By Cheryl Ross
About six months later, Khanh Ha decided to leave the business–it was interfering with her singing career. Would Kim, who was still waitressing, like to buy her out? No, Kim still wanted to go to college. But that never came to be. Instead, Kim and Tuan’s families told her they thought it best that she marry Dan, who by now had become a partner in Pasteur after handing over his successful Houston hair salon to a sister-in-law. Kim and Dan had been good friends all their lives. Their mothers felt that the marriage would cement the two families’ age-old friendship, and it would keep Pasteur in the family. Finding it hard to say no, Kim and Dan soon walked down the aisle. As a gift to the newlyweds, Dan’s mother bought them the other half of the restaurant.
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But Kim was. One day, after having looked at five properties, she stumbled upon an empty 10,000-square-foot building at 5525 N. Broadway in Edgewater, on a strip with auto-body shops, beauty salons, and a martial-arts studio. “It was pale, faded, almost like an ivory yellow, stucco building. It had little cubbyhole windows. That was it; the rest was all stucco right down to the ground. And it had one little door, and I thought, ‘What an interesting building,”‘ she says. “I called up the realtor and told him I’d take it. He said, ‘But you haven’t seen the whole place!’ The thing was, I knew it was for me. I brought in my mother [Dinh Le], she looked at it, and she said, ‘Kim, this looks like a maze!”‘
The new restaurant had been under renovation for four months when Kim closed the family’s small cafe in January of this year. Dan had returned from Vietnam in the latter part of 1995 to help run the cafe and was now free to lend a hand to the new project. But much of the work would fall on Kim. At the time she had no idea how much that would be.
Over the course of the project, five-foot-five Kim had dropped from 110 to 95 pounds. But all the stress and hard work paid off. In May, she opened the new Pasteur. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe that such a dazzling place was in my neighborhood–it looks like it could be on Rush Street. Kim says people told her she was crazy to locate the business here. “They said, ‘That area is so dark. How will you attract people?”‘ she recalls. Kim countered that people would come because of the plentiful free parking. She seems to be right. On a recent Saturday, a friend and I checked out the place and it was packed. We waited 20 minutes in the lounge. It’s been so successful that she plans to build her banquet hall sometime this fall.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Kim Nguyen photo by Robert Drea.
