Where stood a lonely nursery amid an array of strawberry fields, one entrepreneur saw an opportunity.
His name was Danh Nhut Quach, and he opened his pharmacy on Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue in 1978.
Danh’s Pharmacy became one of the first Vietnamese-owned businesses in what has since grown into the largest Vietnamese commercial district outside of Vietnam.
Long gone are the strawberry fields of Westminster, paved over by double-decker mini malls brimming with Vietnamese commerce.
A 1.25-mile stretch of Bolsa Avenue now teems with more than 700 Vietnamese storefronts doing close to $1 billion in annual sales.
And, Orange County’s Little Saigon commercial district has become so much more than that in the 50 years since the fall of Saigon and the resulting influx of Vietnamese refugees.
While Vietnamese-owned businesses are easily found across the county, thousands are clustered throughout Westminster and Garden Grove and parts of Santa Ana, Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach — the geographic area Little Saigon has grown to include today.
Within the enclave, nearly 11,000 small businesses employ close to 50,000 workers and have an annualized payroll of more than $2 billion, according to a 2024 economic and demographic study out of Cal State Fullerton.
Today’s Little Saigon is more than twice as big as the original district designated by Governor George Deukmejian in 1988.
And, as first-generation business owners pass the torch to their children and grandchildren, today’s leaders of Little Saigon say the area’s next iteration could be limitless.
“Over the next 20 years, I see Little Saigon continuing to evolve as the largest and most influential Vietnamese ethnic enclave in the world, and it’s only becoming more attractive,” said entrepreneur Tâm Nguyễn. “Our aging strip malls will be redeveloped into beautiful, attractive, modern facilities. We’ll have new, culturally sensitive modern housing options. Little Saigon will be denser and more walkable.”
One can already see a glimpse into the future that Nguyen envisions in the form of Bolsa Row.
It’s a mixed-use development on six acres at the eastern edge of Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue, replete with 200 luxury apartments that opened in 2022 and 26,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space that will open later this year.
Bolsa Row is meant to be more than a draw for Vietnamese shoppers, said developer David Nguyen. It’ll also be a culinary hub featuring the diverse cuisines of Orange County.
“We’ve gotten a good amount of interest from Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Western-style restaurants,” Nguyen said.
“Our clientele are not just Vietnamese folks anymore,” Nguyen added. “We’re seeing a mixture of different ethnicities coming from far and wide to visit Little Saigon. It’s such a dynamic place.”
Yet, Bolsa Row, with its signature clock tower at the southeastern corner of Brookhurst Street and Bolsa Avenue, is an homage to Saigon’s Bến Thành Market.
“Bolsa Row is an architectural love letter to Vietnam,” Nguyen said.
Brittany Morey, a UCI professor who studies ethnic enclaves, said it’s not unusual for them to maintain a strong sense of home even as their demographics and services evolve to become more diverse.
“Enclaves such as Little Saigon are deeper than just the number of, say, Vietnamese people living in those zip codes,” she said. “These places draw on a shared history, a shared meaning, that doesn’t easily change even as the people living there do.”
Today, Little Saigon’s population is nearly 30% Hispanic, and many of the census tracts that define the region are home to more people of Latin American descent than Asian descent.
About a mile south on Brookhurst from Bolsa Row, a Sabrosada taquería shares a parking lot with Kei Coffee House, one of the trendiest Vietnamese coffee shops in Orange County.
They’re examples of two family-owned businesses formed in the same place but made in response to diasporic phenomena from around the world.
“We’re seeing a lot of fusion businesses, especially around the concepts of food,” said Tim Nguyễn, president of the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce. “In Little Saigon, there is Vietnamese-style food infused with Latin American flavors, and Latin American foods infused with Vietnamese flavors.”
Even as the demographics of Little Saigon morph, the area it has come to define maintains a particularly special significance for the Vietnamese community, Morey said.
“I think the business landscape of Little Saigon will continue to change over time,” she said, “especially as more Latinos move into the area, but the place will always have a unique meaning for the Vietnamese community,” she said.
The Bolsa Row Apartments and retail center at the corner of Bolsa Avenue and Brookhurst Street in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, CA, on Monday, April 21, 2025. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)From Alpha Beta to ABC
While Bolsa Row, on the eastern edge of Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue, offers a glimpse into the area’s commercial future, what’s colloquially known as the ABC plaza on the street’s western edge continues to be a glimpse into Little Saigon’s past.
An Alpha Beta supermarket used to anchor the shopping plaza on the southwest corner of Magnolia and Bolsa. Now it’s the Siêu Thị ABC Supermarket.
The switch from one market to the other in the mid-1990s signaled the changing demographics and consumer purchasing power of Westminster at that time.
The city grew up in the baby boomer wake of World War II. By the 1970s, its economic engine was sputtering
“A lot of the strip malls downtown were rundown or vacant,” Westminster City Manager Christine Cordon said.
That made it an affordable place for Vietnamese refugees, like Quach, to start businesses.
“Westminster just happened to become the heart of Little Saigon because there was more land availability and more affordability,” said Frank Jao, Quach’s neighbor who became the area’s preeminent real estate developer.
As they opened shops in Westminster in the 1970s and ‘80s, Vietnamese immigrants tried to recreate the way business got done at home, Cordon said.
People visit shops in a strip mall near the corner of Bolsa Avenue ant Magnolia Street in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, CA, on Monday, April 21, 2025. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)Out of the aging strip malls, they built bustling marketplaces.
