'Heartbreaking' fire destroys Khue's Kitchen days before opening, but Chef Eric Pham is 'moving forward'

Eric Pham gives a wistful laugh. When he gets off the phone, he's heading to his restaurant for the first time since a fire destroyed the building late Monday night. "We're gonna see if anything's left to salvage, I guess," he says.

The fire happened just weeks before the late-August opening of Khue's Kitchen, a restaurant Pham had run as a pop-up at Brava Bar until he found a brick-and-mortar home in St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood.

Despite the tragedy, the 24-year-old chef considers the circumstances lucky, as no one was hurt in the fire that will likely condemn the building at 799 University Ave. W, the former home of Ngon Bistro .

"We were there really late that night," Pham tells Bring Me The News . He was training staff before the team decided to go out for a late-night bite at eM Que Viet on Grand Avenue. They didn't think he'd join and pressured him to leave the restaurant. He had been putting long hours into the business, preparing for the opening. He stayed after they left to clean up, but had been convinced to join them.

"I get the call at midnight," he says. "By the time we got there, the building was completely destroyed. It didn't take long. Maybe an hour or two. You look away for... In the blink of an eye, it's gone."

Again, Pham, a third-generation Vietnamese chef, is able to see how much worse things could have been, a testament, he says, to having a family versed in the restaurant business. "I'm very glad that my team did ask me to come out because, had I been there, working and cleaning, and a fire broke out, I truly don't know if I could have left right away," Pham says, adding that his impulse would have been to grab a bucket.

Less than 48 hours since the fire, Pham says his dad has him getting back to work, even if it isn't the work he hoped to be doing.

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He's started a GoFundMe campaign to support his staff, who lost tools and other items in the fire. If he's able to support them, then he hopes the campaign could help him recoup a little of what he's lost, a project he's been saving for through work at other area kitchens, Khue's Kitchen pop-ups, and even money stowed away from high school graduation.

However, even before he was sifting insurance documents, his family was at his side.

Sitting on the curb at 2 a.m., watching firefighters break windows and fend off flames, he turned to his dad. "I said, 'Don't tell me the steps about insurance. Don't tell me the steps about the restaurant or anything. As my dad, as my father, tell me what I do next,'" he says. "He was like, 'You can grieve about it, but you have to move forward. You can't stop training. This is a tragedy, and it's awful, but you can't stop, because if you stop, you may never start back up.'"

Pham took that to heart. The investigation into the cause of the fire is still underway, so what will come from insurance is hazy, particularly because he leased the building from the former owner of Ngon Bistro.

But it's not as much the financial loss that is devastating, it's the lost opportunity to bring "a unique dining experience unlike any other restaurant" to the Twin Cities. "It's heartbreaking beyond anything we lost in the fire," Pham says. Even the location was an opportunity, "a space meant for a Vietnamese chef" with history and memory built into the kitchen and dining room.

"We were young, not a single person [on the team] outside of Gen Z. I loved every minute of it. You look at the restaurants around us, you look at every other restaurant that opens, it's not manned by ten kids," he says with pointed pride.

"Compared to other restaurants, we look like the Sandlot," Pham continues, referencing the underdog baseball movie from 1993. "We may not look the part, we may not be the part, but when we swing the bat, we hit bombs."

Pham isn't yet sure what comes next. There was no "plan B." He put everything into Khue's Kitchen.

Still, ideas are already percolating. People have reached out about pop-ups and offered other ideas to raise money. And he finds something restorative about the idea of getting back in the kitchen.

"I realized that I have been so focused on the behind-the-scenes part of the restaurant that I haven't even been cooking for people," he says. "It'd be really amazing just to forget about the licensing and the restaurant and the building, the taxes, the insurance, just forget all about it and just do what I want to do, just make food. Just cook for people."

Whatever comes next, Pham says he'll be cooking and is thankful for the support of his family. "I wouldn't have opened this restaurant, even attempted to do anything this grand without those key people. I come from a family of restaurateurs, but I also come from a family of businessmen," he says. "They understand. Granted, none of them had a major fire that destroyed everything, but they understand failure. They understand moving forward."

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