Bun thang. Photo by Thanin Viriyaki.

The Lunar New Year is approaching at the end of the month, and a Vietnamese restaurant in our neighborhood has special menu items and events to celebrate.

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To welcome the year of the tiger, Ngon Vietnamese Kitchen on Lowest Greenville is offering two dishes, available Jan. 28-30. There’s a Hanoi noodle soup called bun thang and two pan-fried sticky rice cake options.

People born in the year of the tiger were born in 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010 and 2022.

Bun thang is typically made from combining all the leftover food at the end of Lunar New Year celebrations. At Ngon, it will have rice vermicelli noodles in a chicken broth with dried shrimp floss, shredded chicken, Vietnamese ham, fried egg, pickled daikon, shiitake mushrooms and Chinese sausage. They garnish it with a lime or lemon wedge, green onions, Vietnamese coriander, fried shallots and chili peppers.

The sticky rice cake comes in a vegan option or one with split mung bean, beef ham and freshly cracked black pepper. They are wrapped in banana leaves and boiled.

Decorations will include traditional Vietnamese red and gold lanterns and yellow and pink blossoms from owner Carol Nguyen’s home. On Jan. 30, there will be a lion dance starting at 3:30 p.m. Lucky envelopes will be given out throughout the day.

This isn’t the first time the restaurant has hosted events for a celebration. In September, Ngon commemorated the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, which coincided with Nguyen’s birthday.

We spoke with Nguyen about those activities for a previous issue of the Advocate.

“I want people around here to know more about Vietnamese culture,” she told us at the time. “People know about Chinese and Japanese a lot more than Vietnamese, so I want to introduce my culture.”

Ngon is located at 1907 Greenville Ave.