by Deborah Silverthorn
Dallas Jewish Week
April 26, 2001 

In this week when area Jews recall the times of the Holocaust and refugees who fled their homes to stay alive and the millions who didn’t make it – as well as the 53rd birthday of State of Israel – Hong and Ahn Tran of Dallas are recalling the end of the Vietnam War.

They mark April 30, 1975 as their own sort of Independence Day, and they celebrate it in freedom as eatery entrepreneurs who serve a predominantly Jewish clientele.

Married at 19, the Trans honeymooned for a very short time in their native Vietnam. Six months into their marriage, Hong was captured as an army officer and imprisoned by the Viet Cong for three years.

Over and over, their home was broken into and they were ultimately robbed of almost everything they had. Anh had hidden a few diamonds and some gold that were wedding gifts to her from her mother.

During the time that Hong was held captive, Anh hid in bushes and braved the elements to try to reach her husband. After numerous bribes and much heartache, her husband was returned to her.

Knowing that they had to leave to make a better life for the family they hoped for, Hong and Anh planned to leave. They joined the many who fought so hard to leave their country but who did so because they simply wanted the freedom to discuss and criticize, to worship as they please, to earn a decent living and to live under a just and fair government.

For Hong and Ahn Tran, in 1979 their journey away from their homeland brought them to Dallas. With their 19-day-old daughter, Minh Hai, wrapped in blankets, they left behind family, friends and the only life, language and home they knew.

After landing in Texas, Hong and Ahn took jobs to feed their small family as they had come to this country almost penniless. Hong began working for an electronics company at base wages and then worked his way up as a technician for the Xerox Corporation. Ahn worked endless hours sewing in her home, always remembering the lessons of her mother who taught her to persevere no matter what. After saving some money, the Trans purchased a small grocery store-deli in the Lake June area of Dallas.

As Ahn had never really learned to cook in Vietnam, her first lessons in the kitchen came from the cook who worked for her. Chicken-fried steak and other Southern cooked specialties were the beginnings of her culinary career.

After selling the grocery store to purchase a small convenience store in the mid-1980′s, the Trans sold that business to finance a restaurant, B.J.’s on Harry Hines. After a number of years of learning the restaurant business, Ahn heard that the very popular and successful deli, “Cindy’s” on Central Expressway, was for sale.

Together, she and Hong decided that owning the frontage-road deli would be their next step and they have been there now for 12 years. Fortunately, most of the employees were still available for hire and that made the transition much easier. For the Trans, this was a new form of traveling in “uncharted waters.”

A few years later, Ahn also purchased the “Bagel Emporium” deli in Richardson at the intersection of Coit and Campbell. That deli had been providing Cindi’s (the Trans changed the spelling to keep the recognition but give it a new spark) with their bagels and some of the other baked goods.

When Ahn first purchased the restaurant, she laughs now, she had never seen or heard of a bagel. As a matter of fact, there is almost nothing on the menu that resembles any of the foods she and her family were accustomed to eating in Vietnam.

While Ahn has had requests to either have the current “Cindi’s” include kosher items or open a kosher deli, there are many restrictions to that. While she does respect the culture and its laws, it is more than she is able to take on at least at this point.

On the menu however, is a world full of Jewish/New York style items. Chicken soup and matzah balls, latkes, every classic deli combo one could hope for, as well as salads galore. Challahs and a huge array of cakes and Danish are baked fresh daily and available at both locations as well as bagels in more than a baker’s dozen of flavors.

While the staff is terrific, there have been a few times through the years when customers didn’t think the chopped liver or perhaps the soup tasted enough like “Bubbe’s.” They have many times shared their own recipes or those passed on through the family tree with Ahn and today they remain part of the kitchen’s secret arsenal.

The loyalty to the restaurant is understood as the employees and the ambiance of both locations is bright, cheerful and friendly. Wall-to-wall paintings featuring seascapes and floral patterns in the brightest of colors make it easy to relax at one of the many booths or tabletops.

As the delis have grown and been renovated, so has the Tran family. Ahn stands behind the counters at one or the other of the locations throughout the week and her husband keeps the business end in control. Their family now includes four children. Ming Hai (who traveled to the U.S. with her parents as an infant) is now 21 and will be graduating from Texas Christian University this spring.

