This Wichita restaurant is now gone for good — and prompting a trip down memory lane

I’ve loved Vietnamese food from the first time I slurped a rice noodle down my throat in my early 20s while visiting Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t until I moved to Wichita in late 2002 that the cuisine transformed my culinary life.

It started with a restaurateur named Danny Nguyen and his Pho Hot Bistro and, later, Lemongrass restaurant.

Danny became a great friend to my husband, Joe, and me, and he’d fete us with items that weren’t on the menu — a menu that already was chock-full of amazing dishes. He’d sometimes call or text to say he had a new creation he’d like to test on us (blood pudding, anyone?).

Often, Joe and I would show up, Danny would notice us in the restaurant and swoop to our table to take our menus away before retreating to the kitchen to prepare something that inevitably would have every other diner staring at us in ravenous envy.

Once, we had a decadent multicourse meal with some friends and were driving home when Danny called to ask where we’d gone. There was one more dish to try, not to mention another round of cognac toasts. We quickly turned around the car.

Danny sold his restaurant and moved to Oklahoma several years ago. We miss our good and generous friend, and we still crave the lavish, luscious nights we spent with him.

At least, though, we still had My Tho, our second-favorite Vietnamese restaurant.

Now, technically, we lost My Tho a few years ago, which I’ll explain in a minute.

But the other day, I finally saw a Landmark Commercial Real Estate sign in the window at the business at Central and Emporia. I felt a stab in my stomach that wasn’t my usual hunger pang.

A hug for your throat

When Joe and I first started going to My Tho, it was a pool hall with a tiny area for dining. The spare menu offered only banh mi sandwiches, Vietnamese beef stew and varieties of pho.

The restaurant itself also could charitably be described as a bit spare, or, perhaps more accurately, a bit rough. Knives — as in butter knives — weren’t allowed.

Except for us, customers all seemed to be of Asian descent.

Our friend Bruce Rowley described the same experience when he started going to My Tho, but he and Joe and I would bring other people there, and then we’d see them on future visits as they introduced others to the spot. We joked we ought to be getting some kind of commission, or at least an occasional free bowl of pho.

One by one, the Vietnamese couple who ran the restaurant took away the pool tables and added more dining tables.

Eventually, it was no longer a pool hall. It was a thriving restaurant with lots of business people in suits with strategically placed napkins over their shirts to guard from soup splattering. There were on-duty cops and moms with strollers. And, almost always, someone we knew or had introduced to the restaurant.

Once, I did a video for The Eagle in which banker Clay Bastian and marketer Nancy Blanchat debated which was better: the No. 4 pho with paper-thin slices of steak or the No. 13 beef stew with enough aromatic spices to clear up any congestion.

For me, it was No. 13 all the way, especially if I had a sinus infection or even if I was just feeling a little blue.

I once described a soup at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central in New York as like a hug for your throat, but My Tho’s No. 13 was like a hug for my whole body. The broth was simultaneously spicy yet calming — literally nourishing my body and perhaps, too, my soul. It was that comforting.

I’d follow the meal with a cafe sua — coffee in a French press that’s then stirred with sweetened condensed milk over ice — and I don’t even like coffee.

Then, as if preparing us for the day when the restaurant would be no more, the owners started closing for months at a time as they traveled back to their native Vietnam.

Our friends and we would drive by the business, plaintively eyeing it and texting scouting reports about signs of life or whether there was an actual sign in the window about a reopening date, at which we would all rejoice.

Then came devastating news. One of the sons of the owners was arrested (for the second time, it turns out) on sex trafficking charges.

It was a gut punch on a number of levels: the seriousness of the charges, the fact we’d known this friendly young man who was such an integral part of the restaurant for so long and the realization that we’d probably be uncomfortable ever returning.

One friend who did venture back, only once, reported an almost empty restaurant.

Then came the pandemic.

Now, there’s the real estate sign seeking a new tenant.

It’s the sad denouement of another culinary era.

Memory lane

Though I knew on some level how lucky we were to have Danny and My Tho for as long as we did, I’ve learned it is true that you don’t actually know what you have till it’s gone.

My list of Wichita losses is surprisingly long given that I’m not a lifelong resident.

There are relatively small disappointments that have a surprising ability to get me down, such as the disappearance of cool old signs around town.

I remember that after an eight-hour U-haul trip to move Joe here in 1999, I sat at a picnic table under the Jack’s North Hi Carryout sign waiting for Joe’s landlord to show up to his Riverside apartment and let us in. I was hungry and irritated, but that didn’t keep me from appreciating the vintage Jack’s sign with mod 1950s stars decorating it (although I’ve since learned they were toy jacks, apparently). What a cool city that it still has this sign, I thought.

Then a couple of years ago, a new owner of the business, which is now a doughnut shop, painted over the jacks and made a few other changes to the sign. Many Wichitans, myself included, considered it a defacement. The owner had every right to make the changes, but I can no longer even look in that direction as I drive by several times a day.

Same, too, on North Broadway where the retro Dyne Quik sign used to be. A restaurant that moved into the Valentine diner for about half a minute took down the Dyne Quik letters, accidentally breaking them in the process.

And, last I looked, the fabulous old Welch dry cleaners globe from Broadway and Murdock still is sitting in a sign graveyard on North Broadway.

This weekend, I got my hair done near Central and Woodlawn but couldn’t make my customary trip to Best of Times at Normandie because the business closed in late December. I’m the one who reported the closure was coming, and yet the fresh reminder that the store is gone made me sad all over again.

I realize almost no one will sympathize with my next complaint given that there are four grocery stores within 0.9 miles of my house, but I long for the days when Dillons was at 13th and Waco on my route home from work. So easy. (Yes, yes, cue the tiny violin.)

Speaking of work, I am beyond lucky and grateful to be working from home, enjoying writing in my pajamas and taking the occasional afternoon nap. But I miss the bustling, madcap existence of our newsroom.

I’m so ridiculously nostalgic, I can get upset over the loss of things I never even experienced, such as what sounds like the wonderful old Coyote Club, a roadhouse on North Broadway that our friend and real estate agent Art Busch used to own.

Then there’s the immeasurable loss and longing for friends, the ones who have died or moved or whose lives have taken them in other directions.

And, for your sake, don’t get me started on the number of sweet pets I’ve lost since our great backyard chicken experiment began in 2016 unless you have a bottle of tequila, a couple boxes of tissues and a few spare hours to listen to me whine.

A friend gently counseled me that these are the cycles and seasons of life we all must experience. Why not revel in the riches of all that I’ve had and perhaps count my current fortunes, too?

I do. Really, I do.

But don’t we all look back in wonder at what once was?

One little real estate sign in a window has the power for quite a bit of reminiscing down memory lane.

I’d like to invite you all to come along. What are the businesses you used to love? Or funky signs around town? Anything else that we ought to revisit? Seriously, I’d like to hear from you for a future story — or stories — about the Wichita that once was.

Even though I’m feeling quite the sense of nostalgia on this trip, at least I don’t have to go it alone.