Lê Phở House
Story time… How we started a family business during quarantine…
We were on day 32 of quarantine making the most of every day but could feel how stressed mom was with all the bills piling up due to her nail salon being closed for over a month now. While at dinner (eating pho) a convo sparked about how we should sell mom’s pho to help out with whatever bills we could. We were all so excited and believed that we could make it work. We’ve always dreamt of having a family Vietnamese restaurant for so many reasons.
Mom makes bomb Vietnamese food. All of grade school mom would cook for our teachers and friends that would come over just because and everyone would tell us how much they loved her food!
It would be nice for us to work together as a family and have something that we own, possibly even leave a legacy with it.
There’s no Vietnamese restaurant in our small town Weslaco.
We love sharing her food and it would be amazing to be able to serve the community especially during this time.
I’m sure there are more reasons but its 1:12am and I can’t think of more :)
The reason why we never started was because there wasn’t enough time (and money) in the day for us to do so. Mom was full time at the nail salon all day everyday, I was traveling and focus on building my network marketing business, Amy and Amber were in college, and Randy was working in Hawaii. Crazy how it took a pandemic for us all to pause and come together.
The timing of it all was almost too perfect. My lease in Dallas was coming to an end and I was at a place in my life where I wanted/needed change. I decided to go home to be with my family to figure a few things out then that night at dinner changed everything. We had an idea, went straight to planning, then the following day took action. Since most of the ingredients that we needed was not available in our small town we had to go to a bigger city that offered it. Well since I hadn’t moved out of my apartment in Dallas yet… everything worked out! Mom drove 9hrs up with me to help me pack up my things, after that we went to an Asian market to pick up what we could, then to Sam’s Club to get supplies. Let’s just say good thing we had a uhaul!
9 hour drive up and 9 hour drive down we sure had a lot to talk about. We went over the menu and made it clear that we wanted it to be simple. We agreed on just focusing on 3 things... beef pho, spring rolls, and fried rice. We also created a schedule where we were going to just do it for 3 days out of the week Thursday-Saturday. When we got back home we stayed up all night to figure out a name. I’m so serious when I say all of this happened so fast. After bouncing ideas and asking friends on social media we decided as a family to go with Le Pho House because Le is our last name, Pho will be the main dish, and house because well we started all of this in our house, Le Pho House. Additional to that we all had a “stay at home order” and thought it would be nice to have the pho set in a way where it was simple for our customers to prepare at their house. We wanted this whole homemade concept for us and more importantly for them.
I reached out to my awesome friend Jeremy Biggers who is a very talented artist and we came up with some simple designs for our logo pretty much overnight... we all love what he created. It went with our name so perfectly! There’s also meaning behind our color choices. The red and yellow represents the color of the Vietnam flag. I also remember in art school for color theory class when people are hungry they are attracted to colors like red and yellow... hints how many successful restaurants can you think of that are red and yellow? Okay, thats another convo we can have for another day. And as for black and white because we’re Vietnamese mixed with black and white. Ta-da!
After 3-5 days on planning and preparing we were ready to start our pho business! By April 15 (tax day, we’ll never forget) we started taking orders on instagram DMs. Ladies and gents…we thought we bought enough to sell for about 2 weeks we ended up selling out on everything we had by the 2nd day! The rush was so exciting! Mom and I took another trip and this time we went to Houston (6 hrs) for the ingredients and supplies. And once again… we thought we bought enough but we ended up selling out again! By the 4th trip we really stacked up. Every corner of our house is loaded with supplies and good luck getting around in our garage!
Late at night my sisters and I would promote Le Pho House by posting on social media and just sharing our love for our mom’s cooking to friends. We created a system where Amber would take charge of writing down orders, making cute notes (she has the prettiest hand writing) and packing up orders, Amy would help mom in kitchen, packing up orders and do deliveries in town, Ivan helps mom by carrying the heavy stuff, pick up orders and cooking rice, Pedro helps by investing and would support when he’s in town, our cousin Nhung would make 50+ spring rolls, I do the marketing, taking orders, pick up orders, out of town deliveries, and tracking our growth, Randy is still in Hawaii and should be coming home soon…. As for Mom, she’s superwoman, she does all the cooking and we would help if she let us. lol.
As the word got out about what we are doing we started getting more orders and decided to add chicken pho, then egg rolls to our menu. We plan to add more in the future but keep what we have the main dishes. Working together as a family some days are tough but overall it’s been so worth it. It feels very rewarding. Not only has it been a stress reliever for mom but it really has been such a blessing for us all and brought us closer as a family. Many people have been asking if we will have a physical brick and motor restaurant and trust me when we say we would love too!!! We plan to open up a restaurant in the near future mainly because our home space isn’t big enough and it would be great to see the reaction on people’s faces when they eat pho for the very first time! We will continue to serve and plan to make that dream to become a reality. Imagine having a nice patio for people to come and enjoy the full experience of pho?! We would have great conversations and create wonderful memories. I’m getting excited just thinking about it.
I’ll end it with this…We are so grateful! I’ve learned that with difficulties comes opportunities. Thank you everyone who have posted, tagged us, reposted, shared, ordered and enjoy what we have to offer. We wouldn’t have had this opportunity if it wasn’t for all of you. We read all the comments to mom and it makes her so happy. Thank you so much. Follow us on instagram @lephohouse and ‘like’ our facebook page if you haven’t already done so! Oh, what do you guys think about us creating a YouTube channel and a TikTok? Tell us what you think! We really appreciate you all. Stay safe and eat mo pho.
