Welcome to The City: Vietnamese Restaurant Rice Paper Scissors Spices Up the Bay

Rice Paper Scissors stars in Episode 4 of "Welcome to The City: Bay Area Stories."

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Rice Paper Scissors isn’t just a clever name for the Vietnamese restaurant Valerie Luu and Katie Kwan started in San Francisco; it’s an appropriate one. They mix the old with the new, and believe in creating not only delicious food but dishes that reflect what makes the Bay so special. Take their motto, for instance—“70 percent authentic, 30 percent whatever you want”—or hear them talk about fish sauce and how they want to make it the next ketchup so that when they’re old and gray they can sit back and say, yep that was all me.

Whatever they’re doing seems to be working. Recently, Rice Paper Scissors hosted a celebration for the Lunar New Year. Three hundred people showed up hungry, and everyone left satisfied. The food was completely gone.

“When you got an idea, you just got to do it,” Kwan says.

That drive was there from the very beginning for Kwan and Luu. They both started as home cooks in the area underground market, hustling food to different vendors. Eventually, the two entrepreneurs discovered they were kindred spirits and shared the same interests. Five days later their first store was born.

That was four years ago. Now look at them, owners of a fledging restaurant with four full-time employees and nearly 3,000 followers on Twitter.

“Well, the Bay Area allows for pop-ups,” Luu says. “For us, pop-up is a state of mind. It’s about having an idea and just doing it.”

The Vietnamese-American duo funded their company with their own money and traveled to Asia to learn more about their craft. It was there they made their first purchase for the restaurant: a stack of red Vietnamese street stools. Now those stools are part of the Rice Paper Scissors atmosphere, where locals can sit and talk and enjoy life.

In Episode 4 of the #ChargedByBelief series from Under Armour and Mass Appeal, we hear about Kwan and Luu’s plans for the New Year and how they’re interested in selling dishes that celebrate long life, prosperity, longevity, and family. But more importantly, we learn they still visit the farmer’s market every Wednesday. They still connect with the women who work in area grocery stores.

To them, it’s all a hustle, from the grandmothers carrying 40 pounds of groceries up a hill to the people in the area chasing something better. That’s the spirit they want flowing through their restaurant. That’s why they plan on renaming a dish “Steph Curry,” for he represents all of that in the Bay: the hunger and drive to never be satisfied until you achieve your dream.

“I think that when people underestimate us,” says Kwan, “it just gives us fuel to say we can beat them out.”

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