Markeshia Ricks photo
Duc Nguyen shows off Vietnamese street food at his now-closed restaurant.
After four years of serving up lemongrass tofu banh mi and other Vietnamese street food downtown, Duc’s Place has closed for good, the latest commercial casualty of the Covid-19 economic crisis.
Duc Nguyen, the founder, owner, and chef at Duc’s (pronounced like “Duke’s”), told the Independent that he decided in mid-April to permanently close his small dine-in restaurant at 167 Orange St. across from the federal building.
He said he shuttered his shop for good for the same reason as Clark’s diner on Whitney Avenue and The Beer Collective right around the corner on Court Street: a collapse in revenue, persistent bills, and no luck in securing federal support during the pandemic-induced economic shutdown.
“I still had rent to pay, I still had utilities to pay, and I just couldn’t keep it operational,” Nguyen said. “When things got bad and everything shut down, I just couldn’t maintain business.”
Thomas Breen photo
Nguyen in March, right before the shutdown.
Nguyen is a Westville resident and former Yale School of Medicine scientist whose family came to the U.S. as refugees fleeing the Vietnam War when he was just 9 years old.
He opened up his downtown restaurant in the spring of 2016 and specialized in serving a variety of Vietnamese street food, most notably banh mi: a popular Vietnamese sandwich consisting of a baguette filled with pickled carrots and daikon alongside pork or, for vegetarian customers, deep-fried tofu.
Nguyen had to temporarily close up his dine-in operations in mid-March, along with every other restaurant in the state. He had one other recently-hired employee working for him at the time. Nguyen said he laid him off so that he could get on unemployment.
Nguyen said he applied for the first round of the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a forgivable loan program designed to cover two months’ worth of payroll for small businesses.
But, like so many other small businesses with no special connections to the private banks that administered the program and with few resources to hire a lawyer to help navigate the program’s application, Nguyen said, his business was denied a PPP loan.
Even though the PPP program was ultimately refilled by Congress (and still has well over $100 billion left for small businesses to access), Nguyen said that that Congressional action came too late for him. After getting turned down the first time, watching the first tranche of PPP funds fly out the window towards businesses big and small, and then looking closer to home as his rent and utility bills continued to pile up despite his lack of revenue, Nguyen said he decided the best thing to do would be to shut down for good.
“Everyone took advantage with better lawyers and bankers,” he said. “All the big guys took all the money and ran. For little guys like me, I have little manpower and resources.”
He said he had taken out loans to open the business four years ago, and was wary of going deeper into debt by seeking out a new loan during the pandemic.
He tried to transition to a take-out only model. But at the height of the first wave of Covid-19 in early April, with Yale students gone and many other potential customers hunkered down at home, he couldn’t make and sell enough food to keep the business afloat.
“I was only getting a handful of orders a day,” he said. “Some days, no orders at all. Just to keep things running and open, it just wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t afford it.”
Markeshia Ricks photo
He said that he didn’t get into the restaurant business for the money. (“I made $0 from day one,” he said.) Rather, he transitioned from being a professional scientist to a small business restaurant owner to develop his skills as a chef. He has turned the shop’s keys back over to his former landlord, Olympia Properties, with whom he had a five-year lease.
As he reflected back on the past four years, Nguyen said he is proud of how much he had grown in the kitchen. “That’s what I enjoy,” he said about the cooking part of running a restaurant. The business part, he said, he’ll be happy to leave behind.
“It’s been a great experience, culinary-wise, which is the whole reason I started this thing. And I met a lot of great people, a lot of people I grew to be friends with,” especially the many young people and students who regularly came to his shop for lunchtime sustenance.
Nguyen said he’s taking some time now to fix up his Westville house and plan what’s next. “Science is always my heart and soul,” he said. “I think that’s the most feasible thing for me to go back to.”