How one New York City restaurant fought to survive

Saigon Social, a Vietnamese restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has only ever existed in pandemic-era limbo.

It opened two years ago to labor shortages, supply chain snarls and sudden shutdowns. Its owner, Helen Nguyen, had to play every role in the restaurant, all while running around the city to track down ingredients, containers and condiments.

When coronavirus cases in New York City spiked again in December, businesses announced temporary closings. Saigon Social was among them.

At this point, it doesn’t even faze me,” Nguyen said. “We were shut down and delayed for so long, I’ve never truly had the opportunity to open.”

Despite her bravado, Nguyen approached her breaking point while facing her second pandemic winter. But February was better than the previous month, and in early March, the mask mandate in New York was lifted and restaurants were no longer required to check vaccination status. She reopened with a new menu, leaving behind the takeout-friendly items that were necessary to survive.

But as cases are spiking again in New York, up 30 percent in two weeks, her fortitude will be tested once more.

Saigon Social was originally set to open March 13, 2020, just three days before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered all nonessential businesses to close their doors.

In other words, Saigon Social’s grand opening happened at the worst possible moment. It opened too late to be eligible for the Paycheck Protection Program, a signature part of the federal relief effort. But it was too early for Nguyen to have a loyal customer base and a takeout-friendly menu to weather constantly evolving restrictions.

“I slept at the restaurant every night that first month because I was so depressed,” Nguyen said.

New York is a restaurant city, and Nguyen has been a rising star in it. She spent years working for the acclaimed Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud. She has participated in the prestigious Bocuse d’Or cooking contest in France, and has made regular TV appearances on the Food Network and Vice’s Munchies. Saigon Social is her first restaurant on her own.

But running a food business in New York means operating on extremely thin margins, and sometimes the smallest disruptions — let alone a pandemic — can be the difference between winning acclaim and closing for good.

The streets emptied in December as cold weather set in and fear again gripped the city. Virus case counts exploded, and Saigon Social’s dine-in business fell to a trickle.

Earlier in the pandemic, Saigon Social relied on takeout and delivery orders. Catering also became the restaurant’s largest revenue source, which allowed Nguyen to shut the dining room when omicron hit to minimise potential exposures.

“Having to turn so many diners away is heart-wrenching, but it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “I can’t risk it.”

At-home COVID tests quickly ran short, so she canvassed her neighbors, offering to trade shots of Fernet Branca for spare kits.

Testing became a daily ritual at the restaurant. “Don’t worry, I used to work in a hospital,” Nguyen would tell her employees. “As an interpreter.”

Catering orders came in only once or twice a week, and on some days, takeout sales would barely exceed $500, nowhere close to being able to cover labor costs. Negative test results would often be the only good news Nguyen would hear. She ended many nights by clinking glasses of amaro with friends: “Fernet about it!”

Nguyen is part of a cultural vanguard of influential Asian Americans. Philip Lim, a fashion designer, and the comedian Ronny Chieng are friends and customers. She describes her inner circle as an “Asian restaurant girl boss crew” filled with successful business owners from around the city.

Nguyen’s community extends to elderly people and others in need around her neighborhood. She produces hundreds of meals a week for Heart of Dinner and Feed Forward, nonprofit organizations focused on hunger. These catering jobs helped Nguyen to keep the restaurant afloat.

“You feel that you’re helping the community, but it’s actually the community that’s saving me,” Nguyen said.

Early in the pandemic, she befriended En Bao Chen, sometimes bringing him meals as he collected recyclables from garbage cans outside her restaurant. “Even as she’s going broke, she still cooks for us,” he said.

Chen, 78, was assaulted on the street several times in the past year — part of an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence. In one case last month, a woman was followed to her apartment in Chinatown and fatally stabbed more than 40 times. It was a shocking tragedy, close to home for Nguyen in several ways.

The killing took place just blocks from Nguyen’s apartment. Just a month after, she was also followed home by a stranger. She was able to get inside her apartment and bolt the door before anything could happen, but the experience shook her. “I try to go home a little earlier now,” said Nguyen, who has since asked friends to walk with her. “It’s scary out there.”

Normally a restaurant would have a chef in charge of the “back of the house,” running the kitchen and the cooks. A manager would direct the front, overseeing servers, décor, reservations and everything else not related to food. At Saigon Social, Nguyen often does it all. “I’ve been a one-man band from the very beginning,” she said.

The economic recovery during the pandemic left a severe shortage of workers, including in the service industry. According to the Labor Department, in January there were more than 11 million job openings around the country, an increase of 61% from just before the pandemic. Nguyen simply hasn’t been able to find enough qualified people to work for her. Even when there were lines of diners spilling out the door last summer, she was forced to limit service.

So when omicron began spreading, she closed the dining room rather than risk exposing her few employees to infection. Some got sick anyway.

Shortly after the new year, her first server tested positive. Then the sous-chef and another server quickly followed. Nguyen was soon hustling between every station in the kitchen while also fielding orders on the phone and tablets.

“We’ve been running on a skeleton team,” she said in mid-January, when deserted streets invited even more vandalism than usual. “I feel pretty burnt out right now.”

At the same time, the pandemic continued to break the global supply chain, limiting the availability of takeout containers, condiments and other products. Prices went up across the board.

Nguyen spent hours each week scouring Chinatown supermarkets, suppliers in New Jersey and a wholesaler in Queens, hunting for slightly better prices, eating up time she could have spent hiring workers and figuring out how to reopen.

“I still feel like I’m in survival mode,” Nguyen said.

By late January, two friends came on board to help her reboot the restaurant and throw the grand opening party it never had.

Emily Yuen, who spent the past five years as the head chef of Bessou, a Japanese restaurant in NoHo, offered to help rework the menu to make it less focused on takeout and delivery.

Jennifer Saesue, who managed a 53-person team at Fish Cheeks, a Thai restaurant, joined as a partner to optimize the front-of-house operations. She took advantage of the improving labor market to spearhead a hiring drive, tripling the number of servers.

“She was trying to do everything, but it’s an impossible task,” Saesue said. “We have enough people now to get the ship started.”

The revised menu was taking shape, with dishes that Nguyen long wanted to serve but could not because they wouldn’t travel as well in takeout containers.

“It’s a different energy, plating it nicely and not just doing it into a box,” Joshua Lemi, the junior sous-chef, said of the new menu. It featured dishes like banh beo chen, steamed rice cakes topped with shrimp floss served on six sauce plates.

“Whatever you’ve seen the last two years is not what I wanted to cook,” Nguyen said. ”We don’t just want to be a banh mi and noodle shop.”

Saigon Social’s reopening in early March was preceded by two days of “friends and family” service, to allow the new team to get acclimated. But once word got out that the restaurant had reopened for dine-in service, friends and fans just showed up.

“I’m a little overwhelmed,” Nguyen said. “This is the most people I’ve ever had in here. This is the most staff I’ve ever had.”

At the moment, the restaurant is carefully monitoring case counts but has no plans to close again. Mostly Nguyen is able to focus on the positive.

She was recently nominated for a James Beard award — known as the Oscars of food — for best chef in New York state.

And she earned a different kind of prize.

For the first time in months — maybe even in two years — Nguyen started going home before midnight.

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