In 1980s San Francisco, an under-the-radar restaurant called Thanh Long gained a serious cult following. It was known for its seafood, and sometimes served 200 roasted crabs a night. Robin Williams, Danny Glover, and Erik Estrada made occasional appearances. Rolls Royces would park outside, next to graffitied Outer Sunset buildings, and its owners say Imelda Marcos and her husband, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, even visited once in their heyday.

It was also, according to its owners, the first Vietnamese restaurant to open in that city.

The next places the California-based An family, opened, Crustacean San Francisco and Crustacean Beverly Hills, were even more popular. Crustacean Beverly Hills in particular became a celebrity hotspot, boasting regulars like Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio. For the non-famous, a visit was the ultimate exercise in feeling cool by association. I went once in middle school circa 2004. I couldn’t tell you what we ate (probably roasted crab and garlic noodles — it’s what you order there). But I remember the anticipation; dressing up in my favorite fancy outfit, slathering red lip gloss on my tweenage lips, and driving an hour in Dad’s pine tree-green Toyota station wagon for a glamorous meal with a hefty dose of people watching.

There’s nothing traditional about the version of Vietnamese cuisine the Ans serve. Their restaurants’ most famous dish, garlic noodles with “An’s secret sauce,” has no parallel in Vietnam, and that very lack of tradition is what made the Ans’ food so popular and influential in the ’80s and ’90s, a time when Vietnamese culture was still new to America.

Today, Crustacean doesn’t have the national profile of some other important restaurants from the period. Helene “Mama” An and her five daughters stay out of the spotlight, but the An family’s devotion to hospitality, consideration for its high-profile guests (celebrities like Lady Gaga and Kim Kardashian have a special VIP entrance), and inventive culinary combinations (including a Vietnamese take on bouillabaisse in San Francisco and pho-inspired soup dumplings in LA) have kept business brisk for decades.

And now, the An family’s contributions are getting the respect they deserve. On May 18, during the first-ever Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center celebration, Helene An will be presented with the Pioneer Award in Culinary Arts. According to the Smithsonian, she is being recognized as “the mother of fusion cuisine,” while her relatives are considered “culinary royalty, and the first to introduce Vietnamese cuisine to mainstream America, changing American palates forever with cuisine that honors both cultures.”

Helene An is an unlikely restaurateur. She was born an aristocrat outside of Hanoi, and although she was required to cook at a young age, she was, as she told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, utterly spoiled. That all ended in 1955. She was 11 years old when her family, the Trans, were forced to flee on foot to escape the Viet Cong. They were so recognizable that the Communist army would have shot them on sight.

The family sailed to Saigon and eventually settled in Da Lat. There, Helene An was married to a man so rich that multiple servants washed his feet every night before bed. They had a few children, he joined the South Vietnamese Air Force, and then the couple lost everything again in 1975 during the Fall of Saigon.

Helene An’s daughter, Elizabeth An, says their privileged life was upended in an instant: “In those days women didn’t really deal with money and finance, so when [Dad] was missing in action and the country collapsed, my mother and I and my sister Monique… fled overnight and went from one refugee camp to another.” Before the Fall of Saigon, the An family had personal servants for each of their children. “[We] had to grow up very fast,” Elizabeth An says. “To go from having a paid friend who let you win all the time — I didn’t know how to lose — to all of a sudden being in a camp with everyone and being like everyone else… You learn to fight for everything.”

The Ans eventually made it to San Francisco, where Helene An’s mother-in-law, Diana An, owned an Italian deli in the Outer Sunset neighborhood. The wife of a real estate developer, Diana An had purchased the place on a whim during a rebellious solo trip in 1968 — she initially visited the city because she had heard that American women wore pants — and she was already living in the little apartment upstairs and attempting to run the deli herself when Helene An and her daughters got to the U.S. “Grandma didn’t set out to be some amazing restaurateur. It really started because it was a means to a life here in America,” says Elizabeth An.

As soon as Helene An and the girls moved in, she started working in the kitchen. She did have some prior experience: For a few years after escaping the Viet Cong, Helene An spent her weekends living with Buddhist monks in Da Lat and learning Buddhist medicine and cuisine.

According to her granddaughter, when Diana An first arrived in the U.S., the menu at the deli was Italian. But slowly, she started to serve some Vietnamese dishes. The roasted Dungeness crab, which she adapted from a traditional fish recipe to satisfy her husband’s picky palate, was a hit from the start. So were the chả giò, or Vietnamese egg rolls: “I still have pictures of the old menu. It showed Italian dishes, pasta and all that stuff,” says Elizabeth An. “You’ll see one or two dishes like fried rice, egg rolls, and roasted crab. Grandma would come up to customers and say, ‘Try this dish from my country! You might like it, it’s from me.’”

Diana An paid close attention to which Vietnamese dishes her customers enjoyed, using the clientele as her own personal focus group. By the end of the first year after Helene An’s arrival, the menu was thoroughly Vietnamese.

Everyone in the family had a job at Thanh Long, regardless of their age. “Grandfather was a cashier. My father was a cashier… Mom and Grandma were in the kitchen,” says Elizabeth An. “My sister and I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to everyone.” As they got older, Helene An’s daughters became more and more involved in the business, but when Elizabeth An was in her teens and early 20s, she worked for a high-end clothing designer as well. “My time in retail influenced me,” she says. “I realized that Thanh Long would never have the more international, national, even global presence we hoped to have.” For that, they would need to open a place with a sense of style.

