An odd coupling leads to the first Vietnamese restaurant in Miami

“I began to crave those complex and fiery scents and flavors that I had spent my childhood scorning,” writes Lyn Nguyen, who grew up in Miami at the knees of her mother Tung Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee, and Katherine Manning, an Iowan who traded in cornfields for palm trees. A chance meeting led the elder women to open Miami’s first Vietnamese restaurant — Hy Vong. In “Mango and Peppercorns,” the three women write about their personal memories, from Tung selling soup on the streets of Saigon to Kathy whetting Miami’s appetite with “Vietnamese hot dogs.”