A Grand Opening

A pandemic pop-up goes full-time in Chinatown

Lauren Tran found her voice during a competition she didn’t plan on entering. That was in 2019. Fresh out of culinary school, she’d just started working as a line cook in the pastry department at Gramercy Tavern and her boss, Miro Uskokovik asked her what she was baking for the restaurant’s annual pie contest. She had no choice. What she made combined the flavors of a gelato she’d recently tried in Nice—lemongrass and coconut—with pandan, a botanical ingredient she’d grown up eating courtesy of the Vietnamese bakeries her father took her to in Seattle.