A Delicious Family Business
Everyone who walks in the door to Hai Ky Mi Gia looks around with a sense of familiarity. Amy Han, who has worked at the restaurant for 30 years, greets the customers, most of whose orders she already knows.
Amy runs the restaurant with her two sisters-in-law, Linh and Randi. When I asked Amy if she is the owner, she shrugged and said “It’s a family business. There is no owner. I do my part, she does her part.”
All of them, the women told me, are from Vietnam. “We are boat people.” After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Linh and Randi’s family first fled to Malaysia, and then, sponsored by a Church group in North Dakota, found themselves in a tiny city called Neche, with a population of 500. Their father, Tuan Hua, ran the only cafe. “That was our income,” said Linh. “We were self-sufficient.”
In 1982, the family moved to LA to help their relatives open a restaurant there. “My father had the know-how,” said Linh. The two families eventually split – the relatives now own Vien Huong in Oakland – and Tuan opened Hai Ky Mi Gia in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in 1987.
The family joined the thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees who had filled the Tenderloin with culture, children, and Asian restaurants.
“This is like a Vietnam town,” said Amy, who married into the family in 1996 and has worked at the restaurant ever since.
Amy and her sisters-in-law eat lunch at Hai Ky every day. “Today rice noodles, tomorrow egg noodles, tomorrow a combination of the two.” The menu is the same as it was in 1987, when the restaurant opened.
Many of Hai Ky’s regulars are now scattered around the Bay Area, but they come to the Tenderloin for the noodles. The Hua family is ethnically Chinese, so “this is Chinese flavor.” Tourists from Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam also come. “We’re well known, ok, we’re famous,” said Amy.
When I asked if they have any best friends out of the many people they’ve come to know through the restaurant and neighborhood, Amy shook her head. “Just family,” she said. Tuan Hua and his wife still live above the restaurant, though they don’t work there anymore.
I asked about Amy’s favorite memory at the restaurant. She was amused. “It’s everyday! Every day is the same.”
The business is still not as flourishing as it was before Covid, but Amy is optimistic that things will improve. “We hope so. That’s what the mayor is doing, right?”
