The new location on 57 East Oak Street won’t have the cozy second story of the original, but many design elements are identical.
King found a new location just steps away, which presented a good opportunity to refresh both the decor and the food. However, the Rush Street location was simply becoming too expensive to sustain staying would have meant paying triple the restaurant’s former rent. Certain items were so beloved that co-owner Joe King got hate mail when a dish was taken off the menu.
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She spent time again in Vietnam after the country opened up to tourism in the early 1990s and wrote a book on the country’s food.įast-forward 22 years, and the restaurant is consistently full and has a passel of loyal customers.
Rather than create a “fusion” version of Vietnamese food for 1990s palates, Routhier helped design a menu that represented her roots (she grew up in Vietnam and is half-Vietnamese, half-French), with an upscale approach. “Now it’s a big trend everyone has Vietnamese flavors and bánh mì on their menus,” says Nicole Routhier, the restaurant's n ational culinary director. When the restaurant first opened in 1996, Vietnamese influences weren’t nearly as common in downtown restaurants as they are now. Le Colonial isn’t quite a Chicago original - the oldest outpost is in New York City - but it’s been part of the Rush Street scene for so long that most people probably don’t remember that. Now that it has almost finished moving into its new digs, I sat down with its team to talk about its history, the move, and what running a restaurant that celebrates “1920s French Colonial Southeast Asia” means in 2019. Luckily, it turns out that the restaurant was just changing locations. There were probably some minor freakouts when longtime fans of Le Colonial, the Vietnamese-inspired Gold Coast standby, heard last year that the restaurant was closing.