Bun Mee: Bringing Vietnamese Street Food to the Mainstream with Denise Tran (Ep 227)
With its innovative menu and commitment to quality, Bun Mee has quickly become a beloved destination for foodies seeking a taste of Vietnam. In this episode, Jaime Oikle sits down with Denise Tran, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Vietnamese sandwich eatery Bun Mee. Denise recounts her journey of bringing authentic bánh mì into the mainstream, transitioning from a legal career to pursuing her culinary dreams. With four thriving locations and a fifth on the way, she shares the excitement of launching a national franchise while navigating the complexities of the restaurant industry. Join them as they delve into Bun Mee's story, the challenges of growth, and Denise's passion for sharing her heritage through food.
Learn more about Bun Mee at https://bunmee.co/ and check out more great tips at runningrestaurants.com.
---
Watch the episode here...
Listen to the podcast here
Read the episode here
Bun Mee: Bringing Vietnamese Street Food To The Mainstream With Denise Tran
We have a fun episode coming up for you here on the show as I sit down with Denise Tran, Founder of Bun Mee, which is a quick-growing casual Vietnamese sandwich concept out of San Francisco. Denise is great as she shares lessons about their growth, their culture, their vision, and more. Great conversation. Stay tuned.
---
Denise, first of all, welcome. Describe the concept, and we'll go from there.
Thanks for having me. We are Bun Mee. It’s a San Francisco-based gourmet Vietnamese sandwich eatery founded in 2011. We have four locations in San Francisco, with a fifth one opening up actually in the Marina neighborhood. We are known for our chef- and mom-driven, innovative banh mi and banh mi-inspired Vietnamese sandwiches, salads, and bowls. We are just a neighborhood favorite in town.
You know what's great, folks? You will appreciate this - Denise is literally opening up a new location as we speak. We'll talk about that and the chaos that is along the way. You started a while ago and now you're expanding into franchising and opening up a new location. Talk a bit about the journey...
We've got so many exciting things happening. We are in the midst of launching our national franchise, which is exciting. Along with that, opening our fifth location. All of it is a culmination of a dream of mine that I've had since I started Bun Mee years ago. To see Bun Mee grow, be accepted, and take this next big leap in our journey is so rewarding. I can't wait for the next steps. It does keep me really busy. I'm trying to juggle it all, like you said.
Career Transition
I was on your site, which I love, by the way, and your About page is terrific. It gets to the passion of what you do. For folks who are reading, if you don't like your About Us page, please tell your story there. Give the background. If you need an example, go to Denise's page, BunMee.co. Very good job of giving your background. One of the things that's most fascinating is jumping out of the legal background. You were a lawyer for a while, now a restaurant operator, different transition. What's going on there?
I know. It's not the most straightforward path to get into the restaurant business. I would have to say, I think to leave a cushy law job... my mom probably thought I was going crazy. She's like, “What are you doing?” In her mind, I’m going the opposite way. It was a time in my life when I had a few major events happening. My father had passed away. It made me step back and think about my life. Knowing that life is short, and having experienced his passing, he was pretty young at the time, it just made me think about what I was doing. I wanted to curate the next stage of my life.
At the time, I was doing a lot of billable hours. Happy with what I was doing, but not feeling fully content in the sense that, does this really make sense for me for the rest of my life? I decided to get out of law and launch this sandwich business, which at the time in 2008, I was living in New York City. Bun Mee was just a very fragmented experience in the sense that if you wanted to get a bánh mì sandwich, you had to go to Chinatown, you had to dig for it. You had to be a foodie to know about this sandwich. It was not mainstream at the time.
I wanted to be that person to take it out of Chinatown alleyways and bring it into the mainstream, and to introduce people to a sandwich that basically is our Vietnamese hamburger. That is like the equivalent of a hamburger for us in Vietnam, but not known in the US. I grew up eating this and going to Vietnam and having these great street food experiences, eating this delicious sandwich that is unique in the sense that it is the only Asian sandwich that exists, right, in the way that we know it, because of the French influence. I thought this was a great opportunity for me to create a great scalable concept that is artisan, that is just focused on this beloved item, make it innovative, do things that folks weren't doing at the time, and put it in locations that are accessible to everyone and to educate a lot of people that just wouldn't otherwise have stumbled upon this or wouldn’t go to Chinatown to find this food item. Just be very customer-service-focused.
