Vietnamese-Style Thanksgiving: How Vietnamese-American Families Fuse the Two Traditions

Thanksgiving is not a Vietnamese holiday, and turkey is not a traditional Vietnamese meat. What Vietnamese-American families cook on the fourth Thursday of November is a negotiation between the holiday they live in and the food they grew up with. The results vary from a full Vietnamese banquet with no turkey to a standard American table with one Vietnamese dish tucked in.

Why Vietnamese-American Families Blend the Two Menus

Pew Research Center estimates about 2.3 million Vietnamese people lived in the U.S. in 2023, and 60 percent of them were immigrants. Many kitchens are still run by people who learned to cook in Vietnam, so the American dishes are the ones that get adapted.

Andrea Nguyen of Viet World Kitchen writes that pilgrims, pumpkins, and pies were novelties that never caught on in her family, and that the Mid-Autumn Festival mattered more. Her family shifted to roasting chickens and game hens and filled the table with Vietnamese dishes.

Hosting rules travel too. In stories collected on Viet World Kitchen, one contributor says a single meat on the table reads as stingy, so his family served turkey alongside ham and roast beef. For more on Vietnamese table customs, see our Vietnamese food etiquette guide.

The Bird: Gà Tây Nướng, Roast Chicken, or No Turkey

Chef Tu David Phu’s gà tây nướng is a spatchcocked turkey marinated in minced lemongrass and garlic, oyster sauce, fish sauce, scallions, sesame oil, sugar, and black pepper. It marinates for one to two hours, then roasts at 450°F for 30 minutes and at 400°F after that, until the thickest part reaches 165°F.

Fresh lemongrass is the ingredient to get right; our guide to how to cut lemongrass shows how to mince the tender part.

Some families skip turkey entirely. Nguyen says her mother stopped making it years ago. A whole roast chicken feeds a smaller table with the same marinade.

Xôi Stuffing Instead of Bread Dressing

The clearest Vietnamese-American invention is the stuffing. Nguyen’s mother fills the bird with sticky rice, fatty ground pork, shiitake mushrooms, cognac, butter, and herbs. A later menu adds chestnuts, and the cognac stays.

The base is xôi, steamed glutinous rice, the same starch behind many Vietnamese festive dishes such as five-colour sticky rice.

Starters and Salads Go First

Nguyen’s menus put the Vietnamese dishes at the front, as snacks and salads. Her list includes fried shrimp toasts, banana blossom salad (nộm hoa chuối), papaya salad (gỏi đu đủ), and cucumber salad (gỏi dưa chuột).

Nguyen calls chả giò popular with young and old, and says they can be made ahead and frozen. If you want to know why the fried rolls aren’t just egg rolls, our spring roll vs egg roll comparison explains the difference.

Her family’s full Vietnamese menu goes much further: bánh cuốn, bánh xèo, bánh tôm, bún thang, bún chả, chả quế, and dưa góp. Our bánh xèo recipe and bún thang recipe cover two of them.

Leftovers: Phở Gà Tây and Post-Thanksgiving Bánh Mì

The leftovers get the most Vietnamese treatment. Chef Phu’s phở gà tây uses the bones of a 20-pound roasted turkey, roasted onion, ginger, garlic, Chinese five spice, and fish sauce, simmered for three hours. He says he likes the phở more than the roast turkey.

If the broth turns cloudy, see why your phở broth is cloudy. Nguyen’s other leftover idea is a post-Thanksgiving bánh mì, with sliced turkey in a baguette. The i am a food blog adds a cold turkey salad dressed in a ginger fish sauce vinaigrette, close to nước chấm.

I scaled Chef Phu’s marinade down for a 1.6 kg chicken in my kitchen in Sài Gòn. The oyster sauce and sugar turned the skin dark brown well before the meat was done, so I covered the breast with foil for the last stretch. The fish sauce smell disappeared once it was in the oven, and the lemongrass was what remained.

Kelly Thuy — field notes, Sài Gòn

Thanksgiving Swap Table: American Dish, Vietnamese-American Version

How to Build Your Own Menu

Start with one Vietnamese dish per course, not a whole new menu. Keep the roast turkey familiar for guests who expect it, and put the Vietnamese food at the two ends: a salad and chả giò before, and phở or bánh mì after.

Freeze the chả giò a day or two ahead. Nguyen’s family eats on Thursday and again on Friday, calling it a two-day affair, which gives the leftovers a natural place.

Cities with large Vietnamese communities are where these dishes are easiest to eat out. Pew lists Los Angeles, San Jose, and Houston metro areas as the largest. See our guides to Vietnamese food in Houston, San Jose, and Orange County.

Frequently Asked Questions