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Berlu Bakery has a poster child. It’s a Vietnamese cake called bánh bò nướng that explodes Eurocentric ideas of what makes a pastry good by being both extraordinarily gummy and wonderfully light and airy. It’s elastic, like an aerated sponge of pandan-scented gummy bear. It’s also neon green. The internet loves it.
But the chè at Berlu Bakery (661 SE Belmont St., berlubakery.com), a play on the classic Vietnamese sweet best described as a dessert soup, is just as worthy of praise. The broth is lightly sweetened coconut milk with a handful of ice cubes floating around to keep things chilled. The noodles, as it were, are wiggly green mung bean jellies called cendol.
“Kids think that they look like worms,” says chef and owner Vince Nguyen. “My cousin calls it ‘the worm dessert.’”
Traditionally, red beans, a few textural seeds and perhaps some sticky rice would complete the dessert, though Nguyen’s version veers lighter and fresher.
Herbs such as Thai basil, licorice-y lovage or mint bring a fragrant note. Basil and passion fruit seeds as well as mini tapioca pearls add another textural layer. But strawberries, peaches, nectarines, blackberries or raspberries—“whatever’s best in season,” Nguyen says—are the star. And Nguyen is specific about the fruit. Earlier this summer, his chè featured two different varieties of blueberries, one sweet and one tart.
Nguyen opened Berlu Bakery on Belmont last June. There, he’s continued in the creative vein he opened at his modernist tasting menu restaurant Berlu, which he closed shortly after winning a James Beard Award in 2023. His dishes reinterpret traditional Vietnamese recipes and pastries with prime Pacific Northwest produce and through the precise lens of a fine-dining chef; Nguyen’s CV includes stints at Noma in Copenhagen, Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurants, and Castagna back when it was Portland’s modernist cuisine outpost.
That gummy-spongey cake is delicious—and photogenic—though Nguyen’s chè may well be the fullest expression of his distinct cooking style.
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2026 here!
