Anna and her husband, Ni, who is a first-generation Vietnamese American, met when they were in culinary school in California. He was in the class that was tasked with making family meal for all the students, and she'd recently returned from three months in Germany. So when German food was on the menu one day, she went up for seconds, then thirds. "He was like, 'Who is this girl that can eat so much food?'" Anna recalls.
While Ni is from California, Anna is a Longmont native, and the two moved to Colorado in late 2020. From a cart to a series of pop-ups, they've been working on the concept for Sắp Sửa, which means "about to be" or "almost," for the last few years. "It should always be evolving, it should always be in progress," Anna says of the name's meaning. "We're always working toward getting better. It's a daily conversation."
Sắp Sửa's menu is centered on "non-traditional Vietnamese food," Anna explains. "What that means for us is that everything is very inspired by the traditional dishes in terms of flavor and the feelings that evokes."
Ni and Anna Nguyen originally met in culinary school.
Star Chefs
Another goal is to help ensure that "little kids who are kids now, and little kids who aren't even born yet, will be able to see Vietnamese food and feel really proud of it," Anna adds. "Our kids will be Vietnamese, and I just want them to never have to think of their food as less than."
Though she'd never eaten Vietnamese food before meeting Ni, "I really fell in love with him and Vietnamese food at the same time," she says. "The food, now, feels like home to me."
Anna has a pastry chef background, but the two collaborate on both sweet and savory dishes, though one dessert in particular was a challenge to create. "Ni really wanted a grass jelly dessert on the menu," she says. "It's a hard flavor. The plant is in the mint family, but it's very bitter," so it needs to be balanced by sweetness. "It's the most frustrated I've ever been by a dish," she adds. "I feel a really, really intense responsibility to do justice to an entire nation of people with a cuisine that I didn't grow up eating."
The result, inspired by the traditional dish chè sương sáo, is a combination of grass jelly, coconut crème and guava granita. "What we really tried to capture is all of these layers and all of these textures, and little pockets of bites. It's all about digging into this glass and finding all these little surprises and textures," she notes.
"I always love everything we make," Anna says of the menu overall. "We're big, big, big believers in cooking the food that we want to eat."
One current favorite did emerge after the restaurant's soft opening. "I'm really, really feeling the tomato toast after this weekend," she says. It's built on slices of the country loaf from Wheat Ridge bakery GetRight's and is a "slight nod to banh mi, with the bread component."
The bread is toasted in a cast-iron pan and rubbed with raw garlic before being dunked in a tomato vinaigrette made from the juice of tomatoes that have been confited for three hours with garlic and cilantro. Those juices are seasoned with vinegar and vegan fish sauce, and the resulting dish has plenty of "herbs and crunchies," she says. "It's to die for."
Sắp Sửa's most well-known item — which was pictured in Bon Appétit's list of its most anticipated restaurants in the country — is a play on bắp cải luộc, a simple, fast and affordable cabbage dish that Ni's mother often made for him growing up. "We always knew we wanted to do something based on that, because it's so special to him," Anna says.
Another menu item, hamachi collar with a coconut caramel glaze, was inspired by a recipe from the mother of chef Long Nguyen, owner of Pho King Rapidos. Anna and Ni first met Long in Los Angeles; now he's one of their closest friends.
Pho King Rapidos recently moved into Avanti Denver and is close to opening a brick-and-mortar in Park Hill with Yuan Wonton and Sweets and Sourdough as well, but even though he has a business of his own to run, Anna says Long has been one of Sắp Sửa's biggest supporters, along with Erasmo Casiano and Diego Coconati, the owners of one-year-old Latin eatery Lucina.
"The amount of help they've all given to us in so many ways is remarkable," Anna says. "Especially given that they're not, like, fifteen years into running their restaurants, right? They're all exhausted. They haven't been open a long time, and they have still gone so far out of their way to just help us."
For example, "We really wanted to make sure that the portion of our staff that primarily speaks Spanish understands their benefits really clearly," Anna recalls. "Erasmo came in and translated our whole employee handbook for the Spanish-speaking staff, and then he made us tacos."
When it came to the restaurant buildout, Anna and Ni also found a source of support in Kevin Nguyen, who designed the space, and their contractor, Taurus Builders. "We kind of miss the construction phase," Anna says. "It was so lovely to see them every week. They were really willing to work within our budget, which was not huge, by any means. They were just kind and really good at explaining all the things that we didn't know, which is a lot."
The result is a space that Anna describes as "light, bright and really pretty. It's simple, but that ties back into what Sắp Sửa means — it's this philosophy that, hopefully, the restaurant is more beautiful in five years than it is this weekend." It's a fresh start for a space that's been home to a number of restaurants over the years, after the Lowenstein was renovated into a retail location: first Encore, then Good Son, the Goods and, most recently, Route 40.
Leading up to the official opening, another group of people stepped up to make the restaurant a reality. "We have the best staff you could ask for," Anna says. "It feels really good to be working with really kind people who really care about what they do and take a lot of pride in what they do." People like general manager Heeji Kim, whom Anna describes as "phenomenal."
"If you've been in this industry long enough," she notes, "you really start to understand that it's not just about you as the chef at all. You can come up with the dishes, but if you don't have somebody washing dishes, if you don't have somebody actively cooking those dishes, you wouldn't have a job."
Now that the doors have opened, "I hope that [guests] just feel excited to have food like this in Denver, and excited about the prospect of having more Vietnamese food, whether it's here or on Federal and Alameda," Anna says. "I really want people to feel like it was delicious and the service was excellent, but it was comfortable and not stuffy."
Just hours before opening on June 28, Ni was "arms deep in tomatoes," and Anna was nervous, she admits. "It's been a lot of people giving a lot to get to this point, and now we really feel like it's our responsibility to take that and then give it back," she says. "We're young, we're certainly not the most experienced chefs in the world, and it really is just a testament to everyone who has poured so much into this, quite literally, from the beginning. It's just so much bigger than Ni and I."
Sắp Sửa is located at 2550 East Colfax Avenue and is open from 4:30 to 9 p.m. Sunday though Thursday and 4:30 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For more information, visit sapsua.com or follow @sapsuarestaurant on Instagram.