For us, it was a simple idea, actually, but it hadn't been done or executed well, in my opinion. At the time, that was what I wanted to do. I would say in the first early years, when we ended up launching in San Francisco, in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, which was primarily a very affluent, White neighborhood with a lot of folks that had never even heard of banh mi. Our first several years were just educating folks. We would have our employees have a script and describe what a banh mi was. Once people have it, then it's not so foreign anymore. At the time, there was just no concept of what a Vietnamese sandwich was. We did a lot of educating in the beginning. It just took off, which I was very excited about and happy to see. I was surprised that it took off so quickly. I think food resonates with people. Good food just resonates. It's very basic.
Good food just resonates with people.
Historical Roots
There's an historical component to your story, correct? What's that experience?
My mom is an amazing home cook, and so growing up, that was my experience, just eating out of her kitchen. I really learned from that. Also, I grew up in a neighborhood in New Orleans, it's in New Orleans East, which is a large enclave of Vietnamese immigrants that came and lived there. It was our own little community. They called it Little Saigon. There, that was where we kept our culture and kept our food culture.
For me, all those references, and references that come from my travels to Vietnam and eating street food there. On one of my trips, I traveled on my own, and I would go and eat at all these street food vendors. I would find someone that I liked and connect with. I would ask them to close for the day and see if they could take me home and show me their recipes and stories. They knew that I wasn't trying to steal their recipes, because they're like, "Okay, this is a Vietnamese American. She doesn't live here, she's not local." It was a way to connect through stories and food. All those memories, when I opened Bun Mee, are the memories and references that all gelled together and helped to create our menu and our vision of how we wanted to approach food.
My American background. I grew up here. I came here when I was three. I feel very American. A lot of my American food references also influence our menu. It's a reflection of my background being both Vietnamese and American.
Pain Points
I want to come back to the newness in a little bit, educating customers about trying something new, because I'm one of those people that's hard to try something new. Before I go there, I want to mention a couple of recent episodes. We've been using the phrase pain points. In the restaurant industry, there are pain points, it could be labor, or it could be just the cost of goods sold. Have you identified anything trending in your location that's just like, "Oh, these are the three things that are just bugging me the most"?
I definitely have those two things. Obviously, in the food business, your main costs are labor and food, and managing that with the rising cost of labor and food that we're experiencing is always a pain point. For us, providing value is so important. We don't always want to answer that by raising prices all the time, although sometimes we do have to, but it is a delicate balance between managing pricing and food and labor. We've spent a lot of time researching and investing in processes and equipment that will help us simplify things in terms of how we do things. That will help with labor costs and reduce waste.
Providing value is very important. It requires a delicate balance between managing pricing, food, and labor.
It's a continuing issue that I and, I'm sure, every restaurateur think about and look at. The other pain point is also just consistency, in terms of training and thinking about training and finding ways to systemize our training so that we have consistency in what we do. That’s a continuing pain point for us as well.
What about on the training side, finding people? If you're going to expand, you're opening a new place, so I'm sure you're hiring or you've gone through the hiring process. You're probably training some new people as we speak. How are you systematizing that to make it easier to roll out? What do you think?
We're in the midst of onboarding a lot of our training processes online through video. That's the process, and that's an investment that we're making so that we can make our training programs consistent. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it's just a lot of checklists, a lot of assigning great people to train and having those checklists, following up, and doing tests. We test our new employees after various stages of training. We have tests with them. We follow up and test them. That's the only way at this point. Until we are all online with our training, it is a lot of just following up and making sure that folks are doing what they're supposed to and retaining that information.
How do you go about setting the expectations of a new staff at a new location? Where I'm going with that is a lot of customers are going to come to you for the first time. That first impression, that first experience, can set the frequency for years to come. How do you talk to people about the brand, the expectations, and the ‘what we are’? How do you communicate the nitty-gritty to the people that are going to be dealing with your customers?
I'm really lucky in the sense that we just have amazing managers who take pride in what they do, and they are somewhat competitive with each other in terms of the performances of their stores. That comes with years of investing in culture and building that culture where customer service is really important. We give a lot of shout-outs around customer service, about how we do things in each store. Expressing or being able to convey those standards to new employees is not hard for us to do. This is because they do get to visit the stores. They visit all the stores and say, one store is great at doing this thing, whether it's like, it's a neighborhood store and they're great with customer service.
