Nine Roses is still Nine Roses, with the same kitchen, the same crew of family members running that kitchen, and much the same menu and specialties coming out of it.
But the Nine Roses that reopened last week in Gretna after an extended summer hiatus is also a fresh start for one of the area’s longest-running Vietnamese restaurants and a reaffirmation of its place in a changing dining scene.
At the newly renovated Vietnamese restaurant Nine Roses in Gretna, sliding doors separate a banquet room from the main dining room.
Renovations began around July 4 and stretched longer than anticipated. A planned reopening had to be postponed a few times. When the doors finally did reopen last Thursday, it was clear regulars had been waiting. They poured in, peered around at the changes and, frequently, stopped proprietor Anna Nguyen mid-stride for welcome back hugs.
The renovation was both aesthetic and functional, bringing a fresh new style to the dining room and also a bar for solo diners, a banquet room for private events and a bank of booths with built-in table top booths for the menu’s marquee dish – bo nuong vi.
Nine Roses in Gretna completed a renovation that includes a bank of booths with table top grills.
For Nguyen and her family, the changes are also symbolic, representing a conviction to keep Nine Roses current and a continuing part of the local restaurant community.
“We’ve seen other restaurants close after many years, and we’ve thought about it too,” she said. “We have a chance to slow down if we wanted. We’ve done this for so long and the restaurant business is very demanding.
“But no, we want to double down and show our customers what Nine Roses can really be,” she said. “The customers really are the key to this.”
Jeff and Anna Nguyen run Nine Roses, a Vietnamese restaurant in Gretna known for its extensive menu of traditional dishes.
The decision to re-invest came not long after New Orleans lost one of its anchors of first-generation, traditional Vietnamese cooking. Kim Son, a low-key institution in Gretna, closed in 2018 after 30 years in business. Its building is now for sale; the cravings for Kim Son’s particular way with salt baked dishes remain unanswered.
The history of Nine Roses goes back nearly as far.
Nguyen’s mother, known to all as Mama Tu, first started Nine Roses in 1991 on a backstreet in Harvey (its strip mall location is now home to the excellent Chinese restaurant Hong Minh).
Red snapper served at Nine Roses in Gretna.
In 1998, the family moved to the much larger current location in Gretna. Set back from the main drag, behind a motel and apartment complex, it had been a restaurant called Red China before and had seen a number of other businesses come and go.
But Nine Roses had Mama Tu, and Mama Tu had a following from her years cooking at other Vietnamese restaurants. At her own, she broadened the appeal to more local customers by pairing a deeply traditional Vietnamese menu with more familiar Chinese-American standards.
“When we first opened, Vietnamese food was not that popular and Vietnamese people themselves cook a lot at home,” Nguyen said. “We wanted to have more for our neighbors to come here. By with time, they’d see Vietnamese dishes going to the other tables and tell us they want to try what they’re having.”
Bo tai chanh at Nine Roses, a traditional Vietnamese dish of marinated raw beef with fresh herbs and lemon, resembles a carpaccio.
In 2015, Nguyen opened a second location, called Nine Roses Cafe, in the French Quarter with a smaller, noodle house style menu of soups, bowls and sandwiches.
The Gretna restaurant reopened with most of its staff in place. Many used the long downtime to travel to Vietnam; some worked shifts at the French Quarter location. Also back is Jeff Nguyen, Anna’s husband, though as usual he stays mostly behind the scenes, taking the thankless jobs so his wife can be out front with their customers.
Today, the next generation of Vietnamese New Orleanians has been making its mark in the restaurant scene with fusion cooking and crossover creations, adding new energy and building its own niches from Viet-Cajun crawfish to barbecue pho.
Shrimp and pork crepe with fish sauce at Nine Roses in Gretna.
The pleasure of Nine Roses is about diving deeper into the enormous potential of traditional Vietnamese cooking. The kitchen is known for its “thin soups,” served in family-sized bowls, for lush salads built on crunchy cabbage and strewn with herbs and for caramelized fish cooked in clay pots.
Perhaps most of all, it’s known for bo nuong vi. This and a range of related dishes - is meant to be shared. It’s prepared by diners themselves at the table. In the past this involved bringing out portable gas grills. The new fixed grills are the same used at Korean barbecue restaurants.
For this dish, the beef is wrapped in wrapped in rice paper with an assortment of herbs, pickled and fresh vegetables and sauces.
A new menu guides visitors through the basics of the dish, and lays out its many variations, including squid, octopus, salmon and shrimp for the grill, and a special kind of beef no nuong la lot, wrapped in bitter, fresh betel leaf.
Nine Roses serves an extensive menu of Vietnamese dishes in Gretna.
A dish from the old country, once ordered mainly by people who knew it from family meals, the style has found new currency with a younger generation. The format is social, interactive, with shared meals that take some time to assemble (and makes a pretty good Instagram post too).
Nine Roses is back for another round, and will perhaps show another generation how it’s done.
1100 Stephens Ave., 504-366-7665
Lunch and dinner Thu.-Tue.
Nine Roses Cafe
620 Conti St., 504-324-9450
Lunch and dinner Mon.-Sat.
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