How pâté chaud, an obsolete French hand pie, endures in Vietnamese culture
what they are + where to find them
Hello there!
Happy Holidays and then some. I hope you’ve not had to spend too much time returning gifts to the store. I’m skipping the upcoming Midweek Gems because we’ll be traveling. Happy early 2026!
But folks, we’re still in 2025, which marks the 50th anniversary of when my family left Vietnam. For that reason, certain foods are top of mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about pâté chaud, a puff pastry snack that has a long history in Vietnam and with my family.
In Vietnamese, we call these treats bánh patê sô — not too far off from the French pâté chaud. I’d like to close out the year with the iconic favorite because it’s a great lens for viewing the modern Vietnamese experience.
I’ve been researching their history and working on new recipes for them. However, I am not yet satisfied with what I’ve got, despite having baked through three boxes of pastry dough! And the history of the pastries themselves turns out to be more interesting than I had initially thought.
So, I’m going to share what I’ve found out about pâté chaud in this dispatch plus where to buy them. In a couple weeks, when we’re back from vacation and I’ve had a chance to do another round of testing, I’ll share the recipes so you can make your own versions.
January 11, 2026 UPDATE » My Pate Chaud recipe is now available!
My family fled Saigon in April 1975 with few material possessions, but we did bring many food memories with us. One of them was of patê chaud, savory puff pastry hand pies filled with a country-style pâté or meatloaflike mixture. Involving culinary skill plus butter and wheat flour, bánh patê sô were considered a luxe breakfast item in Vietnam, to be enjoyed hot to showcase their crispy pastry shell. The literal meaning of pâté chaud is “hot pastry pie”.
Typical Saigon residents went out for them at fancy French-style bakeries, like Givral, which made all-butter puff pastry. Lesser versions relied upon margarine, my mom recalls. Founded by Frenchman Alain Portier, the bakery called Givral opened in 1950 across the way from the Continental Hotel made famous in the Graham Greene novel, The Quiet American. However, bánh patê sô had been in Saigon since around 1930, prepared by clever cooks and entrepreneurs such as Mrs. Pham Thi Truoc, who had a shop specializing in the pastries.
By the time my mother migrated to Saigon from northern Vietnam in 1954, a result of the Geneva Accords that split the country into two, Givral was the place to purchase French pastries and baked goods like patê chaud, cream puffs, eclairs and yule logs. Vietnamese people who opted to go southward felt that North Vietnam was conservative and limiting. South Vietnam was freewheeling, liberal and full of new ideas and foods.
Pâté chaud is mostly a Saigon specialty. I’ve never spotted it in the northern city of Hanoi or central city of Hue when I visited there. In the early 1960s, Mom, her girlfriends and even my cousin, Bich Tu (who was a teenager then), were rolling out puff pastry dough at home. Butter was expensive and you had to source good wheat flour with enough gluten, my mom said.
Puff pastry needs a relatively cold environment for the dough to behave and develop the hundreds of layers of laminated dough. I have no idea how cooks in tropical Saigon, where the weather is either hot or hotter with humidity, could patiently make pate feuilletée (puff pastry in French). But they were able to do so because they were curious, determined cooks.
Our family arrived at Camp Pendelton Marine Base in Southern California in May 1975 and the temperature was likely in the low 70s. Mom said that the dry, moderate climate was dreamy; she missed her father and sisters but didn’t miss the weather. She had her notebook of recipes, one of her prized possessions that came with us when we left Vietnam. But it didn’t contain a recipe for bánh patê sô.
Soon after we settled into our new home in San Clemente, my mom began to make puff pastry from scratch and baking up dome-shaped bánh patê sô. She knew the recipe by heart and relied upon Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for technical guidance.
As a result, as an elementary school kid, I ate pa tê sô for breakfast, reheated in a toaster oven until the exterior was crisp and the interior was blazing hot! There was liquor in her beef and pork filling so the first bite often gave me a whiff of alcohol. I’d gobble it up and go off to school, oblivious to how different that breakfast was to what my peers had eaten. I also didn’t realize how unusual it was for a home cook like my mom to make puff pastry over and over again.
But that’s what Vietnamese people are like – obsessively working to polish a skill, to mimic and master a foreign notion, and to make it their own.