They remember folks' names. They call them out. It becomes like a relationship that they build with our guests there. We'll have our employees train at different locations because different locations will excel. It's hard to excel in everything, but different locations may excel in one or two things. We'll move our employees, our new employees, to train at those locations so that they're able to pick up on the best of what we expect. That's still a new process that we've been doing, but we feel that it allows that new employee to see, okay, this is the standard. This is the best that we expect.
Can you go back and give me an example? You use the phrase "shout-outs." Is it during meetings that you call people and say, "Tammy did terrific last week, I can't believe what she did?" Is it like that? What does it look like?
Shout-outs. We connect on Slack, and so everyone's on there. We do a lot of shout-outs, just meaning like, "Hey, this location did this much in sales. Everyone worked really well. It was a huge teamwork." They take photos. We give shout-outs to them, high fives, virtual high fives. Not only that, I make a point of, when I'm visiting the locations, to always have a good stack of gift cards with me, whether it be Starbucks cards or even a grocery store card.
If I'm in there and I'm doing a run, the kitchen is spotless, or I'm seeing folks just really executing high-quality food and presentations, great, whatever I have, we'll just shout out when we're there so folks just know. I come unannounced, but they know it's me, but they don't know when I'm coming. I do that, and our managers do that as well. We don't necessarily have an employee of the month sort of thing. We have this ongoing, "Hey, I just noticed you. This is awesome. You just really stepped up here." It's one of those things. I think people just feel seen and appreciated at that moment.
Having real-time recognition allows employees to feel seen and appreciated.
That's good. It echoes some things we've been talking about on the show and the website. There's not enough recognition and rewards for your staff. We're all guilty of it - if you're listening to this, you're probably not doing it enough. I like how you're doing it on the fly ad-lib. It doesn't have to be just the first Tuesday of the month. You see something good, reward it, and the reward does not have to be gigantic. Gift cards, people appreciate those small gestures. I like how you're approaching that, and that helps build the culture. Would you agree?
Yes, it really does. Our managers do it because they see me do it, and I encourage them to do it. You're right. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It could be a $15 Starbucks card. Other employees see that and see that acknowledgment, and it allows them to say, "Hey, that's great. I'm going to model that" and not have to wait once a month for this employee of the month. I think having it in real-time and having other employees see specifically that activity or that modeling allows them to understand this is the standard.
Target Frequency for Customers in the Fast-Casual Space
We say several times on our show, praise in public, which is what you're doing. Obviously, criticize in private is the way to do that. Let's talk about how you're in the fast-casual space. Frequency is a big deal. What is your ideal target frequency for customers? What do you think? How often would you like people to come in on a monthly basis?
We're fortunate in that we are in neighborhoods where we do see our guests come in about once every week or two weeks. If we can get folks to come once a week or once every two weeks, that's awesome. I think that would be enough for us. In our neighborhood shops, we see guests come in about once a week.
It's one of those things because people have a choice of where they're going to go. You're in San Francisco, CA. That's a food town. People have an infinite amount of choices. How can you get them to choose you? They're not going to come to you every day. It's not realistic. How can you get that once a week or once every two weeks visit and stay on their radar? Are you doing anything that you find successful marketing-wise to encourage those repeat visits, text, email, social, in-store, or anything in particular working for you?
Good question. To answer your question, we've been working on that. A lot of what we do is creating that experience that customers just feel like, "I'm going to get this consistent experience." Pedro at the store knows me and knows what I like and has it ready for me at any time. We do some social media, obviously. We do have offers that we do online via DoorDash and everything. We do have offers that really encourage new customers and new folks who haven't visited us before to try us.
We spend a lot of our budget dollars on introducing ourselves to new folks at the moment because we do have a high return rate once you've tried us. We're testing out introducing us to new folks. Over time, we'll have loyalty cards and discounts, and various freebies for folks that are repeat customers. We've done that in the past, and that worked. We're currently really focused on putting ourselves in front of new folks that haven't visited us.
That's good because it's one of the hardest segments to get is the new, and then obviously you want to build on the existing folks. You're in the tech mega-capital of the planet. I'm assuming that people are ordering on their phones a lot. There are takeout orders. There's a lot of that. Has that become a big, increasingly big part of your business, to be mobile-centric and have to-go orders ready to go? What do you think?
