A new Carrboro restaurant offers Latin-Asian fusion and sweet memories
With his new Carrboro restaurant, chef Yung Nay has built a tribute to the home he left in Vietnam when he was a kid and the life he found in America.
This week Nay launched La Montaña at 370 E. Main Street in Carrboro, just a few doors down from his first concept, Iza Whiskey & Eats, a whiskey bar and Japanese izakaya that he opened in 2020.
La Montaña, which means mountain in Spanish, is a restaurant Nay and his co-founders Chuan Tsy and Samantha Garcia, built to honor their fathers. The dishes blend the memories Nay has of growing up and working on his family’s farm in Vietnam, and the influence of Latin American cuisine he discovered when he moved to Raleigh.
“Food is food and the two culture share many ingredients, lime and cilantro, rice and beans, herbs and spices,” Nay said. “I wanted to have a fusion of the two cultures.”
Nay moved to Raleigh from Vietnam in 1996 with his brother and family friends, sent to America by his father in hopes of a better life.
“In our village you were either a farmer or a teacher,” Nay said. “All we had was the farm. It was my father’s dream to ease up some of those difficulties.”
‘Soccer and grilling and eating’
Nay grew up in an apartment complex near NC State that he said was also the home of many other immigrant children from Africa, India, China and Latin America. He said the smells of the morning were meats and peppers cooking on charcoal grills.
“No one spoke English, but we did speak soccer and grilling and eating,” Nay said. “The only word we knew was ‘amigo.’”
He started working in restaurants as a teenager, first at the Asian counter in the Triangle Town Center in Cary. Then later in sushi, Italian Mexican restaurants and burger joints.
Before launching Iza, Nay mostly worked as a private chef and caterer.
“I tried just about every kind of place,” Nay said. “That’s how I learned to do a little bit of everything.”
On the menu at La Montaña
La Montaña serves a blend of Asian and Latin flavor and ingredients. You’ll find chicken marinated with lemongrass, grilled and stuffed inside an empanada and guacamole with edamame.
It weaves a thread of flavors searching for commonality and finding something familiar in cilantro and lime juice, beans and rice.
Nay said he wanted to add breakfast service for the early risers in Carrboro and as a reference to his memories of working on his family’s farm as a kid.
“We would get up at 3 in the morning to feed the animals; the first meal was so important to get the energy for the rest of the day,” Nay said. “Vietnam is known for coffee....Pretty much anything I planted is on the menu.”
The coffee set-up was designed by Chuan Tsy, who opened the elegant Raleigh coffee shop Heirloom. The breakfast menu includes dishes like Vietnamese French toast with lemongrass syrup and dragon fruit.
A place that honors his father and childhood
Before he had opened his first restaurant, Nay’s father passed away in 2017. Nay said he got a call that his father was in the hospital, but that he died the day before he could make it back to Vietnam.
“As a kid, you want to make your parents proud,” Nay said. “It was such a sacrifice to send your kids to America. The only thing I had were the people in restaurants and a few outside friends. But if you have two hands, you can do a lot. I learned that at a young age.”
Though the memories it honors are sometimes painful, Nay said he built the dining room with a vibrancy that lives up to the kind of life his father wished for him. Steamers of artificial flowers hang from the ceiling in a canopy of light. There’s a Vietnamese leaf hat by the door when you walk into La Montaña, the wide conical brim that Nay said he often wore to shade him from the sun as he planted rice and picked watermelons.
“It’s very hard, I wanted to create this restaurant in a way to bring me peace,” Nay said. “It’s very, very special.”
Nay buried his father by a bamboo wall in the village where he grew up. As a kind of memorial thousands of miles away, tall stalks of bamboo line the dining room wall at La Montaña.
“Whenever people went to my father’s house, he wanted them to have a good time,” Nay said. “I wanted to recreate that here. I wanted to recreate my childhood.”
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