After spending nearly a decade in the kitchen at Tamarind Tree in Little Saigon, Anh Le became a business owner at age 58. It wasn’t something she would have envisioned when Le, her husband, Quy, and their young sons fled Vietnam by boat in 1989. Or during the six subsequent years the family spent at a refugee camp in Hong Kong before they eventually came to the United States.

But in April 2022, Anh and her sons, Vinny and Trung, opened Lotus Pond at North 128th Street and Aurora Avenue North. It’s an inhospitable corner, surrounded by used car dealerships and traffic that races by, well above the posted speed limits.

“We didn’t pick and choose the location,” says Trung. A friend in Anh’s close-knit Vietnamese restaurant community tipped them off when the space, formerly Pho Country House, became available. Trung and Vinny helped overhaul the 1953 building and open the business with their mom. It only seemed fair after she stepped out of the Tamarind Tree kitchen at the onset of the pandemic to help with her young grandkids.

Today, Lotus Pond’s dining room serves dishes Anh has cooked for years, but now she gets to apply her own touches. She uses thicker noodles in her pho, both for the chewy texture, and because they don’t soak up broth as fast as thinner ones. Vietnamese diners come for regional specialties like the noodle soup with bamboo shoots and chopped duck. The crab noodle soup hails from her husband Quy Le’s hometown of Haiphong; his sister sends kilos of wide banh da noodles traditionally used for this recipe.

Vinny runs the front of house, despite having zero restaurant experience before this. Trung works full-time as an engineer, but spends weekends in the kitchen and managing financials. He, at least, worked as a prep cook and server in college. Even Quy pitches in with prep and dishes. “We wanted this thing to be successful,” says Trung. “We can’t do it ourselves, so we gotta do it as a family.”

Few people consider the northern stretch of Aurora Avenue a destination-dining district. Fast-food marquees might dominate the car-centered landscape, but a mosaic of locally owned restaurants—and vibrant, excellent food—occupies its strip malls and aging storefronts. Stick to the slow lane and you might see Hae-Nam Kalbi and Calamari, where groups order bossam platters and bubbling hot pots. Or Taqueria el Sabor, with its menu of antojitos and caldo de res. The building’s silhouette gives it away as a former Taco Bell.

Like the Le family, the folks who run these spots are often first-time business owners and frequently immigrants. And like the Les, it’s often economics prompting them to sign leases along Aurora.

Affordable rent is how Pop Pop Thai Street Food landed in a tidy complex on Aurora in the Haller Lake neighborhood. The restaurant is hidden in the corner of the massive parking lot that serves LA Fitness, Asian Family Market, and Hobby Lobby. Owner Ken Opilun and his former partners opened in 2014, adapting their moms’ Thai home recipes for people who prefer the cuisine’s inherent bold flavor over the sweeter American iterations. “I know it’s not the best location we could have,” he says of their tiny parking lot island. “The pricing fit our business plan.”

Plenty of restaurants along Aurora, Opilun observes, “just run as is.” They’ve been in stasis for decades. But ambitious first-time owners can use this corridor as a proving ground before expanding elsewhere. Pho Than Brothers started here in 1996 and now spans seven locations; the owners of Hangry Panda, both natives of China’s Fujian province, recently purchased Kedai Makan, one of the best-loved restaurants on Capitol Hill.

Opilun graduated from nearby Ingraham High School; he settled into this location knowing that a community pulses just beyond the strip malls. LA Fitness members pick up phad thai after a workout. A PetSmart employee stops in for lunch several times a week. Families, officemates, and Ingraham teachers fill the tables and fill up on khao soi and kao mun gai.

Trung Le, also an Ingraham grad, sees Lotus Pond building is own base of regulars. “I didn’t realize how owning a business can start a sense of community,” he says. His mom knew all along.