UPDATE: Chef and owner Lan Cao added to comments saying she will reopen in November. I had emailed and called several times, but since the boxes were piled up, the space is for sale and I knew two restaurant owners who had considered the space, I thought she had closed for good. This turns out to be much better news.  I haven’t wanted to come face to face with this fact, but it seems like the closure of Viet Café, or V Café, is permanent and for me, very sad. That was our first regular spot in the neighborhood when we moved here and you could not beat the Vietnamese steak frites or the chicken pot for a hearty meal, if you ask me. I also just loved the casual, easy vibe and effortless décor — something we don’t see around these parts any more.

The restaurant was open for a time last June, but it must have been just too slow to be worth the effort. Chef and owner Lan Tran Cao opened a 65-seat pop-up restaurant at the Hampton Racquet Club in East Hampton not long after, and (no surprise) the East Hampton Star‘s review suggested that the pop-up should “stay up.” “Whoever it was at Hampton Racquet who thought to bring Viet Café of New York City out to do a pop-up V Café at their Center Court snack bar is a genius. The food is fresh, light, and inexpensive.”

Lan was a former chief technology officer of Deutsche Bank when she opened Gallery Viet Nam in the space attached to Viet Café first, and then the restaurant in 2003. She closed the gallery in 2012 and kept the restaurant. (It was most recently Outer Reach, the stretching studio.)

According to a feature in Dan’s Papers, Cao plays tennis in the winters in Southampton and became friendly with the owners of the raquet club, who invited her to convert the club’s snack bar used mostly just for kids to Vietnamese street food. When the pandemic hit and everything closed here, she wanted to keep her staff working so they started takeout there last July. It grew from there.

So Southampton’s gain is our loss.

The two retail condos in the building — 1A and 1B, both of which have a lower level — have been for sale for a while; G. forwarded the listing to me last November, which said the spaces would be delivered vacant and could be sold individually or together. I also know that a couple other restaurant owners in the neighborhood were considering the space but in the end chose others that were less complicated.