Lee's Kitchen + Cocktails has been serving traditional Vietnamese dishes, including the highly popular pho and Hainanese chicken rice, to the Westlake community for the past year.
Family issues
Owners Pat and Sara Lee both grew up in the service industry: Sara's parents owned restaurants, and Vietnam-born Pat is the son of Tom and Thanh Lee, who opened MT Supermarket, an Asian grocery store in North Austin in 1983.
“My father was always around ingredients and even went to other restaurants to help with deliveries and things like that,” Lee said. “That's where he discovered his love for cooking and the importance of good ingredients when cooking. He's a very particular person.”
The couple have opened and operated numerous restaurants together in the Austin area over the past 18 years, with Lee's Kitchen being their newest, opening in April 2023. Here, Pat will be creating a menu of Vietnamese dishes he made as a child, as well as putting his own unique spin on traditional dishes.
“We've done a few different restaurants and concepts, but Lee's was born because [was] “Our first few restaurants were all very casual, but then we moved to the Westlake area to raise our family,” Sarah says. “All of our restaurants were outside of Westlake, and we felt there was a real gap for Asian food, so we made it our goal to open one in Westlake so we could better serve the community.”
Just as Pat and Sarah were involved in their parents' business, their three children are also part of Lee's Kitchen: Their son Donovan helps run the restaurant, takes photos, and bartends, their daughter Brooklyn created the restaurant's logo and works as a hostess, and their youngest, Dominique, helps out with “the little things.”
“From the very beginning, we knew we wanted kids to be a big part of this project,” Sarah says. “So [it’s a] It's truly a family-run business.”
What's special?
The menu features classics like pho, egg rolls, and glass noodle bowls, as well as a variety of meat, seafood, vegetable, rice, and noodle dishes, but Lee's Kitchen also serves a Vietnamese-style Hainanese chicken rice, a rarity among Asian restaurants in the area.
“It all comes down to the sauce that goes with it. Ours is a ginger-scallion sauce,” Sarah says. “It's a pretty labor-intensive dish. It's boiled chicken with a mild sauce, but it's not marinated. The dipping sauce is what really brings out the flavor. Then we cook the rice in the broth that the chicken was boiled in, so it's really fragrant.” [and] It's full of flavor. … You don't find that in too many restaurants.”
The restaurant also recently began serving traditional Vietnamese dishes for brunch on Saturdays and Sundays.
