Seven years ago, Hien Nguyen and Justin Boulter met by chance at a coffee shop in Hanoi, Vietnam. Now, the husband and wife duo are bringing Vietnamese coffee — and cuisine — to Astoria with their new food truck, Saigon Street Eats.

Growing up in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, Nguyen developed a love for Vietnamese cooking. Com tam, a rice dish, is her favorite to prepare and will be on the Saigon Street Eats menu alongside pho, banh mi and several variations of Vietnamese coffee.

Vietnamese coffee uses Robusta coffee beans, which have a stronger, more bitter taste than the Arabica beans used to make most American coffee.

“The pho that I’m going to serve is from the north,” Nguyen said. “And the com tam, the rice thing, is a specialty from the south. So we kind of balance the menu with the north touch and the south touch, and the banh mi is from all over Vietnam.”

Pho is also a special dish for Nguyen — her aunt owned a pho restaurant for more than 40 years and passed on her expertise to her niece. She said the pho she’ll be serving is a little different from what most Americans are used to; rather than the common style of pho from the south of Vietnam, Nguyen will add a northern Vietnamese touch through a fattier broth and salted meat.

The idea for a Vietnamese food truck came about when Nguyen moved to Astoria in September. She noticed that there wasn’t much of an Asian community, and found it difficult to source her usual ingredients, so Nguyen took it upon herself to bring a little corner of Vietnam to her new home.

“I think that introducing the community to a new touch, or new options into the diet would be nice,” she said.

The new food truck is part of a small, but growing local supply of Vietnamese cuisine alongside restaurants Nekst Event and Pho Mekha.

While Nguyen will be doing the cooking, Boulter has been helping her set up the business before he returns to his job as a commercial fisherman. In their relationship, they’ve navigated distances of thousands of miles, COVID-19 shutdowns, the U.S. visa process, and now, the painstaking paperwork of business licensing, fire safety examinations and health inspections.

The food truck, wrapped in yellow vinyl, will be an homage to the French-tinged architecture of Vietnam. Nguyen and Boulter plan to add shuttered windows and flowers all around the exterior to create a welcoming atmosphere.

“Right now, we’re just trying to get the hard stuff taken care of, and then we’ll focus on the little final touches,” Boulter said.

Nguyen’s passion for cooking is born out of love; she said in her family, if you love somebody, you show it by feeding them. Because of that, her husband has also become familiar with a wide range of Vietnamese dishes.

“There are a lot of dishes in Vietnam that are really good, that you never hear of in the United States,” Boulter said. “You see them very rarely, and if you do, nobody orders them because they don’t know about them.

“So we’re thinking about, once we get the hang of things, just doing a special once a week to try to introduce new dishes that are from Vietnam. At night, like, at home, she’ll cook food for me that is family food, that’s really good stuff, but you just won’t see it in a restaurant. I was like, ‘Oh, you know, people would really like this if they had a chance to try it.’”

Nguyen and Boulter have enjoyed getting to know their food-cart neighbors in the pod on 11th and Exchange streets and look forward to working alongside them.

“The little community in that corner is really cool,” Boulter said. “Everyone’s, like, superfriendly, and it’s kind of like they’ve all said, you know, ‘We’ll take care of her, we’ll make sure that she’s taken care of,’ so it gives me comfort knowing that she has a good community there to help support each other.”

Saigon Street Eats is set to open Thursday.