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ORAL HISTORY
Ngoc Le and Triet Tra
Eat-Well Food Mart
The Eat-Well Food Mart sits at the intersection of Canal and Broad streets, a geographic and social crossroads of New Orleans, where a steady stream of customers arrive to buy brown-bagged beer, salty and sugary snacks, and bánh mì, the Vietnamese equivalent of the local po-boy sandwich. Triet Tra and her husband Dong Huynh opened their convenience store-meets-Vietnamese deli in 2012. For a decade prior, she ran stores across the Greater New Orleans area: a grocery and American deli Uptown, followed by a seafood emporium on the West Bank.
At Eat-Well, Triet came into her own to serve specialities from her home country, the nation she left in 1985: bánh mì, pho, bun (grilled meat over rice noodles), and bánh xèo (rice paper crepe). She uses bread from Hi Do Bakery and dresses the sandwiches with homemade sriracha aioli.
