In the Name of the Mother
With Chu Mai, James Beard Award-nominated chef Billy Ngo honors his mom and the dishes he grew up loving, while putting his own spin on Vietnamese and Chinese classics. The result is a noteworthy new restaurant whose dishes taste both comfortingly familiar and excitingly fresh.
Vibrant portraits of chef-owner Billy Ngo’s mom anchor Chu Mai’s dining room.
At his new restaurant Chu Mai, chef-owner Billy Ngo aims to both pay homage to his late mother and make food like no one’s mom used to make.
Chu Mai transposes the name of Ngo’s mother, Mai Chu, who died in 2020 after a long battle with cancer. She is further commemorated in an Andy Warhol-style triptych of portraits at various stages of her life by Japanese artist Yoheyy that acts as a focal point of the restaurant’s elegant dining room. “We couldn’t keep her alive, so with this restaurant, I can at least keep her name alive,” Ngo says. “I feel good, like she’s watching over all of us.”
The contemporary Asian restaurant’s mostly Vietnamese- and Chinese-influenced menu also pays loving tribute to meals Ngo’s mother created for her family, who are from Vietnam but ethnically Chinese.
Yet those childhood dishes most often serve as inspiration, not end point.
“These are not dishes my mom made,” Ngo says of the offerings at Chu Mai, which opened at the end of January. Rather, they are Ngo’s inventive plays on traditional dishes intended to evoke the flavors of her food. For instance, his mom never made pasta, but she did make the Vietnamese crab, tomato and noodle soup on which he based Chu Mai’s bún riêu capellini pasta entrée.
Mushroom congee with pork floss and a slow-poached egg
Sometimes a Chu Mai item honors a single classic and other times, a few at once. The restaurant’s hugely satisfying country pork paté toast—an umami explosion of chicken liver mousse, salty pork floss and Maggi-sauced aioli spiked by pickled shallots and served on a savory Chinese doughnut—is “kind of a bânh mi,” Ngo says. But when you consider the expertly salted and peppered fried egg served as a side, the dish also suggests bò né, a Vietnamese hot-skillet breakfast of pâté, fried egg, pork and a baguette.
Chu Mai’s most direct culinary tribute to Mai Chu is its braised pork belly with mustard greens. “One of my sisters saw a sample menu and said, ‘You can’t open a restaurant named after Mom if you don’t have her pork belly dish on the menu,’ ” Ngo explains. “It is a dish we grew up eating, and she loved to make it.”
Housed on the ground floor of the new Ary Place Apartments at 17th and S streets near midtown and designed by the Roseville-based Innov8 Solution Group, Chu Mai features soothing greens on its walls and plush banquettes, along with a prominent, floral-themed mural by Corey Bernhardt, also the creator of artwork on Ngo’s back and the walls of the chef’s other restaurants—the celebrated upscale Kru Contemporary Japanese Cuisine, as well as the more casual Kodaiko Ramen & Bar and Fish Face Poke Bar. The mural’s crimson flowers call to mind Ngo’s first foray into Chinese food, at his acclaimed but relatively short-lived midtown Sacramento dim sum spot Red Lotus.
Yet the exceptionally inviting, date-night-encouraging design also feels somehow entirely new for Ngo. You cannot quite put a finger on it, though, until its co-owner and managing partner Michael Ng—who co-owns the restaurant with Ngo and chef Tyler Bond—spells it out. “We needed it to be a little bit more feminine than Kru,” says Ng, previously Kodaiko’s general manager. “If Kru is Dad in our restaurant group, Chu Mai has to be Mom.”
For his part, Bond says, “Getting to work with Billy again is exciting.” Part of the team that opened Kru’s current space in East Sacramento in 2016, the chef left after a few years to spend time in Japan, then worked for the Bay Area’s Rangoon Ruby Burmese Cuisine group. Most recently, Bond served as a culinary consultant for V’s Paradise steakhouse in Old Sacramento. But working with Ngo has always seemed fated.
“We were born less than 24 hours apart [in 1981] and are very similar,” says Bond, who was the chef de cuisine at Kru and serves a similar role at Chu Mai. When Ngo married social media marketer Mandy Hwang in 2023, Bond officiated the ceremony.
