Hue Vietnamese eatery moves to new building
Switch also sees change in decor of restaurant
The vintage Honda motorbike on display, the kind that has flooded streets in Vietnam for decades, is one sign that Hue Vietnamese Restaurant is doing things differently these days.
Hue opened its newly built Bay View location last week, two doors away from the original restaurant. It first opened in 2010, with Vietnamese oil paintings on the wall and an aim of presenting Vietnamese cuisine in a more upscale setting.
Now, at 2699 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., owners Cat Tran and Mark Nielsen have lightened their approach.
In place of oil paintings on the walls is a mural of a street scene in the city of Hue, in central Vietnam, in which scooters zip past shops.
And there’s the 1965 motorbike itself. (When importing a Honda Super Cub from Vietnam proved too costly, the owners found one in Boscobel, of all places, and brought it to Bay View in the back of a van.)
“My mom got her first one in 1968,” Tran said. “It was pretty fun for her to see that.” Her mother hadn’t seen a scooter like that since she left Vietnam in 1975, at the Vietnam War’s end. Tran said her aunt drove her mother’s motorbike into a lake so the North Vietnamese couldn’t seize it.
The oil paintings aren’t gone entirely; look up, and you’ll see they’re attached to the ceiling over the bar. It was a way of saying that the restaurant was “changing gears and done with the old way of doing things,” Nielsen said.
“We take our food and how we do our food very seriously,” he said, but the point of the new Hue is to be upbeat and fun.
The two-story building (which has three studio apartments on the second floor) was awhile in coming. The couple bought the property in 2019; it formerly was the site of Sven’s, a small, low-slung cafe with a parking lot.
The pandemic not only delayed construction until 2021, it drew out completion of the project. The restaurant opened May 10.
Hue expanded the new building’s footprint into what was Sven’s parking lot, taking its capacity from 49 in the old spot to about 65 in the new.
Tran and Nielsen said the new restaurant is a bit more kid-friendly; it has a place to park strollers, and it was important to have changing tables, too (highchairs and booster seats are on back order, as is much in 2022). One menu item is called The Last Resort — chicken tenders.
The restaurant now has a 25-seat patio, which officially opens this week. A window that looks onto the patio from the bar rolls up to give the restaurant an airy feel and lets the bar easily serve customers inside and outside.
Customers will find some new menu items in the coming months; Hue plans to start offering banh mi in the summer, for one.
A third of Hue’s business continues to be carryout, more than it was before the pandemic. Until April, it had been as much as half.
The new Hue location is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. It’s likely to expand weekend hours, but the owners will evaluate hours carefully.
The restaurant’s menu and online ordering are at huerestaurants.com; to contact, 414-294-0483.