A family affair
Owners Pat and Sara Lee both grew up in the service industry. Sara’s parents owned a restaurant, and Pat, born in Vietnam, is the son of Tom and Thang Lee, who opened the Asian grocery store MT Supermarket in North Austin in 1983.
“He was always around ingredients, and even just going to other restaurants, because he would help with deliveries and stuff,” Sara said. “And that's where he found his love and realized the importance of good ingredients when creating the dishes. He's super particular.”
Together, the couple have opened and run a number of Austin-area restaurants over the last 18 years. Lee’s Kitchen is their newest venture, opening in April 2023. Here, Pat created a menu of Vietnamese dishes he prepared growing up, or takes traditional dishes and puts his own spin on it.
“We've done several different restaurants and concepts, and the reason Lee's that came about [was] our first few restaurants were all very casual dining, and then we moved to the Westlake area to raise our family,” Sara said. “We thought all of our restaurants are in other parts of town other than Westlake, and there's really a void for Asian cuisine. So we made it into a goal to open one in Westlake so that we could better serve our community.”
Just as Pat and Sara were involved with their parent’s businesses, their three children are a part of Lee’s Kitchen. Their son Donovan helps with the restaurant’s operations and photography, as well as bartends, and their daughter Brooklyn created the restaurant logo and works as a hostess. Their youngest son Dominic even helps with “little things here and there.”
“From the start of the idea, we wanted our kids to be super involved in it,” Sara said. “So, [it’s a] very, very mom-and-pop business.”
What’s special about it?
While their menu features classics such as pho, egg rolls, vermicelli bowls and a variety of meat, seafood, vegetable, rice and noodle dishes, Lee’s Kitchen serves Vietnamese-style Hainan chicken rice—a rarity among Asian restaurants in the area.
“It comes down to the sauces that go with it. Ours is a ginger scallion sauce,” Sara said. “It's a pretty labor-intensive dish. It's a poached chicken, and it has a mild sauce on it, but it's not marinated. The sauces that come on the side that you dip it with are what really bring the flavor. Then the stock as a result of poaching the chicken is used to cook the rice.It's very aromatic [and] flavorful. ... You don't find it at very many restaurants.”
The restaurant also recently started serving their traditional Vietnamese dishes for brunch on Saturdays and Sundays.
- 701 S Capital of Texas Hwy, Ste. G700, Austin
- www.leeskitchenatx.com
