You can go home again.
Arriving in the United States from Vietnam in 1975, owner Ve Do opened Que Huong at 355 New Park Avenue in 1983; his wife, Dung Nguyen, was the chef. In 2021, the restaurant is re-opening in the exact same storefront.
What happened in those 38 years in between?
As I look at the general disinvestment from Hartford in the 1960s through 2000s, I can’t help but feel that the media has played a large role in making and breaking so much.
Up until recently, one place after another closed or relocated to a suburb, citing slow business. If you scratched, the owner would usually say something about patrons being wary of Hartford, because the public would hear about violence, yet not grasp the nuances of it. The owner, usually, would talk about how his restaurant was not in an especially dangerous area, but people from the suburbs would hear about shootings and dismiss an entire city.
If nearly all of your knowledge of a place is being fed to you by what you see on the news, there’s a clear outcome– especially in the time before everyone carried the Internet in their back pocket. Still today, reporters need to show more social responsibility, as do the editors, publishers, and producers. They should treat each story as if it happened on their block, and that they have every wish to continue living in their neighborhood for several decades to come. We would be treated to more complexity, less sensationalism.
I think of how it would sound if I refused to ever step foot in Newington or West Hartford or Glastonbury because somewhere in town a man assaulted his wife. I would sound utterly foolish. Paranoid. Not in touch with reality. We all know that it’s possible to condemn domestic violence, while realistically assessing our own risk when we are not part of the household in question. Why doesn’t this logic transfer to urban violence, which is nearly always between people who know each other?
When Que Huong opened in 1983, the first review in the Hartford Courant was positive, overall, but I can’t overlook the very first sentence: “Behind its unassuming, even dingy facade, Que Huong serves the best and least expensive Oriental food found in the Hartford area in a long time.” And while I perhaps should not expect much from a review that uses “Oriental” six times in an article (would “European” be used in place of “French” or “German” to this extent?), even those who claim not to take reviews seriously are ingesting this, just like they ingested the half-baked media coverage of violence over the years. It’s an incomplete picture.
If that review were written today, at least there is no chance they could call Que Huong’s façade dingy. Look at that signage!
The Vietnamese restaurant expanded in 1988, with a Que Huong Express opening as part of “The Greenhouse Cafes,” a food court inside Hartford’s Union Station. That closed in 1990 — slow business — but the last restaurant in the food court shut down in early 1991. Some newspaper articles blamed the design of the building; the food court took effort to find. Others blamed the reports of violence; despite downtown being safe, would-be patrons from the suburbs assumed they would catch a bullet anywhere.
1994: there’s an entire newspaper article discussing restaurants that originated in Hartford and either opened sister establishments in the suburbs, or up and left entirely. Among those named where Luna Pizza, which began on Franklin Avenue, and Harry’s Pizza, which started on Capitol Avenue. Plenty of the restaurants included have long since vanished — from Hartford and the ‘burbs. A few — Peppercorn’s, along with First and Last Tavern — managed to keep their Hartford locations open nearly three decades after this piece came out.
It’s a tough spot to be in, if you’re running a business, just getting by, and your patrons stop showing up for reasons that have nothing to do with your product. You’re one person, or part of a small team, and you are working long days as it is. Do you have the time to try changing the culture? Do you have energy to publicly counter the message that the city is too dangerous?
So, in 1994, Ve Do opened Bamboo Grill in Canton. A food reviewer that year, piling it on, described Bamboo Grill as being “tucked in a pleasant strip mall,” while the same writer depicted Que Huong as being on a “shabby” stretch of New Park Avenue.
Later that year, Que Huong closed on New Park Avenue.
Over the years, the owners opened another Bamboo Grill in Meriden and South Glastonbury. Their niece, in 2018, opened Pho 135 in West Hartford, serving Instagrammable durian crepe cake.
Then, in 2020, while the world was shutdown, the storefront of 355 New Park Avenue began transformation from Pho Ever to Que Huong.
Maybe now, in 2021, suburban patrons have been properly educated about the nature of violence, seeing as how there have been nearly non-stop mass shooting events nationwide since the late 90s. It’s a problem worth condemning, while understanding one’s own risk. We are guaranteed safety nowhere, and because of this, it is even more foolish to avoid urban areas because of misplaced fear.
Congrats to Que Huong, and welcome home!