“Even though we had all these people come, it was still a home-grown, neighborhood joint,” she says of Thanh Long. “It wasn’t a hot spot, it was a secret find. I saw the potential there. I wanted it to become a brand.” A few of the sisters approached the family about opening a restaurant in downtown San Francisco that was “bigger, better, prettier, and more fashionable.” One in a trendier neighborhood. One that was so cool it might trick people into trying new things: “Asian food was still kind of a foreign thing, so I said to my mom, we’re not going to give it a French name or an Italian name. Let’s give it a name that represents who we are, but that sounds not-Asian.” They settled on Crustacean.

The name and decor weren’t the only parts of the restaurant with what Elizabeth An calls “international appeal” — the menu was deliberately Americanized as well. Even when they first opened Thanh Long, “Mama knew that authentic Vietnamese food might be too foreign,” says Elizabeth An. Helene An thought strong flavors like fish sauce wouldn’t appeal to the typical American palate, and so she incorporated the French and Chinese flavors and techniques she was exposed to in her childhood. “She knew that she could lighten up the flavors and be more well-received. And she enjoyed it that way.”

Other influences came from Helene An’s new home. Although she preferred to cook, sometimes Elizabeth An could convince her mother to go out for Italian food in Nob Hill. “I love garlic spaghetti with olive oil and cracked pepper,” she says. “I would take my mother and she would say, ‘This is bland! I can do better than this.”’ One night, Helene An went home and did just that.

When the Ans added the sweet and savory garlic noodles to the menu at Thanh Long, they immediately became a signature. Elizabeth An describes them as the perfect comfort food, and an enthusiastic customer once sent the Ans a note calling the dish “the clear work of a master.”

“We would have grilled tiger prawns with the noodles as a side — like how you have extra mashed potatoes — and [customers would] say, ‘No, no, no! Just give me the potato.’ Give me the noodles. I don’t need the prawns,” Elizabeth An says.

Those noodles and the whole roasted Dungeness crabs made their way from Thanh Long’s menu to Crustacean, but despite the dishes’ cult following at the Ans’ first restaurant, Crustacean wasn’t an immediate success. In her family cookbook, An: To Eat, Elizabeth An’s sister Jacqueline An says that six months in, “Crustacean was losing $10,000 a month and my mother feared we would have to close it. Then San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer made an unannounced visit — and hated everything.” Bauer didn’t understand the way Helene An had combined different gastronomic traditions, and his one-star rating made the Ans more terrified of failure.

Their loyal customers from Thanh Long were outraged to the point that David L. Beck from the San Jose Mercury News got wind of the controversy. According to An: To Eat, during his visit, he was so impressed with Crustacean that he proposed to Helene An on the spot, joking that he would divorce her the moment he learned her secret recipes, which were so closely guarded she had a separate kitchen built to keep them safe. He gave the restaurant five stars.

“My mother saw the conflicting opinions as an opportunity,” Jacqueline An wrote. Helene An spent $15,000 to publish both reviews in a full-page ad asking the public to come and judge for themselves. It paid off: Pretty soon, Crustacean attracted just the cosmopolitan crowd Elizabeth An had hoped for. Seven years after the first Crustacean opened, they were ready to expand.

Crustacean Beverly Hills opened in 1997. According to Jacqueline An in An: To Eat, 500 people waited in line to attend the new Crustacean’s opening night. Esquire named it one of the best new restaurants of the year, and it quickly became a Hollywood favorite. Elizabeth An had found the glamor she was looking for.

She knew she would have to work to hold onto it. Elizabeth An cultivated friendships with LA’s intelligentsia, joining their charities and comping their meals. As she worked the front of the house, she welcomed everyone from movie stars to the most anonymous diners as though they were part of her family. Her strategy worked: all these years later, Crustacean Beverly Hills is still attracting a star-studded clientele.

Four generations of women in the An family have worked together to keep this business going for nearly 45 years. Elizabeth’s daughter Bosilika An is in the process of taking over operations, Crustacean Beverly Hills just completed a $10 million redesign and reopened with a new menu, and several other An sisters operate their own House of An eateries. They’re opening a Vietnamese tasting-menu restaurant, Da Lat Rose, on the second floor of Crustacean Beverly Hills in October, and are working on several new concepts that run the gamut from fine dining to fast casual.

Thanks to the creativity of pioneering chefs like Helene An, American palates are increasingly embracing Asian cuisine, fusion or not. And that means that Crustacean can have more fun with its menu. Elizabeth An says she’s noticed greater interest in traditional Vietnamese foods. “I had a customer the other day who said, ‘Do you serve thousand-year-old eggs?’ I would normally expect that from an Asian clientele, but he was Western!” she says, and adds, “People used to come into Crustacean and say, ‘Oh, we love Chinese food!’ and I would have to tell them Crustacean is actually not Chinese.” Elizabeth An never has to say that anymore. Her customers know what they want, and that now includes ingredients like fish sauce and even chicken feet.

Helene An is 75, and currently in cancer treatment. She’s had three surgeries so far, and the An family is focused on her recovery. Still, the honor from the Smithsonian could not have come at a better time: “For her to be recognized this year as the mother of fusion cuisine… it’s a legacy we’re very proud of,” says Elizabeth An. “Mama made it super, super cool, and I’m glad that she’s being recognized for that.”

Lizzy Saxe is a food and pop culture writer whose work has appeared on Forbes , Vice , and Literary Hub .

Wonho Frank Lee is a photographer based in Los Angeles.

Editor: Monica Burton