“Pho”-get about going back to Bonjour Vietnam for a fusion of French and Vietnamese cuisine, because the restaurant has been shuttered after failing to pay rent, according to a notice posted to its door since Sept. 11.
The restaurant, formerly located in the bottom floor of the Hotel San Carlos on Central Avenue and Monroe Street, received a notice that it had five days to pay back its rent of nearly $5,000 or vacate the premises. Since then, Bonjour Vietnam has been locked up with the chairs stacked on the tables, looking as if it had just closed up for the night.
“I’m really, really sad about it,” long-time customer Sovin Keans said. “It was my favorite restaurant. I went there almost every day.”
A sign on the window of the vacant Bonjour Vietnam said that the owner of the Hotel San Carlos, Greg Melikian, is renting out the space to an “upper class restaurant.” After hearing this, Keans could only guess what was to be next for the Hotel San Carlos.
“It’d be another bar, I guess,” Keans said. “That’s all we have around here.”
Despite these concerns, Robert Melikian, son of the hotel’s owner and one of its partners, said that Bonjour Vietnam owner Lan Tran “plans to reopen (the restaurant).”
Dennis Tran, owner of Saigon Kitchen in Surprise and the brother of Lan Tran, also said the family was currently in negotiation with the hotel to reopen the restaurant.
If the restaurant reopens, it will be with Dennis at the helm. Dennis said that he would be taking over the restaurant because of the reports he had been hearing of the restaurant’s quality of food and management issues.
“The manager is very stubborn,” Dennis said. “He thought he know what he doing, and … Saigon Kitchen went in there, tell me, reporting to me, how terrible the food was, and dropping down the level, the quality of the food (…) and I didn’t want that. So I went there and tell her (sic) to shut it down.”
Keans noticed the issue as well.
“There’s a lot of bad things about the place as far as the staff,” she said. “There’s a lot of issues with the cook, but it happens with a lot of places.”
Dennis Tran plans to open the restaurant as soon as possible, but he said it may take a little work.
“I’m gonna take over and restructure everything there. So, within a month, in a month-and-a-half, I will reopen (the restaurant),” he said.
For the time being, the restaurant remains closed. However, Dennis said that Bonjour Vietnam will make a return to the same location, just looking and tasting a bit different.
“I have to restructure everything,” he said. “Have to redo the kitchen. A lot of equipment in there doesn’t work appropriate to my food. Our particular food, it doesn’t work that way.”
Contact the reporter at Nikiana.Medansky@asu.edu