Looking for a career as a dietitian, Ming has made many suggestions for her parents in the preparation of the meals at the restaurants. Deli and Southern-style foods, not long known for high health quotients, are getting some makeovers. Much of the frying in the kitchens is now done using canola oil instead of vegetable oils – probably not a reason to order two or three times as much, but at least your consciences can relax a little.

Second daughter Yen is 20 and studying at Tulane University. The Tran sons – Man, 18 and studying at UT Dallas and youngest son Michael, 12 – both continue to help out by hosting at the delis.

“Teaching my children the importance of working hard and not giving up is the greatest lesson I will ever give them,” says Ahn. Since they were very young, all of the family has worked together to make a success of their lives.

“Our family is very much like the Jewish customers who come in to eat. The families are close, care about each other, and the parents want to teach them manners, kindness and respect for their families. We aren’t so different in many ways.”

In 1999, Ahn made her first trip back to Vietnam in 20 years. Her mother had since died, but she was able to find her father and attempt to catch up for the lost years. Ahn returned last summer with her sons and hopes to do so again this year to introduce her daughters to their grandfather, who is now 74.

Keeping her prices reasonable has been difficult at times but they do remain so. “We have regular customers who come in here, some a couple times a week, some every single day. I can’t price myself out of their range. We’d certainly rather see people every day and offer quality food at fair prices. That keeps ‘my family’ coming in over and over.”

Source

By Cheryl Hall / Financial Editor of The Dallas Morning News
Published 09-11-1994

The bakery at Cindi’s New York Style Delicatessen and Pancake House is operating in overdrive, churning out challah for the Jewish New Year. Picking up a 5-pound loaf, the deli’s owner explains that the circular bread signifies renewal and luck all year round.

Her name isn’t Cindi, and she isn’t Jewish. She’s never even been to New York. But “Cindi,” aka Anh Tran, who escaped Vietnam by boat in 1979 with only her husband and towel-wrapped newborn, knows about chutzpah and luck.

Her story isn’t a tale of instant wealth. Rather, Mrs. Tran is building her stake in America one bagel at a time.

She took over Cindy’s North Central Expressway location in 1989, after the previous owner went under and closed his three neighborhood restaurants. She called back some employees, changed the “y” to an “i,” and reopened the one deli – just as construction would make it nearly impossible to reach her front door.

To stay alive, she started delivering to nearby office buildings. And, yes, she drove the family car to make the rounds.

That section of Central between Royal Lane and Northaven Road is now complete, and there’s fresh paint and a new sign outside, courtesy of the landlord, who apparently agrees that the worst is over.

Fifteen years after landing destitute in Dallas, she’s expanded with a second location and bakery in North Dallas – using the same means she’s used throughout life: working hard, squirreling away whatever she could, then reinvesting her savings judiciously.

Roadwork and recession have been the least of her travails.

Trouble at home

Anh Tran was an 18-year-old bride of six months when the Viet Cong swept into her home in Saigon and captured her husband, an officer in the South Vietnamese army. Hong Tran was carted off to a prison camp in the mountains. Late one night, most of the family belongings were raided.

She managed, however, to stash the gold and diamonds that her mother had given her as a wedding gift.

For the next 31/2 years, she braved jungle and mountains, skirting snipers and booby-traps to get to the prison camp, where she bribed a soldier to get her husband out.

“I was very brave,” says the 38-year-old, now a bit mystified by her youthful daring. “I was scared of nothing at that age.”

On her first trip to the prison camp, she got caught by a North Vietnamese soldier, who could have imprisoned her for illegal travel. Instead, he let her go. A few weeks later, he showed up at Mrs. Tran’s home and demanded money to release her husband. Not knowing whether he could do what he said, she gave him part of her dowry anyway.

“What else could I do?” she asks.

That would prove to be the first of many payments – each additional bribe meant she had to make another dangerous trip to the mountain prison. Just as her personal cache was nearly depleted, Mr. Tran was miraculously released.

Mrs. Tran was seven months pregnant when the young couple eventually made it to their seaport escape route. Her husband tried to learn how to deliver a baby in a boat. Perhaps fortunately, they missed the first chance out. Their baby girl, named Minh-Hai after that fishing village, was born 19 days before they boarded a small boat with 200 other people and headed for freedom in Indonesia. Mrs. Tran worried that her baby would die at sea, but a proverb gave her hope: “In Vietnam, people with long ears are supposed to have long lives. And she had very big ears.”

