‘The crime killed us’: Oakland’s Le Cheval restaurant closing after 38 years

Family-run institution has been a dining mainstay for locals, politicos

Le Cheval, a Vietnamese fine-dining institution in Oakland for 38 years, will close its doors at the end of the month.

According to Son Tran, business is down sharply at the family-run restaurant at Tenth and Clay streets, and it’s not due to a post-pandemic problem of too many local employees still working from home.

“The lack of office workers did not kill us,” Tran explained to KPIX. “The crime, the criminals, they killed us.”

He claims that the restaurant has been robbed, but the impact on customers has been far worse.

“Their car was broken into right in front of the restaurant.” And they’re furious. ‘Son, I love your restaurant,’ they said. I adore your cuisine. I adore your family, but I am unable to return to Oakland. “A $30 meal becomes something like $500.”

According to the Bay Area News Group archives, Le Cheval first opened on Jefferson Street in 1985. Son Tran explained that the family arrived in 1975 via airlift from Vietnam. My Ngoc Tran’s father worked for Bank of America in Saigon, so he was able to find work at the bank in the United States. He died four months after the family moved to Oakland. Tuyet Bui, his wife, was a single mother of seven children in a country whose language she barely understood. She supported her family by working two jobs: as a seamstress for the North Face outdoor clothing company and as an electronics assembler for Xerox.

Bui decided to open a restaurant after being laid off by Xerox. Son Tran was born in 1954, the Chinese zodiac year of the horse, so she named it Le Cheval.

The matriarch ruled the kitchen, which was then on Clay Street, and taught her five sons, two daughters, and grandchildren how to cook Vietnamese food. She left the company in 1997.

Oakland’s political and business elite have charted the city’s future while dining on shrimp rolls, plates of lemongrass chicken, and steaming bowls of soup over the years. When Jerry Brown was mayor of Oakland prior to his second term as governor, he made Le Cheval a regular stop.

Le Cheval briefly closed in 2013 due to a lease dispute, prompting Son Tran to declare “the end of an era.”

This time, the era comes to an end on Saturday, September 30.

1007 Clay St., Oakland, CA; www.lecheval.co