At Sap Sửa, a non-traditional Vietnamese restaurant in Denver, the most popular dish is cabbage. It may sound basic, but for chefs Anthony “Ni” Nguyen and Anna Nguyen, the simple plate represents their mindset around dining.
“You don’t need the fanciest equipment or tools or techniques to make something that’s meaningful,” Ni tells Observer, speaking from the restaurant’s dining room in June. “We took a piece of cabbage, we confit-ed it, charred it and then put it over an egg yolk sauce. Everything from beginning to end was intentional. It doesn’t matter if you have 1,000 ingredients or cool techniques—it has to mean something to someone.”
He adds, passionately, “That’s never coming off the menu. It’s the dish that encompasses everything about who we are at Sap Sửa.”
The dish, called bắp cải luộc, is a recreation of something Ni’s mom used to cook for him when he was a kid growing up in California. “It was just boiled cabbage and rice,” he says. “And it was one of my favorite things. It was humble. That’s what we want to do with food here: very simple, but very impactful.”
Ni and Anna met at the International Culinary Center in San Jose, California, nearly 14 years ago. Anna was studying pastry and Ni was studying savory cooking. According to Anna, from their first date at an Ethiopian restaurant, “you could just tell we were going to be together forever.” Soon after they started dating, opening their own restaurant became a shared dream. The idea has taken on many forms over the years, but they always wanted to do something that would pair their talents.
“I never really had envisioned myself in a career until I decided I wanted to cook,” Ni says. “So meeting her, it was like this whole new world opened up. We were talking about food and flavors and so many things. And it was never my dream over hers, or, ‘This is more important than your dream.’ It was like we helped to facilitate each other’s dreams.”
The fantasy began to solidify in March 2020 when the pandemic hit. The couple, now married, was living in Los Angeles. They were in the process of opening a new restaurant with Nancy Silverton, which was put on pause amid Covid-19 closures. “You can only grow so many scallions in your window until you’re like, ‘Okay, what are we doing now?’” Ni remembers. “So we decided to play restaurant and come up with mock menus. It was so fun. It was the same energy of when we first met.”
The cost of living in Los Angeles wasn’t sustainable, so Anna suggested returning to Colorado, where she grew up. Her family still lived there and could help support the idea. When she called her dad, who had owned a business for many years, he offered some sage advice. “He said, ‘You’ll only have the energy to do this once,’” Anna says. “He was like, ‘You’ll either do it for somebody else’—which was the track we were on—‘or you can just roll the dice and do it for yourselves.’”
At the time, Denver’s culinary scene had stagnated due to the pandemic. The city had welcomed great new restaurant openings in previous years, but there were a few glaring omissions. The Nguyens could see the potential for a modern approach to Vietnamese cooking inspired by Ni’s parents, who immigrated from Vietnam in the late ‘70s.
“California has such great Asian food,” Anna says. “Denver does too, but it’s much less, so we thought if we came to Denver, maybe we could really stand a chance to make a difference for people. We could bring this first-generation dining experience into a city that has a fairly big Asian population, and that is mostly represented by very traditional food. We wanted to be the ones to usher in this place for kids to see what Asian food could be in Denver.”
After moving to Denver in November 2020, Anna and Ni began recipe testing in her parents’ kitchen. One of the first dishes to emerge was the cabbage. In the years that followed, Sap Sửa hosted pop-ups at numerous local spots while Ni spent his days working at the Pho King Rapidos food truck and Anna worked for Etalia Foods. It was challenging, but the couple was focused on the possibility of what Sap Sửa, which is Vietnamese for “about to be,” could become. Finally, in 2023, Sap Sửa opened its doors on East Colfax in a former theater shared by the beloved Tattered Cover bookstore.
“Denver embraced us completely and from the get-go,” Anna says. “It was so empowering because we decided we were going to be ourselves no matter what, but we weren’t sure how it would be received. Maybe it would take years for people to latch on to flavors like big acid, tons of fish sauce, off-cuts of meat. But people were craving it.”