On weekends today, 15-year-old Minh-Hai tends the register and plays hostess. Her mother’s survival stories must seem like a Grimms’ Fairy Tale, far removed from her teen-age world of friends and fashion at Berkner High School.

Arriving with nothing

During the Trans’ two weeks at sea, they were robbed four times by pirates – leaving them with only the clothes on their backs and the towel that wrapped the baby. Only the calm sea cooperated.

“Without nice weather, there was no way we could make it,” Mrs. Tran recalls.

From Indonesia, the family flew to Dallas under a government program that allowed Vietnamese refugees to resettle in the United States and pay back the cost over time.

“When I came here, I’m out of my mind because this country is so different,” she says, still putting little twists to a language she found so foreign.

Mrs. Tran had thought she knew English until she found that what she learned in Vietnam wasn’t anything like what people spoke here. She couldn’t turn to her husband for help because his second language was French.

“I cannot talk to my neighbor,” she says of her early days in Dallas. “I cannot drive. Sometimes I would walk down the street and cry. Then I thought, `I have to work very hard and use my talents to get a business.’ ”

Mrs. Tran had a good role model.

Before the Communist takeover in Vietnam, her mother had been a successful wholesale and retail fabric merchant.

“I have my mother’s blood. Any business – if you have common sense – you can do it.”

Long days

So Mrs. Tran took in sewing. Mr. Tran went to work at an electronics company for minimum wage.

“We used to work 16 hours a day,” she says.

Home sewing turned into a contract-sewing business. He became a technician for Xerox. The couple also had two sons and another daughter along the way.

In three years, the Trans had saved enough for a grocery, meat market and deli in the Lake June area. The business wasn’t that great, but the kitchen had an elderly cook who taught Mrs. Tran how to prepare down-home Texas food.

That’s why chicken-fried steak – not exactly a New York deli mainstay – highlights Cindi’s menu.

Some of Mrs. Tran’s Jewish regulars – who’ve nicknamed her a “Vietnamese princess” – have shared protected family recipes. When her bread pudding drew only complaints, a customer came to her rescue with a grandmother’s secret.

“People always ask me why I didn’t open a Vietnamese restaurant,” Mrs. Tran says. “In Vietnam, I never cooked. I can cook American food better.”

Profits from the Lake June store were used in the mid-1980s to buy a convenience store on Inwood, which a couple of years later would finance a restaurant on Harry Hines, which would finance Cindi’s on Central in fall 1989.

“When I started, I didn’t have very much money, but I tried to keep improving,” Mrs. Tran says. “I had to be very, very patient. When you go into business, you expect to make money right away. But it takes time. Sometimes, a lot more than you thought.”

A restaurant-supply salesman helped her track down a woman who had telephone numbers for the old Cindy’s crew, and Mrs. Tran hired them back.

“They’ve been with me forever,” she says of her five years on Central.

‘She just dives in’

Jewel Kendrick, who enjoys the restaurant’s neighborhood feel, has been there 10 years – with the exception of that forced four-month hiatus.

“When the landlord locked the doors (in 1989), I had to leave,” she says with a little laugh.

Ms. Kendrick marvels at the way Mrs. Tran delves into the unknown. “She’s totally undaunted. When she wants to do something, she just dives in.”

Like the time someone wanted her to cater a Chinese dinner for 70. Afraid that the customer would simply call someone else rather than change the menu, she pulled out some cookbooks and went to work.

She’s sold everything to concentrate on Cindi’s, which now includes a restaurant and bakery that used to be the Bagel Emporium. Her husband oversees the bakery operation, which, in addition to its retail clientele, sells bagels and breads commercially to hotels and country clubs.

Columbian Country Club, a predominantly Jewish club, says it buys Mrs. Tran’s bagels because of their consistent quality. The Adolphus Hotel echoes that praise.

She’s redecorating the Campbell and Coit location. She’s added booths. Carpet is next – if business stays solid on Central.

That’s her word to the wise. Never bite off more than you can chew.

“Before business got better on Central, I didn’t even think about buying another business, because you have to have one make a profit to spend on the other. . . . We’re just barely making it,” she says, perhaps an understatement. “But I’m sure later on, we’ll do much better.”

To detractors of this country’s economic promise, Anh Tran says baloney. Or at the very least, corned beef on rye.

Reprinted with permission

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