How Sunh Fish became the go-to seafood market for Sacramento’s top chefs, home cooks

Behind nearly every Sacramento-area restaurant of note, there’s only one brick-walled fish market on Broadway.

Most major Sacramento-area restaurants source seafood from Sunh Fish, Nguyen Pham’s store at 1313 Broadway. Founded by Pham’s parents in 1985, it’s the supplier for the upper echelon of Kru Contemporary Japanese Cuisine, Allora, Localis and The Kitchen, as well as comparatively casual places like Kansai Ramen & Sushi House and Bawk.

Home cooks, too, can buy Chilean sea bass or whole branzino caught off the Cyprus coast from the fairly industrial market, along with Asian sauces and snacks. A range of sashimi-grade fish — Hawaiian albacore, Santa Barbara sea urchin, Japanese hamachi — are popular for DIY sushi nights, and Sunh Fish sells the California-grown rice and MAC Knife blades to complete the projects. Poke, oysters, lox and salmon roe are all ready-to-eat as well.

Amateurs make up less than 5% of Sunh Fish’s revenue, though. Company vans deliver fresh fish and shellfish to about 500 restaurants from Vacaville to Plymouth, serving roughly 100 each day Monday to Saturday. The storefront is open for walk-ins on Sunday, too, and restaurants such as Tower Cafe may send someone over to pick up an order among families grabbing groceries for the week.

Brad Cecchi has been a Sunh Fish client since he was a Grange Restaurant & Bar sous chef in the late 2000s, and now buys its seafood for Canon (East Sacramento), Franquette (West Sacramento) and Cantina Pedregal (Folsom). If there is one vendor chefs ought to have a close relationship with, it’s their fishmonger, Cecchi said. Few local ones remain, making Sunh Fish’s service stand out alongside its sourcing.

“It’s the hometown feel of it all, and the ability to have a conversation with a person and get what we want,” Cecchi said. “It’s not necessarily that we need custom cutting. It’s more that we want somebody to talk to that says, ‘this is really fresh, or this is really good and you should get this, or I can get that special for you.’”

“It’s a true success story of the Sacramento region.”

Pham’s parents, Nho and Suong, met in a Philippines refugee camp following the Vietnam War, immigrated to Sacramento and settled in a Dos Rios Triangle housing project. Needing to make money, they bought an old van and began a seafood sales business, driving to the Bay Area several early mornings per week to pick up inventory, then heading back to Sacramento to re-sell to other immigrants out of the back of the van. Five-year-old Nguyen rode in the back with the fish, arranging pallets to make sure he didn’t fall through the gaping hole in the floor onto Interstate 80.

Nho and Suong eventually opened a 300-square-foot kiosk in an Asian grocery store at 13th and Broadway, and Nguyen took over the business in 2002 after graduating from UC Davis. The transition coincided with a change in Sunh Fish’s clientele: 90% of early customers were Asian, but Sacramento chefs of all ethnicities began caring more about seafood quality around the turn of the century, he said.

That’s helped Sunh Fish expand, first in 2012 to a 17,500-square-foot warehouse at 19th and V streets and then back to 13th and Broadway in 2019 once Pham bought the building. Sunh Fish makes no outside sales calls and buys no advertising, but word has gotten around the Sacramento restaurant scene.

“We just know that if they don’t buy from us at the beginning, at some point, they’ll call us. It just always happens that way,” Pham said. “If we don’t have their business at the beginning, we’ll have their business in whether it’s six months or two years or whatever.”

What I’m Eating

There are only four tables at Dim Dim Food, Stella Pan’s Chinese restaurant in the Pocket’s Promenade Shopping Center. Carts? Forget about it. What the 2-year-old business does have is a bevy of fresh and frozen dim sum favorites, perfect for quick pickup and on-the-go Cantonese bites that are as inexpensive as any food around.

There are plucky steamed chive dumplings with translucent skin, meatball-like shumai teeming with pork, chicken or shrimp, green tea sesame balls (each $1.50 apiece) with Wicked-green dough surrounding sweet black paste.

My favorite, though, was the crispy baked BBQ pork buns ($2.20). Deep-red char siu is surrounded by an interior crumb as beautiful as any sourdough, and the bun was finished with a crystallized sugar skirt, creating a savory-sweet heaven delight.

Bulbous egg custard buns ($2 or three for $5.70) were nearly as stellar and eye-catching, dyed a soft yellow, cross-hatched to look like chicken skin and holding a luscious, creamy river inside. They were my favorite desserts aside from Dim Dim Food’s wife cakes ($1.60 or three for $4.40) a flaky Guangdong specialty also known as sweetheart cakes filled with a thick swath of winter melon and almond paste.

Dim Dim Food

Address: 7485 Rush River Drive, Suite 680, Sacramento

Hours: 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except Tuesdays

Phone: 916-942-9302

Website: dimdimfood.com

Drinks: Canned and bottled teas and sodas

Vegetarian options: Many items. Most have ingredient lists on their display case, but be sure to ask if it’s unclear — some surprising ones may have pork and fish

Noise level: Quiet aside from refrigerators’ hum

Outdoor seating: None

Openings & Closings

▪ Saigon Alley Kitchen + Bar’s Folsom location opened March 20 at 2770 E. Bidwell St., Suite 600, in Broadstone Marketplace. Jimmy Voong and Mymy Nguyen’s modern Vietnamese restaurant and cocktail lounge also serves its 72-hour pho at midtown Sacramento and North Natomas outposts.

▪ Coatza Brewing has closed after a little over a year in Old Town Elk Grove. Enrique Silva and Hendrick Crowell II’s craft brewery at 9251 Elk Grove Blvd. made Mexican-influenced beers and regularly hosted DJs that spun Latin music.