How Chef Vince Nguyen's Pastries Turned Berlu Into One of Portland's Hottest Bakeries

Eater

11-07-2025

The lore behind Berlu Bakery starts, like many do, during the pandemic. Chef Vince Nguyen is known in the food world for working at high-profile restaurants, including Castagna, Royal Mail in Australia, and Noma in Copenhagen, later opening his own tasting menu restaurant, Berlu, in 2019. Then, the menu showcased Pacific Northwest flavors and barely had any Vietnamese influence. But at the start of the COVID-19 shutdowns, he dove into cooking Vietnamese at home. 'I had never previously cooked much traditional Vietnamese food, but like many during this time, found pride in my heritage and was able to connect to my Vietnamese roots through food,' Nguyen wrote in an email of those days.
In lockdown, inspired by a childhood memory of a pandan birthday cake for his sister, he made bánh bò nướng, the sponge cake that became Berlu Bakery's signature dish. While it turns out the birthday cake was actually a pandan chiffon cake with pandan custard, the bánh bò nướng sparked a hit pop-up that put Vietnamese desserts front and center while being entirely gluten- and dairy-free.
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Berlu reopened in late 2021, and the menu shifted toward Vietnamese dishes, leading him to win the Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific award at the 2023 James Beard Awards. Nguyen wound down the tasting menu in January 2024 — he and his wife had a new baby and he no longer wanted to be working on the line every night, he said at the time. Berlu became a permanent bakery and Nguyen's primary professional focus; he later closed it down in October 2024 to incubate its next stage. As of June 29, the bigger, better version is now open, and the menu remains gluten-free, but its offerings are expanding, such as dairy in select items and as part of coffee service. 'I truly feel the experience I've had baking has made me a better tasting menu chef,' Nguyen writes. 'It allowed me to cook Vietnamese food at a basic level and grow a deeper understanding of the cuisine.'
Read on for the inspiration and details behind four items on the Berlu Bakery menu.
Bánh bò nướng
Carter Hiyama
Carter Hiyama
The signature bánh bò nướng translates to 'baked cow cake,' because of the dessert's resemblance to a cow's udder. It's a sweet, slightly chewy sponge cake with a honeycomb texture inside. It's made primarily with tapioca flour, which makes it gluten-free.
Nguyen's first attempt at the recipe 'turned out so perfectly,' he merely made small adjustments to the salt and sweetness levels. The biggest alteration he made was to the necessary, single-acting baking powder needed to make bánh bò nướng; he was getting inconsistent results using store-bought packets, so the team now makes their own using a combination of cream of tartar and baking soda. The star of the bakery is the pandan version, and at the start of the pop-ups, he used pandan extract, giving the cake a bright, fluorescent green interior. These days, Nguyen makes bánh bò nướng with fresh pandan leaves grown in Hawaii, steeping the leaves in coconut milk to release its flavor. To get the interior color, he then blends it and uses nut milk bags to strain the mixture of any fine particles. The cake is mixed, baked for an hour, then cooled upside down.
Another version of this cake, bánh bò hấp, is steamed, but Nguyen feels the baked style is 'far superior.' That being said, he is adding a few different flavors of the steamed version to be served with salted coconut cream.
Bánh bò nướng avocado toast
Carter Hiyama
The pandan bánh bò nướng is the bakery's runaway hit, but Nguyen also uses a savory version as the base for the bakery's avocado toast. A self-proclaimed fan of classic American dishes, 'partly because I didn't grow up eating them,' Nguyen says he wanted to serve a version of avocado toast with banana bread at the original Berlu because he loves the combined flavors. The banana bread recipe turned out too dense and moist to work, however. 'You need the contrast that traditional toasted sourdough gives to the avocado because the avocado is so soft,' Nguyen says. 'You need those crunchy edges, you need that lightness, and bánh bò nướng has that in a really unique way.'
The bánh bò nướng is first toasted on a grill 'pretty aggressively' to give the cake some char, Nguyen says, lending a savory note to balance the sweetness of the 'bread.' The bánh bò nướng is then loaded with organic avocado slices, seasoned, and then topped with alfalfa sprouts and fried shallots for texture and savory notes. The toast arrives with a side of salted coconut cream with added fig leaf oil for another savory moment, as well as chile oil made by the team. Nguyen suggests guests pick up the toast, then spoon the coconut cream and chile oil on each bite. Diners who've dropped into the bakery during the soft opening love it, he says.
Bánh khoai mì nướng
Carter Hiyama
Carter Hiyama
'This might be one of the [items] I'm most proud of,' Nguyen says. Bánh khoai mì nướng is a cassava cake known for its mochi-like texture. It's vegan and made without eggs, and uses both cassava and mung bean to achieve its texture. Bánh khoai mì nướng is typically made without any fruit inside, but at Berlu Nguyen treats it like a pineapple upside-down cake, adding in slices of kiwi in a recent version.
After it's baked, a pastry shell is added, giving a tart-like feel to it and adding textural contrast and more balance, Nguyen says. The cake will be seasonal, Nguyen says, favoring tart fruits to balance the flavors, with a nectarine version on its way as that fruit comes into season.
BEC bánh xèo
Nguyen is expanding the bakery's savory selections, and another new item is the bánh xèo, which translates to 'sizzling crepe.' It's made with turmeric, coconut milk powder, rice flour, water, among other ingredients, and is poured into a hot pan, giving the item its sizzling part of the moniker. More traditionally, the bánh xèo is filled with seafood or ground pork with sprouts, folded over, then eaten with lettuce or mustard leaf, all dipped in nước chấm, a fish sauce–based dip. For the shop's nod to the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, Nguyen folds in the aforementioned ingredients and a little basil. It will be offered for the first time during the July 17 weekend.
Berlu Bakery (661 SE Belmont Street) is open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., or until sold out, Thursday through Sunday.
Chef Vince Nguyen Carter Hiyama
Eater Portland
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