Yes, being in San Francisco, we're always the first to adapt to all the new technology. That's another challenge for us, being a small business and being on top of technology to make sure that we meet our customers where they are. It is true. Our business, we've seen that just continue every year to move more and more into mobile. We've had to adjust our business to make sure that we're there. Mobile ordering is big, and we spend a lot of effort.
As I mentioned earlier, just reaching out to those folks because we know that's how they're meeting us, via third-party apps. That's how we're marketing ourselves. That's how we're putting ourselves out there. The money that we spend is really via that because we know that's where they are. People are working more from home. We're getting less office catering and more folks just ordering food for lunch because they're working from home.
We know that's happening more. We're also investing in ordering kiosks. Folks are just used to ordering in front of a kiosk. They don't necessarily need someone ringing up their order any more. They're just used to doing that. Sometimes they prefer it. We've made investments in kiosks at all our locations to reflect that that's how our customers are experiencing us, and they're okay with that.
It's a big change. When I see younger people come in, they're just on their phones. I'm sure you serve people across demographics, but especially where you are, being able to do those things has become second nature in terms of order. My kids just pick up the phone, they do everything they want to do that way. To your point, a lot of people just want to interact with a digital screen to put in exactly what they want. It's going to be correct, and then they hit submit. If you're not doing that as a restaurant, continue to push those boundaries, because it's only a way to increase sales
Operating Bun Mee Inside an Airport
We didn't even touch on the airport piece. Let's touch on that for a quick second. You guys are in the airport there. That's got to be wild to operate inside of an airport because I know it has constraints and so forth. Give me the highlights there.
We are at SFO Airport, terminals 1 and 3. We've been there since 2017. We're the only Vietnamese restaurant at SFO. Operating at the airport is an entirely different environment altogether, as you can probably imagine. One of the biggest adjustments we've had to make is our airport employees are all union. Understanding labor contracts and union contracts and dealing with union employees is something you have to learn and be familiar with. That was a learning curve for us because that's just not our model.
Operating in a secured environment, even down to something like a plumbing leak, you couldn't just call someone off the street. They had to be badged, meaning they needed an airport badge and clearance. There's just so many steps. I don't want to say red tape, but there are so many steps to getting into the airport for security reasons and just screening employees. Employees have to constantly be screened for security reasons. Hiring there adds another layer of complexity when you're hiring employees for the airport because they have to have a clean record, they have to be screened, and they have to constantly be screened.
Operating in an environment where we're open for such long hours, that's not what we're used to. We're open from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Just having a workday that spans such long hours was new for us. We had to develop a breakfast menu that we didn't have before. We had to be more efficient with our operations because airport operations is very expensive. But then, there are lots of upsides as well.
It makes it worthwhile, but getting into the airport is a hard thing to do. Getting through the RFP process to be able to get into the airport and operate there is a hard thing to do, but you get rewarded at least. We're very fortunate to be able to be there. We love being at SFO. One of the reasons I came in was I thought this was a great opportunity to expand our brand to travelers, to people who may not visit our stores street-side and not know about us.
Parting Thoughts
Thanks for running through that. I had only thought about a couple of those things. The layers of complexity increase dramatically to operate in that environment. I've always been curious about how the restaurants get in there and how they operate differently. Obviously, you see a lot of chain brands at airports, but to see a local brand of restaurants, I appreciate that. I like that. Let's go to parting thoughts, parting wisdom. Send them to your websites, and your socials, where they can find out more. Where should they go?
Our website is www.BunMee.co. You can find all the information about us there. Find us on Instagram @BunMee. Those are the two best spots to find us.
Thank you. Parting thoughts, parting wisdom, what would you say to close it up? Last things you would say about the brand, the business? What do you think?
The last thing I want to say is we're embarking on an exciting time. We want to be a nationally known brand for Vietnamese sandwiches. We think there's a great opportunity for us to do that. We invite folks to visit our site. If you're in San Francisco, come to our stores and try our delicious sandwiches, bowls, and salads. I think you'll be really impressed with the experience, and hopefully, you'll be able to meet some of our friendly staff who will be happy to serve you.
I appreciate that. Folks, Denise Tran, Founder and CEO of Bun Mee. Again, find them on the web at BunMee.co. For more great restaurant marketing, service, people, and tech tips, and more, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. In the meantime, do us a favor, wherever you're watching or listening, like it, subscribe to it, or give us a review or rating. All that helps, and we appreciate it. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Denise.
Thank you.
Important Links