things,” he said. “At first, they probably won’t understand it or maybe like it, but hopefully it’ll grow on them.”

The dish that is his favorite? Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang—a Vietnamese soup with a Cambodian background.

Meanwhile, Dao Huynh, who calls herself Kate, is serving the Sparks community at her small café and eatery, Sip of Saigon.

She came to the United States as a refugee in 1979, describing herself as one of the many “boat people” who fled the Southeast Asian country following the Vietnam War. Her mother, who had owned a restaurant in Vietnam, followed later and served as chef in the first Vietnamese restaurant Kate established in Orange County, California.

Though her mother died several years ago, Kate now carries on her culinary legacy. In 2021, she opened the Sip of Saigon, which offers Vietnam’s most common foods to help northern Nevada discover Vietnamese culture.

“Well, people gonna go, ‘Oh yeah, I wanna try that cuisine,’” said Kate, “and then, maybe then they [are] gonna go, ‘Oh, I really want understand more about that culture,’ right?”

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