The Paper Bridge story
Our choice to name our restaurant ‘The Paper Bridge’ began as a simple translation of the ‘Cầu giấy' district in Hanoi where we lived, and where the original idea for our restaurant was conceived. Here was a real place, with food we adored, a tangle of alleyways in between wide tree lined boulevards. Wet markets and street vendors tucked away from the sprawling shops on the main streets; seventy-story skyscrapers across from pop-up street food cooked on coal fired bbq’s, served on rattan platters. It was a place, at first jarring in its dualities, that seemed to fully embrace a modern world while unwaveringly refusing to open and compromise its traditions.
We wanted a perspective to follow, a lens with which to to view the cuisine through. We found this in the words ‘Paper Bridge.’ We would purposely limit ourselves to this one spot, this one vibe. We wanted to import the feeling and the food of this one place, with all its dichotomies, idiosyncrasies, and singular cuisine. We wanted to capture what was unique about this place.
We also wanted a metaphor for our goals. We wanted to capture the stark dualities that were ubiquitous in Hanoi; The traditional vs the modern, the elegance vs the austerity, the French inspired bistros with nouveau Vietnamese cuisine vs the small blue chair set out on the street where an elderly street food vendor has served one dish for thirty years; the bridging of cultures vs the fragility and ephemerality of paper. And the connectedness of all this dissimilarity is what we want to showcase, that this cognitive dissonance can produce an unique dining experience that could only come from Northern Vietnam.