Two years ago I took a tour of the raw space at 145 East Pender Street underneath Fortune Sound Club in Chinatown with the owners of Yaletown’s tiny Vietnamese restaurant, DD Mau. Siblings Kim Tran and Kon Tran secured the massive space back in December of 2015 and were hoping to open it as their second location before the end of 2016. Fast forward almost exactly two years, and it’s finally here.

A long way to go, indeed. They’ve done an admirable job with the interior’s unorthodox layout, which begins with a narrow frontage that funnels down to a cool anteroom (its walls hung with family photos, sparsely shelved with old books – in Vietnamese, natch – and bric-a-brac, plus a peekaboo window) and further to the open lounge/bar area and kitchen. It’s all of 54 seats, but they’re well spread out.

Kim and Kon showed me around the massive kitchen and talked of the trials and tribulations of making/baking tapered banh mi demi-baguettes in house for both locations. Right now they’re still outsourcing their bread, but they expect to reveal their own loaves ...