This Vietnamese restaurant has taken over New York's food scene with one special ingredient

NEW YORK -- With its signature dish, Vietnamese restaurant Mam has crafted a special corner in New York's cuisine.

Vietnamese restaurant Mam (meaning 'fish sauce' in Vietnam) has made a mark on New York City's food scene with its signature dish: bun dau mam tom.

Husband-and-wife duo Jerald and Nhung Dao Head initially opened the restaurant as a limited pop-up shop during the pandemic.

"We were eating a lot, cooking a lot, and we had the opportunity to take over a friend's restaurant," Jerald explains.

Rave reviews of their signature dish spread quickly among the Vietnamese community, giving the couple an opportunity to expand the pop-up operation into a 5-day-a-week brunch service in Chinatown.

In early 2023, Mam was featured on Pete Wells's "The 100 Best Restaurants in NYC" list in The New York Times.

"We were just doing it for fun, expecting a couple of tables here and there, and it just blew up into something that we never imagined," says Jerald.

All ingredients are made in-house from scratch with great effort, from the sticky rice patties and blood sausage to the tofu, and the restaurant has a distinct streetside seating area reminiscent of street food stalls in Vietnam.

The dish features a selection of proteins like pork belly, tofu and blood sausage alongside blocks of vermicelli noodles. The assortment is served with a side of mam tom, a pungent fermented shrimp paste brought from Vietnam that Nhung says is controversial even among the Vietnamese community.

"This is not for everyone," says Nhung. "But people who come here and have never had that, we always encourage them to try it. Give it a chance and get to know it, and you'll see another color of Vietnamese cuisine."

"If I were blindfolded, I would have thought the dish was from Vietnam," says a patron eating at the restaurant.

Mam is open from Thursday to Monday at 70 Forsyth Street with a rotating, seasonal menu.