Marian Days food caters to pilgrims but popular with locals too

Jul. 30—CARTHAGE, Mo. — The food served at Marian Days offers dishes familiar to Vietnamese pilgrims who come for the annual celebration, and provides an annual treat for local residents looking for a culinary adventure.

Victor Tran, one of the operators of the Quan Bien tent sponsored by the Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church in Port Arthur, Texas, said a good part of their menu includes seafood because some members of their church are shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We are from the deep south of Texas, and we are covered with ocean," Tran said. "And the majority of people involved with this particular job are going to be shrimpers, and we have a lot of donations at home from shrimpers. So the reason we pick out that name, Quan Bien, is to represent the people that won't be able to be there so we can carry that name further. Bien translates to ocean and Quan is remembering. Basically, you look back into the ocean and remember the ocean."

The Rev. Trieu Vu is an organizer of the Bac Tho Moc tent sponsored by St. Joseph and Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Springer, New Mexico.

"The name of our tent, Bac Tho Moc, means carpenter, and can represent Jesus or Joseph," Vu said. "The Vietnamese, we eat a lot of rice, so most of the items on our menu have rice or are based on rice. And on top we have pork, we have chicken, we have beef, and we like shrimp. And we have many kinds of sauces for them."

After their meal, customers and pilgrims can enjoy a sweet treat with fresh fruit from the Rev. Peter Dihn and the Chua Kito Vua fresh and cold boba tea tent sponsored by the Christ the King Catholic Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

"Our church has been coming here and running this booth for at least the last 10 or 15 years," Dihn said. "We're not a full-scale restaurant. We serve just desserts or treats, but we prepared at least two or three months ahead for Marian Days."

Running a food tent at Marian Days, which runs through Saturday and draws tens of thousands of visitors, is labor-intensive, and the workers are volunteers for the most part. While it is a religious festival, the event is also famous for its food.

All of these restaurants have between 30 and 100 people working at peak times. And all have bilingual menus with items and ingredients listed in Vietnamese and English.

Tran said young people who work as servers are a big help for customers with questions.

"You see all the youngsters, all the youth? They learn how to talk to the American people. They are the face of the church," Tran said. "All those young people are the ones who serve the tables, they're the ones who communicate with the people. These are the young kids who actually know how to communicate, and every single year, they come back and help."

These parishes prepare ingredients in advance and freeze them for storage in refrigerated trailers they transport to Carthage.

Boba tea is one of the most popular cold beverages to battle the heat, which can climb into triple digits. It's something like a smoothie, with fresh fruit mixed in with crushed ice and other ingredients.

"Most of the stuff, the mangoes, bananas, strawberries, we buy ahead of time and we prepare it and we freeze it," said Dihn, with the boba tent. "We bring all those main fresh ingredients from Fort Worth here. Some of the stuff we buy here is the ice. We bought 500 pounds of ice just to prepare for this. Ice is one of the main ingredients for boba tea."

Vu, with the Bac Tho Moc tent from New Mexico, said many customers order that tent's specialty, pho.

"It's beef noodles in soup," Vu said. "Noodles with different kinds of beef. Even the Vietnamese and the not Vietnamese, they still like the pho. Our menus are bilingual, so that is one of the reasons they understand what is in the dish. If they have more questions, we can explain a little bit."

Tran, with the Quan Bien tent, said he started coming to Marian Days in 1981, just four years after it started, but he and his partner, Victor Vu, didn't start the food tent until later.

"Before then, we could sit and watch the events, but for the last 24 years the tent has been up and we serve more and more people," Tran said. "Everything we make here goes back to the church. We do it for God. There's no profit involved in this. Everything goes back to the church. This year, we changed it a little bit just because we've got to adapt to the new generation. This is the first year we've got kabobs and finger foods."

All three vendors said preparation for Marian Days starts months before they come to Carthage.

Dihn said the people who prepare the bobas actually have to practice their craft because for some this is the only time they do this and they have to get the bobas out fast in the busiest times.

Vu said the workers in his food tent come from a number of churches, so they do what they can to get ready at home and come to Carthage to see how many of their workers will be there in a given year.

They all come prepared to feed thousands of people over four or five days and they return the money they raise in Carthage to their churches at home.

Then they rest for a few months and start preparations to do it all over again.

"Come and enjoy Vietnamese food and have another taste," Vu said. "The unique aspects of the food we serve here, the way our mom at home cooks, that's how we cook it here. They always say that's how your mama would cook it. That's how we prepare food here. That's the reason we bring out a unique taste in every single food on the table."