dining guide BY: This was a great choice, Thanh. TT: I love Epic beers and I’ve heard a lot of good things about this place lately. BY: Talk to me about your relationship with the food community and different chefs and restaurants around the city. I know many of them buy from you. TT: Working at the store, I get to meet a lot of chefs. I like to see how they’re using the ingredients they’re buying from us. I love frequenting their restaurants and seeing what they’re doing. The guys here at The Annex just got tubs of gochujang [a fermented red chili condiment from Korea]. I’ll have to come back for dinner and see what they do with it. BY: That must be really fun for you. I know you’re a food guy. TT: It is. My girlfriend and I are really big on food, so it’s fun to see all these guys come through. BY: What’s your latest food obsession? TT: Bombay House. We’ve been eating a lot of Indian food lately, a lot of middle eastern food, too. We got takeout from Mazza four days straight. The lady who took our order knew who we were before I could even order. She was like, “You guys haven’t tried these dishes yet.” And I hadn’t given her my name yet. Lunch Meet with Billy Yang
Thanh Trang A life of loving food
Thanh Trang, the affable Asian store manager at Southeast Market at 422 E. 900 South, grew up in Utah but was living in Southern California when his parents purchased the market, formerly called Tay Do. While he’s always had a love of food, Trang, who studied economics and interior design, never really thought it would be his livelihood. “My dad needed help. There were only two people running the store, so I came back to work for the summer but it just kind of stuck,” Trang says. Trang took a break from the store one Sunday afternoon to meet me for brunch at The Annex. Between the two of us, we split the maple-brined ham and biscuits, pastrami hash, spaghetti with morel mushrooms, bresaola with Tokyo turnips and pastrami-cured salmon. Because The Annex is part of Epic Brewing, we had to wash all that food down with beer. We tried the Smoked and Oaked Belgian ale and the Berliner Weisse, which is a sour beer available on tap at the brewpub.
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BY: Besides all that eating, what else do you do when you’re not at the store? TT: My girlfriend and I are big foodies. We love to eat and travel. Last year we went to Asia. We went to Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. BY: What was it like going to Asia as a ChineseAmerican? Were you able to blend in? TT: You definitely stand out. They can tell. They know you don’t belong there. They can tell by your dress and your mannerisms. I’d love to go back to Asia. I’d love to go to Tokyo. BY: I have this theory that immigrants want to recreate a piece of what they had back in their home countries and that’s why stores like yours are so important to the community. TT: Yeah, especially for refugees. We see a lot of refugees from Burma and Nepal now. They sometimes can’t completely connect with this new world they’re living in so they want something that they can identify with. Visit SLmag.com for more of Billy Yang’s interview with Thanh Trang