Vietnamese restaurants rebuilt East Biloxi when Katrina took everything. ‘I had no choice.’

On another busy lunch hour at her East Biloxi restaurant, as loyal customers ate pho and vermicelli, Kim Pham paused to look at old photos framed on the wall.

“Kim Long restaurant in Katrina,” she had written above the images of boarded windows, an empty parking lot and the littered street. “Reopen in 10/11/07.”

“They wonder why I opened so fast,” Pham said. “I had no choice.”

After Hurricane Katrina pounded the low-lying, working class haven of immigrants and wrecked their homes, their work and their neighborhood, a few determined Vietnamese restaurants were the first to return to East Biloxi 16 years ago. And today, they still call lost neighbors back to talk and remember, but mostly, to eat.

“It’s remarkable that they’re still up and running,” said Heidi Phan, an esthetician in Pensacola who grew up in Gulfport. She returns often to eat at Le Bakery, a popular local restaurant that opened less than a year after the storm.

Even since she moved away, “I always get a king cake from them,” Phan said. “They’re basically the best.”

Katrina ruined Kim Long – its force blew the windows out and the storm surge destroyed everything inside. Pham returned to an empty neighborhood that smelled of gas.

Businesses across the city closed, or moved north to D’Iberville. People came back to find that houses not completely gone had sometimes wound up in the street.

Some families never came home.

A 2018 survey showed Biloxi had just 750 Vietnamese residents.

By 2022, that number grew to roughly 2,000. And on Sundays at Kim Long, even more return. It is the restaurant’s busiest day, and Pham said Vietnamese families come from Alabama, New Orleans – even Atlanta.

Amid all the devastation of the storm, longtime Biloxi councilman George Lawrence said, the restaurants and businesses that returned showed “a little spark of life.”

“It paid off,” he said. “Didn’t it?”

Vietnamese restaurants return after Katrina

In 2007, Lawrence and other city leaders honored the 20 East Biloxi Vietnamese business owners who had already reopened. Kim Long and Le Bakery both made the list.

Pham gutted Kim Long when she returned — everything inside today is new. But the building stood. And that, she said, is why she came back.

She slept in her Ocean Springs jewelry store for one year and cooked for two families she let stay in the building for free. She paid workers in cash and ordered ingredients from Houston. By the day it reopened in 2007, Kim Long was packed.

Pham served street cleaners, volunteers and police. Her old customers had been mostly Vietnamese, but the new crowds were mostly military personnel and first responders. They ate fast and did not linger. No one dressed up.

“No time,” Pham said, because after the storm the last thing anyone could think about was looking nice.

Kim Long means “golden dragon” – a symbol of luck, which Pham said she had. Insurance paid for most of her repairs.

And usually, she said, she got $5 in tips per customer.

But after Katrina, “they give you $10.”

East Biloxi 18 years later

Allytra Perryman, program director of the East Biloxi Community Collaborative, said the neighborhood is still considered a food desert. It was full of businesses in the 1960s and 70s, but downturn in the fishing industry and wreckage of the storm turned many away — for good.

“Having somewhere in close proximity to pick up a hot meal was really important,” Perryman said.

“Little things,” she added, “like seeing an old neighbor, means a lot.”

Four days after Katrina made landfall, then-President George W. Bush stood amid the city’s ruins with a message.

“Out of this rubble is going to come a new Biloxi,” he said, but 18 years later, lot after lot on the quiet streets of East Biloxi are still vacant, and many of the places and people that once defined the city before the storm are gone.

But there are signs of hope.

Vung Tau, a restaurant steps from the Buddhist Temple and Vietnamese Martyrs Church on Oak Street, opened in 2017. At a time when the region was in crisis, the Phan and Lam family made a rare choice.

They moved to the Coast.

They left Las Vegas and arrived in August 2006 – just a year after Katrina. They stayed in friends’ homes and cheap housing until they could finally open their restaurant.

Theu Phan owned a restaurant in Las Vegas and wanted to do it again. Her family came to Biloxi with the hope of a future in fishing, but when her husband, Chiem Lam, found no luck in the industry, the family opened Vung Tau.

Now, Phan spends the day in front of a 30 gallon pot. It makes 130 bowls of pho, and she fills it three times a week to make 390 servings.

Vung Tau, said her son, Tom Phan, is somewhere “families can have a place to chat and eat and just hang out and build some memories.”

He is not sure why they chose East Biloxi, instead of Ocean Springs or D’Iberville, like so many others have.

Maybe they were drawn by the nearby Temple, because his family is Buddhist.

Maybe it was because, as the only restaurant on the block, the customers and tourists just seem to find it.

Or maybe his mother simply liked the neighborhood, Phan said. “She could start her dream there.”