If grit and determination could be found in a sandwich, it would be discovered inside every Banh Mi sandwich at Ba Le Restaurant on Dorchester Avenue.
The shop, led successfully for almost 30 years now by Jennifer Nguyen, 64, has been staunchly traditional, and will remain that way as her youngest daughter, Baotran Le, and son-in-law, Hung Duong, take over more of the day-to-day operations during this year.
On Tuesday, Ba Le was cited as one of the city’s 2025 Legacy Business Award winners – joining Dot favorites the Ice Creamsmith and Greenhills Irish Bakery among the 30 citywide winners.
Above, Jennifer Nguyen (next to Mayor Wu) holds the city of Boston Legacy Business Award, which she received during a ceremony on Tuesday, June 3, 2025. Mike Mejia photo/Mayor’s Office
“I am proud of my mom and constantly in awe of how she was able to pull through all these years,” said Le, 42. “She’s the calm in the eye of the storm. She’s just now finally being recognized with citations and awards, but I’ve watched this woman be beaten down so many times all my life and she kept strong through it all – she gritted her teeth and moved forward.”
Nguyen is a Vietnamese War refugee who escaped on a boat in the 1980s while undertaking unthinkable measures to keep herself and her brother alive during the awful journey to, first, a camp in Hong Kong, and then to America “with no money at all and no English at all,” said Le.
What Nguyen did have was a drive to succeed that was unstoppable. After working in fish cleaning factories, and starting and failing with four businesses, she quit a waitressing job to join her sister, who had opened Ba Le at a stall in Chinatown.
Soon after, they expanded to the signature Ba Le Dorchester at 1052 Dorchester Ave., where Nguyen took full control in 1996, only to find out that the owners of the Chinatown stall were kicking them out to open their own sandwich shop.
It was the beginning of many trials and tribulations for the Banh Mi queen of Dorchester Avenue. The whole family worked in the Dorchester shop with the kids helping before school, and after school – doing their homework at the tables in between filling orders and eating meals from the buffet. They later secured a spot at the new Kam Man Plaza in Quincy, which has grown to three stalls in the busy Asian marketplace.
“I’ve grown up in Ba Le; my kids have grown up here,” said Le. “My oldest is now 24, but when we opened in Quincy, I had to take him to the store, then close for 30 minutes to pick him up from school, come back so he could help me. My oldest son still helps out and does the delivery runs and airport runs.”
The Dorchester shop has introduced a whole generation of non-Vietnamese folks to the Banh Mi, a meat and vegetable combo – while retaining its Vietnamese customer base. The eatery offers a variety of home-cooked specialties, smoothie drinks, and a wealth of authentic Vietnamese foods.
“If you come to the store and just watch the lines you know every walk of life comes in here now and I think it’s awesome,” said Le. “Before, when we hired, it was an absolute you had to know Vietnamese. Now when we hire it’s an absolute that you have to pick up some English, too. It’s different customers now, not just Vietnamese.”
There are no days off in Jennifer Nguyen’s world, and the food remains the same year in and year out.
“Our food doesn’t change,” Le said. “It’s very core Vietnamese food and we go for that. Some say to Americanize the menus, but we don’t do that. The food in our store is very traditional and you could easily find a duplicate of it in Vietnam.”
Amidst success, family members said, they overcame much behind the scenes. Nguyen was a divorced woman raising four kids – a taboo experience in Vietnamese culture. A lot of suppliers wouldn’t work with Nguyen because of that, Le said. “It was a lot,” she added. “I couldn’t do what she did the first 10 years of this business.”
Le said that even though she and her husband are assuming day-to-day operations, Nguyen is still very involved, and Le will always consider Ba Le to be “mom’s store,” right down to the free sandwich and coffee policy for active or retired military. It’s a policy, like the food, that was carried here from Vietnam and won’t change.
“(The soldiers) introduced her to chocolate and let her ride in their Jeep around the village; they were the good people to her,” said Le. “These were her few bright moments during the war. She carried that with her… It’s been trials and tribulations and here we are at Ba Le nearly 30 years later. It’s a tribute and honor to my mother.”