Chu Mai owners, from left: managing partner Michael Ng with chefs Billy Ngo and Tyler Bond
In just its first few months, Chu Mai has already recaptured much of the magic diners might recall from the Ngo-Bond Kru era, starting with exquisite Shigoku oysters on the half shell that taste equally of sea and garden thanks to a “chimichurri” of fish sauce, shallots, cilantro and mint.
Chives, Thai basil and cilantro cut the richness of the bò tái chanh, or Vietnamese beef tartare, which increases in flavor with each new second of “cooking” in its lime marinade before peaking when ensconced in the crunchy yet airy (and giant) shrimp chips served alongside it.
The mushroom congee, cooked in a cremini-maitake-shiitake broth, offers such sophisticated comfort as to suggest rice should always be overcooked intentionally, while the pork floss accompanying it adds a hint of solidity and credence to the idea that jerky is more delicious served in a mass of tiny strips.
Texture chasers will appreciate the pan-roasted rice that is blender-pulverized into dust before being combined with fried, ground shallots and toasted sesame seeds, and spread over the baby lettuce salad. And fried garlic adds crunch to tender chicken wings sparked by a house-made glaze created with a fish sauce that also factors in the White Ao Dai cocktail, Chu Mai’s iteration of a martini.
The drinks menu, created by the Ngo group’s beverage director Jose Carrasco and Chu Mai’s bar lead Adrian Bayardo, also features the vodka and dragon fruit Boy with the Dragon Tattoo. Named after the headline of a 2019 profile of Ngo in this magazine, the refreshingly sweet, yet not cloying craft cocktail comes with an edible topper featuring a tiny cartoon version of the dragon tattoo covering the chef ’s back.
Boy with the Dragon Tattoo cocktail with vodka, dragon fruit, lime, cardamom bitters and an edible topper
Ngo envisions Chu Mai, with its high-end cocktails, elegant ambiance and experimental approach to traditional flavors, as Sacramento’s answer to Bay Area restaurants like Michelin-starred Chinese American spot Mister Jiu’s and Vietnamese stalwart The Slanted Door.
Ngo enlisted the business-savvy Ng to help work out the all-important details. Before he collaborated with Ngo at Kodaiko, Ng spent years working for acclaimed local chef-restaurateur Rick Mahan, first at The Waterboy then at OneSpeed Pizza. Ng also worked for Portland fine-dining legends Vitaly and Kimberly Paley and most recently, Milwaukee restaurant group Benson’s.
Among Chu Mai’s target demos are first- and second-generation Asian Americans. Born in Sacramento but raised mostly in Hong Kong, Ng fits that bill. This did not resonate with him until he was well into the process of trying to open the new restaurant.
“When this opportunity came around, it was more to work with Bill,” Ng says. “But as this project progressed, it became a lot more personal. It definitely helped me reconnect with my culture.” Although he has known Ngo for a long time, the pair “never really talked about our culture or heritage,” Ng adds, until they dined out for Chu Mai research-and-development purposes, and “we were talking a lot about how we grew up and how similar our backgrounds really were.”
Pastry chef Bennyjann Peneyra’s pandan mochi cornbread with salted coconut anglaise, white chocolate cremeux, and a slice of caramelized banana
Asian American patrons already have shown up to Chu Mai. “It’s heartwarming when they tell us, ‘This reminds me of my mom’s cooking,’ or ‘This reminds me of my grandma’s cooking,’ ” Ng says.
At the same time, “There are a couple of people saying, ‘This is not right,’ ” chef Ngo says. “Well, it is not supposed to be. We are not trying to make a congee like your mom made it or my mom made it.”
Simply duplicating classic dishes would be antithetical to Ngo. Although he has more prominent laurels on which to potentially rest than most other Northern California chefs—for instance, last year he became the first Sacramento chef ever to be named a finalist for a James Beard Award for best chef in California—he keeps evolving. Ng says that Ngo is similar to Mahan in that way: “Neither of those chefs are stagnant, ever. They are constantly growing and pushing their teams to grow.”
“I feel kind of like everything’s been done in this world, right?” Ngo says. Japanese contemporary cuisine, his specialty, is now so commonplace, he points out, that it is “yuzu cocktail this, yuzu-ginger this, shiso that.”
But he is not aware of other chef-driven restaurants innovating both Vietnamese and Chinese flavor combinations—in Sacramento or the Bay Area. “This is just so new, which is why we are having so much fun with it,” he says.
1829 17th St. chumaisacramento.com. 916-553-7096
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