Prairie S.
Yelp
This hotch-potch shopping center with a mix of Vietnamese bakeries, bubble tea shops, pho joints, cafes with colorful trays of sticky rice and cured meats, Vietnamese restaurants and Asian stores is an under-rated attraction that visitors to D.C. tend to miss out on.
Maybe its the humble, outdated construction or its hard-to-get-to location at the confluence of dreary traffic arteries in Northern Virigina, but this Vietnamese hub escapes most travel writers who write about DC. Yet its vibrance, ever-reinventing businesses, and food offerings are a way to experience northern Virginia's Asian culture. Every so often there are Vietnamese festival celebrations here complete with music performances and costumes. The massive flags of Vietnam and the U.S. flying side by side are an inspiring sight.
Today, you'll find incursions of Korean and Thai food among the multiple Vietnamese cafeterias down long interior corridors of this 1970s era mall.
Many of the Vietnamese delis offer prepared food that sits in trays (I can barely imagine how tiny the kitchens in back are, and how all this food is prepared on old burners). You see all kinds of prepared meats, gravy laden dishes, and Vietnamese delicacies that the local population would rather buy, then make at home themselves. There are now shops offering bubble tea to attract the millenials, and vape shops mixed in with video stores, beauty salons, and general stores offering luggage, pearls and gold, and kitchenware equally.
I enjoy coming here to savor the salty atmosphere of the Vietnamese ethnic community of multiple generations mixing and mingling alongside Americans of every stripe. At Thanh Son Tofu, serving sticky rice and bubble tea, all the servers are Latino. The Vietnamese communicate in Spanish and the mix of cultures is typically blended-northern Virginia. Even the political class knows to come here. I once met Virginia Senator Tim Kaine while he was campaigning here.
If I were a visitor, or even a DC resident who doesn't know this spot, I would find a way to get out here and sample some Pho, noodle bowls, famous sticky rice selections at Than Son Tofu, and drink bubble tea with fun flavors like Taro and Jackfruit. Vietnam and its diaspora in the American pantheon, is well represented here.