While chef Richard Le was growing up, his mother filled the family fridge with trung chien, a Vietnamese omelet studded with shrimp and tomatoes. Le would microwave slabs of it throughout the week to pile over rice, finishing each serving with a splat of sambal or a squiggle of sriracha. “That was my childhood,” he says. “But she was a single mom, so McDonald’s breakfast was a part of my diet, too.”

Those familiar with Le’s food cart turned pop-up, Matta, will know this juxtaposition well. He’s consistently explored the varied culinary influences of his upbringing: The Vietnamese dishes his family made, combined with Americana fast-food chain staples. At Matta, that manifested as breakfast sandwiches on pandan buns and burgers fragrant with fish sauce, which held equal footing with dishes like the caramel-salty braised pork belly thit kho or his mom’s omelet.

But Le is far from alone in wanting to capture that experience, growing up eating both McDonald’s and mam nem as a Vietnamese American on the West Coast. It’s a passion he’s shared with his now-collaborators, Lisa Nguyen of the spring-y rice flour doughnut shop HeyDay and Kim Dam, owner of the city's groundbreaking Vietnamese coffee shop, Portland Cá Phê. Together, they will open their breakfast café, Mémoire Cà Phê, in late August, serving pork belly breakfast burritos and black sesame cinnamon rolls out of a counter service space on Northeast Alberta and 15th.

Dam, Nguyen, and Le are a part of a talented cohort of Portland-based Vietnamese American chefs and food world regulars who have expanded the scope of the cuisine in Portland within the last five years—not strictly Vietnamese, but rather Vietnamese American. Matta’s creative, eclectic style, unpretentious but thoughtfully executed, became a phenomenon when it opened in 2018. It originally hewed closer to family recipes before Le began to experiment with his remixed fast-food standbys. When Dam opened Portland Cá Phê, there was nothing else in town like it. She took Vietnamese coffee beans—historically panned within the specialty coffee world—and took them seriously, letting them shine in traditional espresso bar drinks as well as preparations like cà phê sữa dá (or Vietnamese iced coffee). And Nguyen, nostalgic for the bouncy Vietnamese desserts she grew up with, was one of the first people in town to sell glutinous rice flour doughnuts, specifically focusing on East Asian flavor profiles.

Le covers the savory food at Mémoire, but all of the restaurant’s owners appear in its DNA. The three became friends while orbiting each other in the city’s food world, but bonded through grief. Discovering that all three of them had lost parents during the month of December, they decided to get dinner together at Yaowarat, and developed a deeper friendship as they recalled memories from their childhoods. The café is, in many ways, an homage to their parents: Family portraits will appear throughout the space, and many of the shop’s recipes are either direct allusions or re-spun tributes.

“We all started our business because of our parents,” Nguyen said in a January interview. “What we created was because of them, what they allowed for us to do, or the things that they’ve taught us. So when we think about [Mémoire], we think about the experience that they gave us as kids through food. We want to be able to do that for the community, but also for us.”

Dam—who now runs two Portland Cà Phê locations and is in the process of opening yet another coffee shop, Café Better Days—developed Mémoire’s beverage menu. She’s particularly excited about the café’s Vietnamese egg coffee, dark roasts balancing a bouffant of whipped egg yolks and sweetened condensed milk, as well as non-coffee drinks like the iced peach-matcha latte with coconut cream. Currently, they're just using a phin, but down the line, the café will have a broader menu of espresso drinks, including espresso tonics.

Nguyen is the mind behind Mémoire’s pastry program, which is her biggest departure from the world of doughnuts. She originally hoped to explore a broader range of pastries at HeyDay, but noticed that her Southeast 82nd counter worked better as a doughnut shop. Instead, she started venturing into other baked goods by making treats for other coffee shops, including Portland Cà Phê.

At Mémoire, Nguyen will bake the milk bread for the café’s sandwiches and load the pastry case with black sesame cinnamon rolls and cookies. Those cinnamon rolls will be a fixture at the Alberta breakfast café, slathered in cream cheese frosting with the option to add a dollop of marionberry jam. Over time, she hopes to add more renditions, changing offerings seasonally. The shop's two staple cookies—miso–chocolate chip and black sesame sugar—will be the stars, with mini yuzu cakes or madeleines making the occasional cameo.

Nguyen also developed the recipe for the restaurant’s waffles, available stacked with fish sauce bacon, eggs, and Thai chile maple syrup or with a demure dollop of pandan butter. In the future, the team will add a wider palette of flavors, with options like pandan, ube, and black sesame.

The midweek menu leans lighter, but things head into brunchier territory on the weekends. Every day, Matta loyalists will find a version of Le’s breakfast sandwich: smashed pork patties with hash browns, American cheese, a fried egg, and nước chấm piled on one of Nguyen’s milk buns. Mémoire’s breakfast burrito will be another daily driver, stuffed with a similar lineup: hash browns, scrambled egg, with a choice of pork belly, a beef or pork sausage patty marinated in fish sauce and chile, or turmeric-galangal roasted oyster mushrooms. Accompaniments include a house-made hot sauce and an avocado salsa buzzing with Thai chiles.

The menu is starting small, but as the team gets their bearings, they hope to expand weekend brunch, involving things like biscuits and fish sauce gravy, passionfruit or lychee mimosas, and cold-weather specials like breakfast congee. But for now, the jewel of Saturday morning breakfast will be Le’s mom’s herby, coconut milk–sweetened omelet, plump with shrimp and blistered tomatoes.  Keep an eye on Instagram for more information about the restaurant's opening date.