VOL. 124 | NO. 239 | Monday, December 07, 2009
A story from The Memphis News
On newsstands throughout the city
Former Immigrant Hangs Hopes On New Restaurant in Collierville
By FREDRIC KOEPPEL | Special to The Memphis News
AT HOME: Tuyen Le left the family business, Saigon Le restaurant in Midtown, to serve her own Vietnamese cuisine at a new business in Collierville. -- PHOTO BY BOB BAYNE
When the Le family moved from Saigon to Memphis in 1984, they brought little with them except cooking skills and a desire to prosper in a new country.
Family matriarch Hoa Nguyen and her daughter Tuyen Le went to work for Fascinating Foods, the old Midtown catering company, a job that Tuyen Le followed by working as a waitress in several American and Asian restaurants. For years, Tuyen Le told her mother that she needed to start her own restaurant.
When that restaurant, Saigon Le, finally opened in 1993 in the home of the former Mid-South Revival Center on Cleveland Street, it transformed the city’s notion of what Vietnamese cuisine could be. With Hoa Nguyen in the kitchen and Tuyen Le as manager and waitress and three brothers and two other sisters and a sister-in-law working in the restaurant, Saigon Le was truly a family business.
Sixteen years as a waitress, however, was too long for Tuyen Le. Two years ago, she began thinking and talking about opening her own restaurant; recently she sat in the dining room of New Que Huong, which opened in June in a shopping center in Collierville, and said, beaming, “All mine. No family. I do this myself.”
Tuyen Le was 23 when her family immigrated to the United States.
“When we came to Memphis, we were very poor,” she said. “We went to work right away, but didn’t speak English very good. I worked in too many restaurants, American and Chinese.”
She has three children, sons, 23 and 21, and a daughter, 18. She divorced her husband six years ago.
Working at Saigon Le for nearly 16 years forged a culinary and business philosophy that Tuyen Le intends to follow strictly.
First: No Chinese food.
“Mama had Chinese food on the menu at Saigon Le because people don’t know about Vietnamese food, said Tuyen Le. “At first, we cook Vietnamese for the neighborhood, and other people come and eat the Chinese food and maybe soon they try the Vietnamese food and we teach them. Now people know more, but Mama keeps the Chinese food on (the) menu.
"I say, ‘No Chinese!’ Too many Chinese restaurants open here already. I want to show people what real Vietnamese food is.”
In a way, she said, opening her restaurant in Collierville is like returning to the old days at Saigon Le.
“In Collierville, they don’t know so much about Vietnamese food,” she said. “It’s like in Midtown 17 years ago. Now I am teaching them again.”
Second: Consistency.
“Every day the food has to be the same,” she said. “When customer order food second or third time, it has to be the same as first time. The sauce has to be the same as always.”
Tuyen Le puts a great deal of emphasis on her sauces and their appropriateness to the dish. When she brings food to the table, each dish is accompanied by a sauce in a small bowl, some of them surprisingly different from others, such as a pungent sauce of sliced jalapenos and pickled garlic with a soup chockfull of noodles, bamboo shoots, fish balls, shrimp and sliced beef.
“I make that sauce for that soup. Some customers, they put anything on the food, but I say, ‘No, you use this sauce I make for this dish.’”
Third: Service.
“I tell my children, ‘If you work here, you do it my way and make customers happy.’ Restaurant business is about making people happy. You must do that. Feed them, teach them about the food you cook, and make them happy. Then they want to come back and be regular customer.”
She described her relationship with customers this way: “First time I wait on a table, I let the people order what they want. Next time they come in, I give them some help. Third time, I know what they like, and they will order anything.”
Tuyen Le looked far afield for a setting for the restaurant she had in mind, even as far away as California, Ohio and Atlanta.
“I didn’t want to be too close to Mama,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt her business.”
She realized that she didn’t have to move out of state not to compete with Saigon Le, and started looking closer to home.
Rent in Midtown was too high. Rent at the space vacated by Costa Vida Fresh Mexican Grill at Poplar Avenue and Holmes Road was really high, $11,000 a month. That situation pushed Tuyen Le farther east. She looked at a former sandwich shop at Germantown Parkway and Macon Road, but it lacked a full kitchen.
Finally, through her lawyer (one of her customers at Saigon Le) and her real estate agent, she found a corner space in an L-shaped shopping center in Collierville, once home to a Chinese restaurant and thus fully equipped.
Happy to have a tenant, the landlord allowed Tuyen Le two months rent-free and a rate of $3,250 a month for a year, after which the rent will rise to $3,900.
“You see,” she said, “that helped. Business is good but not what we want yet, but it will grow. I feel good about it.”
Tuyen Le sees New Que Huong-New Homeland as a legacy for her children. It’s the immigrant’s dream: A poor family arrives on these golden shores, works hard and succeeds; the family branches out, and the business and success follow; the children become educated and they, too, form lives that are recognizably American.
“All mine,” she says again. And then, laughing, “Someday you try my spaghetti and potato salad.”