As the story goes, this Houston classic owes its notoriously extensive menu to Kim Su Tran La, “Mama La,” who memorized over 250 family recipes before fleeing Vietnam and ending up in Houston in 1980. Many Houstonians enjoyed their first taste of Vietnamese cuisine here, and many more are still trying to work their way through the entire lineup of dishes at the flagship location in EaDo—a Mount Everest-scale food bucket list in itself.