The idea that food can be art is something of a divisive topic. Some people scoff at the notion, usually because of the connotation behind what it means for food to be art. Michelin starred restaurants come to mind, and kitchen tools go from everyday pots and pans to sous vide machines and tweezers which chefs in all-white will use to adorn dishes with tiny, edible flowers. Food starts to feel a little highfalutin, a little pretentious—What’s the point, after all, of making a meal look pretty when all you’re going to do is eat it? On the other hand, there are those who believe that food is art, just as much as music, painting, and writing are. Skill, creativity, and craft are involved in cooking, making the process of taking a variety of ingredients and turning them into a singular, delicious dish a magical, transformative experience. As someone who’s worked in a kitchen and loves to cook at home too, I believe food doesn’t have to be art but that it can be. Speaking to Dat, owner of East Borough Pizza, it was nice to know we were on the same page. Here was someone who took something as humble as pizza and elevated it in a way that frankly, only an artist ever could.
We met at his shop on Phạm Viết Chánh. The place opened in November 2024, and from the get-go whispers about how good the pizza was circulated around the neighbourhood. But Dat’s story doesn’t begin in Saigon. For the full picture, we’ll have to go to Santa Ana in California, the city where he was born and raised. Growing up there as someone fully Vietnamese—his Dad is from a coastal town to the North of Saigon and his mother the South of Vietnam— he did mention how things could get rough at times. The fact was, he grew up around Latinos, with the majority of the students at school of Mexican descent meaning that he stuck out among the crowd. While he believes it built character, it also meant that when he was younger he distanced himself from Vietnamese culture as much as he could, all in an attempt to blend in. It’s common to do so when you’re younger, when you’re still unaware that what makes you stand out is what makes you, you. In any case, pizza, at this point in Dat’s life, wasn’t yet something he had an aspiration to make a living out of. What he was interested in at that time was art—he’d been big on oil painting and animation in school—which is why when it came time to decide what he wanted to do after high school, he enrolled in Cal State Fullerton to study industrial design.
Upon graduating, he got into work as an industrial designer in biomedicine. The majority of his work was centered on making intraocular lenses for people who’d undergone cataract surgery or had other vision impairments. He found the work fulfilling, even more so because on the side he did a lot of furniture design. At that point two things were happening. First, starting in 2016, he’d started making annual trips to Saigon to reconnect with the country and its culture. Learning the language helped him develop a stronger bond with his Vietnamese roots, causing him to stop desiring that same distance that kept him separated from Vietnam when he was younger. More so than ever, he could see himself living in the country. Besides that, back in the States he’d also made it a habit to take regular trips to New York City. This was when his love of pizza really took off, owing to a love of the history behind the dish in how Italians migrated to America and created their own style of pizza, not to mention visits to pizzerias he considered to be run by masters. An idea brewed in his head: what about trying his hand at pizza-making? After all, food was— just like oil painting and industrial design—art. Perhaps this was his artistic calling.
As fate would have it, Covid hit around when Dat began thinking about making pizza. The pandemic’s isolation measures meant he had a good deal of time at home, which he spent figuring out how to get the dough formula right. Even more fatefully, towards the end of Covid, he lost his job. At face-value, losing your job is rarely taken as a positive but blessings are often hidden in disguise. It was now or never: Vietnam called.
Dat moved to Vietnam in November 2023. For the first four months in the country he focused on consulting work for a design and manufacturing startup. Throughout it all, pizza remained the focus but it was something of a nightmare figuring out how to open a business in Saigon. From obtaining licenses, working through a boatload of paperwork, and getting in contact with the proper suppliers, it all seemed like a neverending fiasco. Then there was the issue of finding the right location to open. He wanted a spot on Phạm Viết Chánh given its popularity, as well as the fact that his grandfather had actually grown up near the Pink Church close by. He saw a few places but nothing really clicked. One day, his friend told him about a landlord wanting to rent out what was a garage and after seeing the space for himself, Dat knew this was the one. So began three months of negotiations, involving a lot of verbal agreements, backtracking, followed by more verbal agreements. Finally, at the end of the gruelling process, he got his spot.
The name East Borough pizza pays homage to Dat’s love of New York style pizza. However, the name goes deeper than that. Given that there are five boroughs in New York City and Vietnam’s situated on the far east, it’s something of an unofficial sixth borough: the East Borough. Opening a year after Dat moved to Saigon, him and the team have experienced a myriad of highs and lows. For Dat, a lot of the lows had to do with figuring out how to run an F&B business. He’d never done anything similar and people always warned him about the perils of getting into the restaurant game, which, over the year they’ve been open, he understands to all be true. However, what he believes you need more than anything is passion for food. This is the only way to justify the grind of working in F&B and luckily, when it comes to pizza, Dat’s got passion in spades. Besides the business end, he also learned to keep the menu simple. When they opened, East Borough had wings on the menu. Issues with costing led to them removing it but more so than that, Dat also wanted to focus on perfecting pizza before dabbling with a bunch of other items. This is an idea I love. I’ve been to too many restaurants that flood their menu with all kinds of dishes without ever getting any one of them right. Though wings may make a reappearance and he wants to work with pasta in the future, it’s no wonder why East Borough received such glowing reviews from the start: they were willing to go all in on pizza first.
Today, East Borough has six regular pies: the Margherita, Pepperoni, Burrata, Funghi, White Pie, and Xa Xiu. While the first five are relatively common across pizzerias, the Xa Xiu is Dat’s attempt at blending his Vietnamese heritage with the traditionally Western dish. He’s also played around with one-off pizzas for pop ups. With Rafters they made a South-African style biltong, avocado, and feta pizza whereas during a collab event between East Borough, Alibi, and Lucky Vodka, he made a Salsa Roja tomato based pizza complete with vodka sauce, cream, chorizo, and ricotta. It’s with these collabs that Dat really gets to push the boundaries with pizza-making. When it comes to what goes on the menu, he takes his experience as an industrial designer to figure out what works best. Essentially, there’s tons of research and development. Usually he starts with an idea and starts tinkering based on intuition. He understands food needs to be balanced in the sense that it should hit the five flavour elements (salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and the Japanese term known as umami). With this in mind, he’ll keep experimenting until he lands on what he wants. Occasionally, this can take as long as three months, as was the case with the Funghi pizza. Still, through talking with Dat, I’m not surprised he operates in such a manner. Just like the creative process of writing a song can take weeks, painting a portrait can take months, or writing a book can take years, making a pizza also requires an adequate amount of time if the one doing the work does so with the mindset of an artist. And that’s why, in the case of East Borough, pizza can be art.
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