Le Cheval is back in its flagship spot
The arms of Lan Tran’s father and grandmother, who founded Le Cheval in 1985, are crisscrossed with battle scars — burns from spattering woks fired up at a series of locations. The family’s latest restaurant reopened Feb. 23 in the same Oakland City Center location lost in 2009 during a bitter legal contest with the landlord.
At a recent lunch, Tuyet Bui, Tran’s grandmother and the matriarch of the family, looked as colorful and proud as a national flag, presiding over a sea of patrons as diverse as the Bay Area itself.
At that meal, I loved my fork-tender calamari, soaked in toasted curry oil, infused with fresh lemongrass and dusted with peanuts ($10 lunch; $13 dinner).
It’s dishes like these that have kept the menu intact for more than 25 years. It was called fusion cuisine when Le Cheval first opened — a time when Vietnamese food meant pho, vermicelli salads or banh mi.
Another favorite is the cube steak ($13), bite-size bits of crisp, stir-fried tenderloin cooked medium-rare in a sweet-garlicky glaze and served with seasoned lemon juice.
While the 5-year-old Le Cheval in Walnut Creek feels upscale, and Le Cheval in Berkeley (known as LPC and opened in 1998), is more of an inexpensive dish-up spot for the college community, this flagship Oakland location is a comfortable hybrid of quick and leisurely dining.
One night we ordered the steamed striped bass Hanoi style (market price; $28 on our visit), and were given a tableside lesson on how to soak and soften the rice paper sheets, load them with moist bass, fresh mint, lettuce, carrot and cucumber, douse them with sweetened fish sauce, and wrap them into refreshing handheld rolls. It was both elegant and fun, with enough fish and garnishes to make a dozen rolls.
We followed that up with bananas flambe, triangles of pastrywrapped banana doused at the table in flaming rum and honey ($4.50), particularly good with a side of dense vanilla gelato ($4.25).
More humble and satisfying is the chicken curry ($12), a not-too-rich stew with chunks of potato and carrot. Our clay pot rice ($9 lunch; $9.50 dinner) was rather bland, although packed with prawns, beef, chicken, vegetables and plenty of well-crusted rice lining the pot.
Abottle of soy and sriracha on every table lets diners perk up any dish. Good on their own are the sauteed garlic green beans ($8.50 lunch; $11 dinner), cooked soft enough to soak up the spicy sweet sauce, and offered at lunch with beef, chicken or tofu at no extra charge.
I’m glad I gave Le Cheval a second and third look. My first visit included an underdone vermicelli salad with overcooked pork kebabs ($9.50), the preparation as desultory as our waitress. But our appetizers of flash-fried salty shrimp ($13), and a spicy, minty raw beef salad ($10) gave me hope.
The landlord who evicted Le Cheval put some money into the kitchen with the idea of opening a restaurant, before the building was foreclosed. And the new landlords, who invited the Tran family back, put in new windows, flooding the pastel walls in an abundance of natural light. The space remains a bit industrial and urban, with echoing acoustics, but it well reflects the clientele, especially at lunch.
So it seems one can come home again — to a renovated home, to boot. Lan Tran, whose two young children may or may not continue the Le Cheval legacy, is certainly happy all the twists and turns led them back to this location.
“It worked out,” Tran says. “Even with all the headaches, it worked out.”