Next to the ABC supermarket are smaller storefronts where many vendors peddle goods from the sidewalks, emulating that “bazaar-type feeling” that Cordon, Westminster’s first city manager of Vietnamese descent, says is so familiar in Vietnam.
“There’s a sense of pride in maintaining this type of aesthetic,” she said.
“This is a very organic way of doing business,” added Assistant City Manager Adolfo Ozaeta. “And, it’s working.”
On a Monday afternoon in April, the strip mall’s immense parking lot was packed. Every storefront was crowded with shoppers.
“Even as we think about redevelopment, we don’t need to change this,” Ozaeta said.
A blend of old and new
The city recognizes that part of Little Saigon should and must change as first-generation residents, like many who do business in the ABC plaza, age out of commercial life, and younger residents bring new ideas and tastes to the marketplace.
In 2021, Westminster, along with leaders from Garden Grove, Santa Ana and other agencies, created a 66-page blueprint for investment in Little Saigon on how to boost business and tourism in the area among consumers throughout Orange County and beyond.
In Today Plaza, halfway between the ABC plaza and Bolsa Row, the mix of old and new businesses is crystal clear.
People wait in Lin outside Bake & Che in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, CA, on Monday, April 21, 2025. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)Gen Z shoppers, phones in hand, line up in front of Bake and Che, one of the trendiest dessert shops in town. There’s also a second location in Garden Grove and a third coming in Rosemead.
The shop has a substantial online presence, with nearly 12,000 followers on Instagram, where practically every day the store’s social media team posts a trendy reel featuring a beverage or sweet baked good.
Cordon says Bake and Che is an example of a newer-wave Vietnamese business that’s marketing to a younger and wider audience.
“We’re seeing newer businesses, especially trendy restaurants, come into life,” she said. “We have a lot of new tech-savvy businesses, for example, that might be completely cashless. That’s very different from a lot of the original Little Saigon businesses that continue to be cash-only.”
Just steps away within the same plaza is Thạch Chè Hiển Khánh, another dessert shop that’s been there for years. It’s not a chain, and the shop doesn’t appear to have a website.
Still, it’s one of the plaza’s bigger draws and one of Cordon’s favorite places to pick up a sweet snack.
“Right now, when you look at the types of businesses of Little Saigon, there’s this really interesting balance as this transition of generations unfolds,” she said.
What’s next for Little Saigon?
Moving forward, Cordon would like to see Little Saigon become more of a tourist destination.
She admits that it won’t be easy to achieve given the development limitations around Bolsa Avenue, where a scarcity of parking along with an array of mobile home parks, wholesalers, manufacturers and auto repair shops could limit the retail corridor’s walkability and expandability, Cordon said.
But, a rethinking of the Bolsa corridor’s sense of place has been top of mind for Cordon since she took her office over three years ago.
“How do you enhance marketing of Little Saigon so it’s not just a business district, but a cultural attraction, as well? We’re working on creating an identity for Little Saigon that starts with how the signs look, how the streets look, maybe making some facade improvements, making Bolsa Avenue more pedestrian-friendly,” she said.
Garden Grove City Manager Lisa Kim echoed that idea for the part of Little Saigon in her city.
“As we see this transition of generations, we continue to be respectful of tradition, but also understand that this next generation of consumers is looking for something different, particularly a trendy foodie experience,” she said.
“In Garden Grove, our tourism corridor is very robust,” she added. “Everyone thinks of Disneyland first. But, we also have a lot of visitors that come and stay at our hotels just to dine locally in Little Saigon or to visit family there.”
The Bolsa Row developer, David Nguyen, who helps run a family-owned firm out of Westminster, said he is not wary of competition. He welcomes it.
“A Class A apartment building in the middle of Little Saigon — you can understand that kind of raised eyebrows when we built that,” he said. “But, investors see it’s doing well.”
“I want there to be more development in Little Saigon, and I think there will be more investment,” he added. “You’re starting to see a flow of money come in from overseas and also from financial institutions around Southern California.”
Even Jao, a leader in the area’s commercial market for nearly 50 years, has in recent years played around with ideas of redeveloping the Asian Garden Mall, the area’s signature landmark he opened in 1987, or at least adding a parking garage behind it — but nothing has come of that just yet.
“I see two new major sources of competition,” Jao said.
“One, we are seeing more developers introduce capital from Vietnam for projects in Little Saigon,” he said. “The homeland has transformed itself and is doing pretty well to be able to send capital here. Two, we’re also seeing more people who are not of Vietnamese descent take an interest in developing Little Saigon.”
Cordon says she is not holding back from moving Little Saigon forward into a new phase of redevelopment.
A woman tends to produce at Trai Cay Tuoi in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, CA, on Monday, April 21, 2025. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)“We’re starting a big push right now, pointing out Bolsa Row, for example, that our city is a viable place for investors to do well,” she said. “I’ve been out to different real estate panels, engaging with investors and showing them the steps we are taking to welcome new development.”
“When I think of Little Saigon 10 to 20 years from now, I envision a place that’s more walkable, where there’s better traffic improvements and better access to ride shares,” she added. “The one- and two-story-tall strip malls might even build up. We’ll see an intensification of business, and more visitors who are not just Vietnamese people.
“There will be a fully marketed identity with new street signage, maps and other markers that showcase Little Saigon as a cultural destination.”
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