A “cancelled” restaurant in San Francisco has closed for good.
Le Colonial, which has been open near Union Square since 1998, served its last customers on Sept. 1.
The restaurant and its food paid homage to Vietnam during the French occupation in the 1920s.
But critics said depictions of Vietnamese culture could be gimmicky and based on stereotypes, and decorations were often objects from other Southeast Asian countries.
This led to accusations that it celebrated colonialism, and Le Colonial was branded racist in a now-infamous review by a San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic in 2019.
“We basically got canceled, in a sense, with a lot of local media,” the executive chef and general manager said. Geoffrey Deetz told the Chronicle this week.
Le Colonial, which had been open near Union Square since 1998, served its last customers on Sept. 1.
Screenshot of a video promoting the restaurant Le Colonial
“It was a lot to overcome, between that review years ago and COVID. It put us in a situation where we couldn’t move forward.”
He was referring to a Restaurant Review in 2019 by then-Chronicle food critic Soleil Ho.
“The theme of Le Colonial is covered in a sticky film of racism, but what makes this insult worse is the fact that the food is neither well prepared nor particularly exciting,” he said.
San Francisco is a city that is home to one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the United States outside of the country itself.
Deetz and his wife Quynh Nhu, a pastry chef, took over Le Colonial in 2021 and were tasked with shedding its questionable image.
In an interview at the time, The Chronicle described Deetz’s task as having to “try to gain respect for perhaps the least conscientious restaurant in San Francisco.”
“When I went to the bathroom and saw Buddha, that was really unacceptable.” Nhu told the Chronicle in the interview.
‘Some of the pictures on the walls were pretty and others looked scary and just not right.’
She told the publication that some of the images, with their depictions of Vietnamese people in the 19th century, made her shudder.
“You can see this funny white guy cooking your food, but the passion that this restaurant is trying to convey is really celebrating Vietnamese culture,” Deetz said in the 2021 interview.
“I want to create an environment where Vietnamese people can feel at home in a place that used to be so offensive and distant from modern America.”
The opinion of the city’s residents is that the couple did improve the restaurant’s image, but – with the added problems of the pandemic – it was too late.
“It was an uphill battle,” Deetz concluded last week.
In general, restaurants across the United States have struggled post-pandemic to deal with… With rising food and labor costs, there have been numerous closures and bankruptcies.
Geoffrey Deetz and his wife Quynh Nhu took over Le Colonial in 2021 and did their best to shed its questionable image.
Le Colonial, which had been open near Union Square since 1998, served its last customers on Sept. 1.
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