Market East, a new wing of Ponce City Market, showcases the range of Asian cuisines in Atlanta

When Dinh Tran was a child, his father used to make him bao for breakfast: soft, steamed buns filled with ground pork and other ingredients. Today, Dinh may no longer live in his father’s house, but he’s able to make his own buns—and, as a successful restaurateur, to share the family recipe with Atlanta diners. They’re the main attraction at Boom Boom Bao, one of three stalls that Dinh and his wife, Khanh Dang, opened in early June in a revamped section of Ponce City Market.

For the last few years, Dinh and Khanh have already been operating one counter in the buzzy Old Fourth Ward food hall: an outlet of their Avondale Estates pho restaurant Vietvana. But with Market East, as the new section is called, an entire wing of Ponce City Market is now dedicated to Asian cuisines. In addition to Boom Boom Bao and Vietvana, the couple have opened Lime Tiger, which serves bento-style boxes with fare from Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, and Cambodia, and Uwu Asian Dessert Co., which specializes in sweets like boba and bingsu, a Korean treat made from shaved ice.

One recent afternoon, as crowds gathered for Market East’s official launch, Dinh explained that he and Khanh think of food as a way to reconnect with their home country of Vietnam—Dinh fled the country with his family at three years old, while Khanh came to the U.S. in high school. “As I grow older and older, I get pulled back to where I came from,” Dinh told 285 South, while waiters fanned out across the food hall carrying samples of pork bao and other dumplings to share with guests. 

When his family first arrived here, more than three decades ago, Dinh said, it was hard to find any Vietnamese food—or any decent Asian food in general. But as time has passed, and as burgeoning populations of immigrants from across Asia have transformed Atlanta’s food culture, the options have exploded; 2020, for instance, saw the opening of the all-Asian food hall Ph’east in the Battery Atlanta. The addition of Market East to the lineup at Ponce City Market is further evidence of the centrality of Asian cuisines to Atlanta food culture. 

“Part of the original idea of opening up in Ponce was to create an Asian area, and it’s either I do it or someone else does it,” Dinh said. When he and Khanh opened their first restaurant in 2017 in Duluth, they used it as a research and development project, where they explored different recipes. Then, in 2019, they opened the first location of  VIỆTVANA in Avondale Estates, which remains open, and in 2021, they opened a location in midtown at Ponce. 

In early 2024, they started pitching ideas to Ponce City Market to open the new restaurants. Initially, the couple had their eye on a Chinese restaurant—but Jamestown, which manages the market, was more interested in lesser-known Asian cuisines, he said. So after traveling to the continent and consulting with other Atlanta chefs, Dinh and Khanh came up with different ideas that incorporated Lao, Cambodian and Malaysian cuisines, including dishes that are more reflective of what people eat at home. 

“Our vision for Asian cuisine is not fine dining,” Dinh said. “No matter what Asian cuisine you’re talking about, a lot of meals are shared; we put everything in the middle, and we share all the entrees. So, that was the idea behind Market East. It’s select comfort food that we eat at the house.”

Now, Dinh has regular orders at each of his restaurants. At Vietvana, he likes pho bun bo hue, a spicy lemongrass-scented soup, made with beef and pork, from central Vietnam. At Boom Boom Bao, of course, there are his dad’s pork belly bao; at Lime Tiger, he usually orders shaking beef, a Vietnamese dish that gets its name from the way the marinated meat is shaken in the pan during cooking. At Uwu, his favorite is bingsu—Korean shaved ice made from milk or cream and topped with a variety of sweeteners, fruits, candies, and sauces; Khanh’s preference, meanwhile, is egg waffles, a Hong Kong street food. 

At the opening earlier this month, influencers recorded themselves sitting at bamboo-decorated stalls while round lanterns hung from the ceiling. Dinh and Khanh rotated among each of their stalls in Market East, making sure everything was going smoothly; they talked with patrons and momentarily joined a show of Asian drums and lion dancers just outside the doors to the food hall. 

“For me as someone that came here back in the 1990s, when I first found the first Chinese restaurant, Japanese restaurant, Vietnamese restaurant, I got excited,” Dinh said. “But I’ve been living in Atlanta for close to 30 years. So I’m Asian, but I’m also Atlantan, and I just want to create food for everybody.”