Building an empire
Restaurateur Mike Tran is on the grow with multicultural concepts in Chinatown — and beyond
MIKE Tran strides into work dressed like an Asian Russell Simmons — slim pants, cool sneakers, T-shirt and baseball cap. It’s a look that befits a busy urbanite whose anti-fashion countenance is actually a nod to a smart lifestyle/ design aesthetic.
It’s a youthful look, though, belying his growing prominence as one of Houston’s restaurateurs to reckon with. In the span of a few years, he has managed to open three wellregarded Asian restaurants and has at least four more concepts in the works. By the end of the year, Tran’s restaurant group could have as many units as some of the city’s biggest and most highprofile multiconcept hospitality collectives, such as Clark Cooper Concepts, F.E.E.D. TX, Treadsack and Cherry Pie Hospitality.
If Greater Houston doesn’t know Tran, there’s a good, but not entirely sound, reason: All his restaurants are in Chinatown, snug in strip malls that, taken as a whole, form a long, dizzying corridor of Houston Asiana. But Tran has managed to hook dedicated foodies and hip millennials by creating small, boutique experiences for diners attracted to authenticity, contemporary design and gentle pricing.
Ask Tran and he will tell you why his restaurants are successful: Each is a separate, distinct Asian concept, not brand extensions of
each other. And, especially in Chinatown — where restaurants tend to follow a pattern of sameness — his don’t look or feel like any others in the metropolis.
“That’s the whole focus,” Tran says, “doing concepts people aren’t doing, things that are new and fresh.”
That may be too simple an explanation. It doesn’t take into account the pains he takes to ensure the food is the best and most creative evocation of its individual cuisines. He never lets his customers see the sweat, but it’s there in the thousands of culinary and creative decisions he’s made.
Let’s backtrack to his first solid score in Chinatown. After years as a co-owner of Aka Sushi House in Upper Kirby, Tran decided to get into the Chinatown game in 2013 with a 60-seat ramen shop, Tiger Den. The restaurant features four varieties of ramen whose broths are laborious projects that take 36 hours to make. Even before he opened in the busy Dun Huang Plaza at 9989 Bellaire, Tran sensed he might have a hit. On the first day, he expected maybe 50 people to show up; 300 did. So overwhelmed was Tiger Den in its initial days that Tran closed the restaurant for two weeks so that he could tinker with his bowls of hot noodles, refine the menu and make service adjustments.
Tiger Den soon was one of the buzziest restaurants in Houston, let alone Chinatown, striking long before the city was in the full grips of ramen fever. In 2015, he followed up with Mein, a snazzy Cantonese restaurant whose design was inspired by the golden age of glittering Shanghai. With his brother, Jack Tran, as chef/partner, Tran sought to elevate the taste and feel of everyday Cantonese cuisine. Again, food lovers flocked — this time to 9630 Clarewood in warehouse space in a strip mall a block off Bellaire.
Tran liked the site so much that he worked with the landlord to sign a handful of leases for spaces on either side of Mein. A month ago, one of those spaces came to fruition: an Indian curry and grill shop called Night Market, which he opened with his friend and chef/ partner Rikesh Patel. The strip mall eventually will house four other Tran concepts. In March, Tran plans to open Ohn, which he says will be a Korean “dive bar” serving soju (the Korean distilled alcoholic beverage), makgeolli (unfiltered Korean rice wine) and Korean bar food. Toukei, a chicken ramen concept, will follow. And then a dumpling house and a coffee shop. Back at the mall where Tiger Den is slurping up customers, Tran secured a lease next door for yet another concept: Laki Fish, a poke bowl restaurant. All are expected to open this year.
Beyond that, he is thinking about two spots inside the Loop: an izakaya ( Japanese pub) and a Thai shop. He says he’s also been approached about opening two concepts at George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Tran says he’s able to juggle logistics because he’s good at visualization. He sees things through the eye of a graphic designer, his trade since graduating from the Art Institute of Houston in 1991. (He’s owned NX Media, a print and design business, since 1993.) “I know how to see the package,” Tran says. He creates the design plans for all his stores; he picks out the lighting fixtures, the tile, the tables, chairs, countertops, even the faux beams. The slick, pop-art murals that grace his restaurants are his inventions.
Tran has lived in Houston since he came to the United States as a boy of 9. Tran’s Chinese parents — who hailed from the Canton region but lived in Vietnam, where he was born — arranged for Tran and a few of his siblings to exit Vietnam.
“Vietnam was bad. The war was over, but my parents wanted to send us out,” says Tran, 49, whose voyage to America took a path that included Malaysia and the Philippines before Houston. Locally, he attended Brookline Elementary and Austin High School.
“I think I came a long way,” Tran understates.
For now, he remains busy with his newbie Night Market and the almost complete build-out of Ohn, where he’ll be in the kitchen as the chef of the Korean restaurant with dark, semiprivate pocket booths. Tran is quick to point out he’s never been to culinary school and is not a trained chef. But he allows that he can cook the cuisine at any of his restaurants.
“The best training is in the kitchen,” he says, adding that of all his restaurant cuisines, he admires Chinese the most. “It’s the toughest one. There’s so many ingredients involved, and technique — roasting, stir-frying, steaming — it’s so broad. I have great respect for those chefs. It’s not easy to stir-fry. Just to control the heat takes time to learn.”
But learning seems to be something Tran has a way of embracing quickly, wholeheartedly. That, coupled with a sincere desire to succeed, drives him.
“I pick the right concept for the area to minimize the risk of failing,” he says. “I always want to try something new and different. But I have confidence that I can make it.”