Food Is Medicine for Bé Bếp’s Phoebe Tran
The farmer honors her family’s history with her nourishing meals.
The Deligram highlights some of the best food artisans making delectable things in and around New York City. In our last feature, we spoke to pastry chef Jena Derman and master mixologist Jack Schramm, the masterminds behind Brooklyn-based Jelly cake brand Solid Wiggles. This week, we’re chatting with another maker who isn’t afraid of gelatin: Phoebe Tran, the creator of Bé Bếp Baby Kitchen. In addition to doing pop-ups at New York restaurants like Honeys, Winona’s, and Rhodora, and catering for cool-kid events, Tran offers a postpartum meal service, made with thoughtfully sourced ingredients and designed to heal mothers in their most vulnerable physical state. For Tran, food is more than something you eat. “Throughout my entire career, food has been a medium through which I research and discover, parts of myself and my heritage and my health, and has been a way to connect myself to my family and preserve all the recipes that I grew up learning,” she explains.
The Product: Frozen postpartum meal plans.
How to Buy: Order on bebepkitchen.com.
Price: $350 a week, for one or two weeks of postpartum meals.
I grew up with such a beautiful food culture in Southern California, and I was really close to my family. My mom would cook elaborate meals every night of the week. She had ten other siblings, who had all escaped from Vietnam and settled in Southern California. We'd all get there every weekend, and usually, all of our activities were planned around food. When I moved away to New York, I started learning to cook the food I grew up with and I was studying food academically, as well, at NYU. I decided to do a study abroad program in Shanghai, and ended up loving it so much there that I dropped out of school and stayed there for two and a half years, working. I started doing pop ups in 2015; I made burgers with a friend, because we were nostalgic for burgers and we didn't know where to get them. We called it Burger Babes, and we would set up outside of clubs.
I decided to move back to New York to finish my bachelor's degree, and ended up going to The New School to study food studies. I thought I was going to learn more about food product design, but I ended up immersing myself in cooking and becoming more interested in farming. My mom got diagnosed with cancer, and I just started questioning where our food was coming from, and how I can recreate the flavors without processed ingredients. I went to work on a farm in the central highlands of Vietnam at the end of 2019, and seeing people who lived in the countryside really convinced me that I wanted to deepen my understanding of Vietnamese plants and food.
Vietnamese food is something that you're meant to cook a lot of at one time, and it was comforting to me. When 2020 hit, I was out of a job and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. It was either farm or start a meal delivery service. I did meal deliveries throughout 2020, and in 2021 started doing in-person pop ups in addition to farming. A design duo called Out of Office was offering free design services to anyone impacted by the pandemic, so I reached out to them and that's kind of what made it more official.
In 2022, my mom passed away. I took a couple of months off and I decided that I just really needed a big change in my life. I had a dream job at Brooklyn Grange. I was farming in the city, trialing so many different Vietnamese crops, but I finally felt ready to pursue Bé Bếp as a full-time thing. So at the end of the year, I left my job. I was thinking about how I could expand my offerings, but still uphold my values. A pop-up event or even a restaurant is so location and time specific, but something frozen could potentially scale nationally. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine had hired me to cook for her the week after she had given birth, and I did all this research. I interviewed my mom, I interviewed a doula, and learned so much about traditional Vietnamese medicines. As a former farmer, I had been searching for ways to sort of bridge my interest in plant medicine with cooking. It felt like a lightbulb moment, when you realize that there is a need for something and you have the opportunity to fill that gap. It’s fulfilling to be able to cook food that really has an effect on the recovery of a mother.
I've just been really enjoying the process of researching specific ingredients and learning more about the ways in which they replenish the blood supply, boost the immune system, and increase lactation. I try to grow a lot of my own herbs. I live part-time upstate, and then I do a lot of hand shopping in Chinatown, in Manhattan and also Queens or have things delivered through Baldor. And I'm strategic, I'll often call up my dad, who still lives in Southern California, and I’ll ask him what’s growing in his backyard or in my Auntie's backyard, so he can pick them and ship them over to me.
Doing it as a side hustle was really hard. It's hard running the business full time as well, but after doing it for over a year I'm really happy. I'm so grateful for the community that I've built; they will support me through whatever I do, because they believe in what I do, and they know me. This project has become a way in which I carry on my mom’s legacy, preserve my family recipes, and tell her and my family's story.
As of now, I would say, it's probably like 30% pop ups, 40% postpartum meals and 30% catering. It's a balance between all three of them right now. In my ideal state, I'd probably be doing less pop ups. As incredible as they are, it's really challenging to turn a profit from them. I would like to be expanding my catering services, and really focusing on expanding my postpartum meals. Right now, I am only offering one week and two weeks packages of the postpartum meals. I would love to do the entire sitting month period, which is 40 days. Also, we will have a more accessibly priced, two or three-day trial period. There's many ways of customizing the food offerings, but beyond that, I think expanding my distribution and reach is my main priority.
I just recruited a collaborator helping me with the creative direction and design and I have a commercial kitchen, but it’s all very personal. I'm basically running all the operations, I do all communication with new customers. Even if I were to scale it, I would still do that. The nature of offering a postpartum meal plan, I think, is there will always be a personal touch. So, if anything, it's really just like improving user experience, improving the packaging and design, and expanding my reach. But as of now, it's as streamlined as it can get. I have a bunch of soups already frozen and ready for distribution, it’s just about taking orders as they come.
Who are some makers you admire?
A mentor, and like a really close friend of mine is