Argyle FYI

Walking home from the el yesterday I was glancing at the listings posted in the window of the small real estate office on Argyle and noticed that one of the listings was for Nhu Hoa -- the entire business is up for sale. Don't know if this has been true for some time or not. Had some take out from there within the last couple of weeks and there were no inidications inside. But the listing was defintely there in the window several doors down the street.

mrbarolo wrote:Walking home from the el yesterday I was glancing at the listings posted in the window of the small real estate office on Argyle and noticed that one of the listings was for Nhu Hoa -- the entire business is up for sale. Don't know if this has been true for some time or not. Had some take out

Interesting - I ate there this Saturday and there were no indications of a pending sale. There were, however, only a handful of people eating in the restaurant. Too bad.

i had a long chat with hung, the owner of nhu hoa, this afternoon. i'm very sad to report that there's truth to the rumor of a possible sale. that said, they're looking for the right price and are apparently in no hurry to sell. having run nhu hoa and other restaurants over the last few decades, hung and the family running the business are tired, and they're also looking for better weather (i don't blame them). they're likely to head out los angeles way.

I'll certainly miss them. They had some consistency problems over the years, but I loved that they provided an alternative to basic pho and straight vietnamese menus that are replicated at most all the other storefronts on the street. The Laotian and Cambodian menu sections were a lot of fun to explore and they had a tamarind duck preparation that I just loved.

that is too bad, though I never really cared for tamarind stuff, I really liked a number of things there, including their laab, papaya salad with beef jerky and the mung bean "sweetie" for dessert

It looks like Nhu Hoa, my favorite place on Argyle, has closed. Tables were stacked up last night, and the number has been disconnected. What a shame. Hai Yen, not nearly as good, or as interesting a menu seems to thrive, and a unique place like Nhu Hoa can't attract enough customers to stay in business.

'tis very sad but true.

but as is often the case, when one door closes another one opens (or in my case in this instance, is discovered). we've been going to tien giang since the nhu hoa closing. it's fantastic and has made the loss of nhu hoa, one of my favorite places, much easier to swallow.

Tien Giang
1104 W Argyle St
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 275-8691

I wish them well. My wife and I used to be regulars there around 1999-2001, when we lived nearby. Returning to Chicago after several years away, we eagerly stopped by last summer--and were very disappointed with the quality of the food.

We noticed that the handsome young Vietnamese husband and lovely Laotian wife that used to run the place were gone. The folks now running the place claimed that they were their relatives (cousins, I think), and that the couple we were thinking about had moved out to the 'burbs--and I think they said the husband had gone into IT work, and his friendly wife was busy raising their kids (she was working-while-quite-pregnant back in early 2001).

Anyways, I digress.... I imagined that the food had suffered due to the new management, even if it was still within the family. Of course, my wife suggested that *just maybe* our dissatisfaction could have something to do with the fact that during our time away from Chicago we spent three months in Vietnam, getting used to the real thing....

Haven't been that impressed with Hai Yen, either, but hey--at least they have a version of Bun Cha (called "Bun Cha Thang Long") that begins, but only begins, to resemble Hanoi's glorious dish. Now, if we can only get a dish, somewhere, that begins to resemble the almost equally-great Cha Ca....