Germantown has a new all-day cafe and BYOB with Southeast Asian and Hawaiian flair

For a neighborhood as rich in history, culture, and diversity as Germantown, it’s relatively light on sit-down restaurants. Sure, you can get a good meal — at Salam Cafe, All the Way Live, Deke’s Bar-B-Que, Young American Hard Cider, or B&B Breakfast and Lunch — but 19144′s dining scene has plenty of room for growth, especially when compared to the rest of Northwest Philly.

That makes Germantown’s latest restaurant, Das Good Cafe, all the more welcome. The Chelten Avenue all-day cafe and BYOB opened last month, a few doors down from the new Weaver’s Way grocery store. Its wide-ranging menu includes eggs with Spam and rice, quarter-pound burgers, salmon BLTs, banh mi topped with char siu pork, and homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Das Good’s offerings appeal to the mainstream with items like build-your-own breakfast sandwiches ($6), hand-cut seasoned fries ($12), and chicken cheesesteaks ($15), but there’s hefty Southeast Asian and Hawaiian influences here, too: Vietnamese coffee, Massaman curry, a Lao burger (house-made pork patties topped with spicy jeow bong and a fried egg), and Hilo-style loco moco: two beef patties and jasmine rice topped with Hawaiian teriyaki gravy and fried eggs.

These specialties reflect owner Anh Vongbandith’s background, as well as that of her husband and head cook, Anou Vongbandith.

The 32-seat restaurant, open seven days a week, is Anh’s second establishment in Germantown and her third in Philadelphia. Her first, the now-closed Tipsy Bistro in University City, which opened in 2018, had a similar menu to Das Good’s — tuna poke, wings, empanadas and eggrolls, Caesar and Cobb salads — and a full liquor license. Pricing was fit for a college-student budget, with only a few entrees breaking the $20 mark. (Impressively in 2024, this is also true of Das Good’s menu.)

“We did very well there until COVID happened, and then being a bar, all the restrictions in Philadelphia, we went from $20,000 to $30,000 a week to barely $500 a week,” Anh said. “When they finally allowed seating, the building decided to do the scaffolding work, so they took off our awning, put on that giant scaffolding — it was the last nail in the coffin.”

Tipsy Bistro shuttered in early 2021, but Anh, a veteran of the hotel and hospitality industry, was already onto the next thing. Even before the pandemic, she had been operating a catering business out of Tipsy Bistro, but it was rapidly outgrowing the space. “We were doing about 18 orders of catering a day, and I’m like, ‘I need my own facility,’” she remembers telling her former business partner, Tory Keomanivong.

Anh required a setup capable of cranking out a lot of food. When she found a worn-down Chinese restaurant in Germantown with a 20-foot hood — “the most expensive item [of equipment] that you can find in a restaurant,” she said — she pounced. She gutted all but the hood and redid the place, opening Tipsy Cafe and Catering at 5227 Germantown Ave. in July 2021.

For a couple years, Tipsy balanced catering orders with retail takeout and delivery orders, but when it started providing individual lunches for various Germantown-area schools, its kitchen and staff maxed out. To accommodate the volume, they started shutting off retail sales for a few days at a time so they could prepare, package, and label 400 to 800 individual lunches each day.

“We get the customers all upset,” Anh said, but “it was just bags and bags everywhere. There was nowhere for anybody to even walk in the door and pick up their food.”

On top of frustrated locals, Anh kept hearing from Tipsy Bistro customers who wanted a sit-down spot to visit. So she signed a lease on 322 W. Chelten Ave. in April 2023 and renovated the former Lily of the Valley Cupcakery & Cafe (which relocated to Maplewood Mall), installing all-new electrical, plumbing, and refrigeration. (Tipsy Cafe continues on, but it is exclusively focused on catering.)

When Das Good held its grand opening last week, it also launched its grab-and-go section, which includes breakfast sandwiches, salads, ready-to-eat lunches and dinners, frozen soups and curries (think tomato basil, tom yum, and Massaman curry), house-made Laotian sausage, frozen egg rolls, and more.

Both Anh and Anou had winding paths to Philadelphia. Anou was born in Laos and moved to California as a child refugee before coming to Philly after high school. Vongbandith traces a similar arc. She was born in Vietnam during the Vietnam War — her dad was a U.S. Coast Guard captain, her mom a bartender in the Mekong Delta city of Sa Đéc — and moved to Hawaii in 1974, when she was 4.

“All U.S. citizens had to leave Vietnam, so we had the last flight out,” Vongbandith remembers. Her parents’ marriage broke up, and her mother, Nam, raised her alone, relying on her foraging and cooking skills to sustain them.

“She weaved her own nets, she did her own thing. We made dumplings, we made a lot of stuff, even pickled fish,” Vongbandith says. “We learned how to forage, fish, create food and sell it. That’s how we survived.”

Vongbandith didn’t speak any English until she was 8, despite being enrolled in public school in Hilo on the island of Hawaii, better known as the Big Island. Teachers mistook the hazel-haired, blue-eyed child for a native English speaker.

“After a couple of weeks, because I didn’t speak at all or didn’t acknowledge what the teacher was saying, they put me in special-needs classes,” she remembers. Two years passed before a substitute teacher who happened to be a Vietnamese exchange student discovered that Vongbandith spoke only Vietnamese.

After that, “I had ESL classes and all that, and I graduated at 17, so I caught up,” she laughs.

She and a friend first moved Philly basically on a whim after high school in 1988. They dipped ice cream at Ralph & Rickey’s on Oregon Avenue. Vongbandith eventually earned her associate’s degree in hotel restaurant and institutional management at Community College of Philadelphia. She met Anou at the Bellevue Hotel in 1995, where she was his boss.

“No matter what I said, he had a comment. I wrote him up a few times,” she remembers. When she went to the Omni Hotel, they started dating. For several years, the couple and their family lived in Florida, where she worked for Aramark and others, before returning to Philly in 2016.

To further celebrate their heritage and mix up Das Good’s offerings, the Vongbandiths plan to hold communal feasts to showcase a specific cuisine, such as Vietnamese or Laotian, over dinner once a month. Vongbandith intends it to be “one seating, lining up the tables with banana leaves and just doing a tasting night.”

They’ll offer mixers and mocktails, and potentially invite a distillery or a beer, wine, or liquor rep to provide drink samples.

“It gives everybody a chance to try something different, try something new,” she says. “We don’t like the normal boring stuff. We try to do something different here.”

Das Good Cafe📍 322 W. Chelten Ave., 📞 215-804-9449, 🌐 dasgoodcafe.com Hours: Monday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sundays from 9 to 3