“Honestly, people have responded really well to having things on the menu like pig ears,” Ni adds. “They go crazy for it, and I did not think that would be the case. People in Denver actively seek out our stranger dishes. For a month, we had a burger on the menu, and nobody ordered it.”
Sap Sửa regularly swaps dishes in and out, but the approach is consistent. Ni says about 70 percent of the menu is inspired by what he grew up eating with his parents and what you would find in restaurants in Vietnam. The other 30 percent comes from the chefs who work with him. One of the menu standouts, trứng và trứng, combines rice, soft scrambled egg, trout roe and a brown butter sauce. It’s immensely satisfying and rich in flavor—the sort of dish you might return for again and again. It was conceptualized by Ben Carolan, one of the sous chefs.
“We always encourage the chefs to put a little bit of their story or their culture into the food,” Ni says. “It’s a part of empowering our cooks and our chefs to actually be chefs. And we want people to leave here better people than when they came in, not just better chefs. Ultimately, your career is a marathon, and you’re going learn so many techniques and so many recipes, but the thing we pride ourselves on here is you’re gonna learn how to be a good person first.”
A sense of storytelling is inherent in all of Sap Sửa’s offerings. The restaurant often shares the stories on Instagram along with images of specific dishes. Ni started doing it as a way of dealing with “imposter syndrome and self-doubt.”
“When we first opened up, a lot of that self-doubt came in,” he recalls. “I was saying things to Anna like, ‘I can’t remember the five mother sauces. How can I be a chef?’ I felt so self-conscious about that, and I wanted to be able to lean into one of my strengths, which is to be able to tell a story. I realized that if I leaned into being vulnerable and telling people about the process of how scary it is and how vulnerable you have to be and how strong you have to be, I could carve out a lane for myself.”
Anna leads the charge on the desserts, which are similarly inspired by Vietnamese flavors and dishes. But she also brings in her own influences. The most popular is the chè chuối, a variation on banana pudding that incorporates coconut and peanuts alongside the traditional Nilla Wafers. Anna drew on her own childhood, as well as the Vietnamese inclination to combine multiple textures in a dish. She took inspiration from Vietnamese dessert shops in Orange County that offer bags of crushed peanuts and sesame seeds with every dessert.
“To me, the banana pudding is the sum of both of us and our marriage,” Anna says. “Sometimes there are dishes where I am really taking ideas rooted in Vietnamese food and there’s very little of me in it, which is sometimes appropriate. But I have so many memories of growing up eating banana pudding. I wanted to do something in that world, and there’s a lot of bananas used in Vietnamese desserts. That’s another one that I don’t think will ever leave the menu.”
Initially, Ni and Anna were worried that the older generation of Vietnamese people in Colorado might not appreciate their unconventional approach to the cuisine. But the reaction has been the opposite: many diners feel like they are finally being represented by Sap Sửa’s presence. The intermingling of cultures reflects those who have one foot in each country, like Ni.
“I’ve never felt Vietnamese enough or American,” Ni says. “But when I get to see guests in here with their parents, and they’re eating, and they’re laughing, and they ask for Thai chilies, that feels nice. You don’t have to be this Vietnamese to be Vietnamese, and you don’t have to be this American to be American. You can just exist. In this building, I feel like people are existing and not having to explain themselves. To me, that is a healing thing—to be able to provide that for others.”
Over the past two years, Ni and Anna have established Sap Sửa not only as a must-visit restaurant, but also as an advocate for inclusion and community. They regularly partner on events with the Tattered Cover and the nearby Sie Film Center, including a recent panel titled “How Asian is Asian Enough.” Accomplishment for the couple doesn’t just mean having a thriving restaurant. It also means uplifting those around them, both in the kitchen and in the dining room.
“There are a lot of organizations that we have close ties to and we really believe in,” Ni says. “We’re spending our time and our platform to make Denver a nice place to be.”
Anna adds, “For us, success is if the people inside your walls are happy and taken care of. Are your guests happy? Do they come back? Are the staff happy? Is their life good? And if we are able to live full and complete lives outside of the restaurant because we trust the staff, I think that’s the highest marker of success.”