With city help, cafe reopens in Tenderloin
On the last afternoon of her months-long break, Mong Thu owner Kim Lien Nguyen was almost too excited to stand still. Her eyes darted constantly to the tasks left to do. Signs to put up in the window, a kitchen to rearrange. So much food to prep.
Nguyen and her family reopened her 28-year-old Tenderloin Vietnamese cafe this week. The city, which in January had told Nguyen she couldn’t serve the dishes the restaurant’s regulars loved best, had helped her reopen as well.
“I’m ready,” she said in Vietnamese, her daughter acting as interpreter, then switched to English: “I’m very happy.”
There are more than 6,000 restaurants in San Francisco, and hundreds close every year, with restaurateurs citing unfriendly regulators, hikes in the minimum wage, rising rents, changing tastes and other factors. Mong Thu’s reopening shows how one small, family-owned neighborhood restaurant persisted despite its challenges.
The Nguyens arrived in San Francisco in 1984, bringing with them a clutch of tiny daughters. A brother-in-law first rented the Hyde Street cafe in 1989, but realized after four months that he couldn’t make it profitable.
Little Saigon, as the strip has come to be called, was still coalescing, and there were few Vietnamese cafes back then. Kim Nguyen had spent eight months in a nail salon, but the work didn’t suit her. Cooking did. So did being her own boss. And so she took over running the cafe, which then only served coffee and Vietnamese sandwiches. Six years later, the family transferred over the paperwork to make it officially hers. Nguyen named the business Mong Thu after one of her daughters, who has since died.
The cafe’s kitchen was never any bigger than a coat closet, but as the years passed, Nguyen added more dishes to her list of banh mi. First she served beef porridge and seafood noodle soup. Then she slowly rolled out additional soups, each requiring a different broth. She’d try new dishes on her family until she found the right formula before adding it to the menu.
Mong Thu became known for its soups, such as the spicy pork-and-beef bun bo hue, bun mang vit (duck and bamboo-shoot soup with a duck-meat salad on the side), and Kim Nguyen’s favorite, bun mam, with its sweet and pungent fish broth. The only problem was that the kitchen’s ventilation was so paltry that she wasn’t supposed to be prepping or cooking inside the cafe. The family tried renting a commissary, which was expensive. And yet, for more than 20 years, they made it work.
Mong Thu has become a steady presence in Little Saigon. “A lot of the client base is Vietnamese, so she knows a lot of the people who come here,” daughter Linh Nguyen says. “She knows their family, their kids, who’s getting married, who died. It’s very close-knit.”
One daughter, a graphic designer, set up a website and redesigned Mong Thu’s restaurant, while another painted the walls a pale mint green that reminded the Nguyens of Vietnam and some of their Americanborn customers of 1950s diners. Even after the owners of the building refused to renew the lease for Lafayette Diner next door, they offered Mong Thu another five years.
In January 2017, the city, however, finally stepped in. In January, Kim Nguyen was forced to give up making soups, serving only the sandwiches allowed in her health permits. Her daughter Linh began negotiating with the city, as well as contractors, to find a way to legally cook in the space.
The Office of Workforce and Economic Development’s SF Shines program, which primarily helps local businesses improve their facades, kicked in $47,514 in design services and technical assistance. SF Shines helps 12 to 15 businesses a year, with grants ranging from $5,000 to $50,000.
Three months ago, the Nguyens closed Mong Thu and rebuilt the kitchen and the diningroom counter.
Despite the fact that neighbors would tell them how much they missed Mong Thu, the past three months have been stressful for Kim Nguyen. “There were obstacles to everything we did,” Linh Nguyen says. Every month, as they paid rent on a closed business, they fretted more: Would they be able to finish the renovations before their money ran out?
The compromise the health department settled on with the Nguyens suits Mong Thu’s short menu: a more powerful stovetop hood plus a set of four induction burners, which can heat big pots of broth quickly and efficiently without any hint of fire. During the hiatus, the daughters posted regular updates on the restaurant’s Instagram page, culminating in an announcement on Friday that the final permit had come through.
As the cafe resumes its regular schedule — 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily — it’s back to 5 o’clock mornings and 12-hour days for Kim Nguyen. And she couldn’t be happier. “When she’s sleeping, she’s still smiling,” Kim’s daughter wrote on Instagram. The chef celebrated by returning to the kitchen.