Pho King Rapidos Opening Saigon Noodle Club by PKR in Edgewater

Pho King Rapidos is back! Its new concept, Saigon Noodle Club by PKR, will soon occupy a stall at Edgewater Public Market.

Building a food business — any business, really — is rarely a straight line. And no one knows that better than Pho King Rapidos. Husband-and-wife team Long Nguyen and Shauna Seaman started serving their Vietnamese comfort food out of a trailer during the pandemic. After rave reviews and earning a die-hard loyal fan base, they moved to an Avanti food stall in May 2023. Then came the shared-space concept Thuy by PKR at the Park Hill location, alongside Yuan Wonton and Sweets and Sourdough. That only lasted a few months before PKR withdrew from the concept to focus on the Avanti food stall. But in January, Avanti closed its first floor for renovations and PKR was homeless once again.

The couple started doing pop-ups, including a series at MAKfam. “I feel so extremely fortunate and so grateful that our friends in the industry extended themselves for us,” says Nguyen. There, the couple experimented with new Vietnamese-fusion dishes such as coconut braised pork belly carbonara, pho-spiced beef tortellini, braised beef in birria spices served on a bánh mì. And then Edgewater Public Market reached out.

PKR had spoken to the management team there three years ago, but all the leases then still had years left. So when the Mac Shack decided to leave, the Edgewater team called PKR and asked if they were still interested in the stall situated between Gladys and Arepas House. “We were doing a pop-up, so I was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys come to the pop-up and try our food?’ I remembered they tried a bit of everything and definitely had the pho and wings,” says Nguyen.

In a way, going back to Edgewater is a little full circle for PKR. Seaman and Nguyen initially parked their food truck at Joyride Brewing, and “it was such a great turnout every time we went there, so that excites us,” Nguyen says. “It’s tucked in the middle right between Denver, Lakewood, Wheat Ridge…so it’s a good opportunity to have a lot of exposure to many different types of people.”

Why not go back to a brick-and-mortar? “The economy,” Nguyen answers. They'd kept their eyes and ears open for potential spaces, but were never convinced any were a good fit; besides, they didn’t want to be locked into paying overhead and forced to compromise their cuisine or work-life balance to stay ahead of rent. “It’s like, I never wanted to do brunch on Saturday, Sundays and now I gotta open for lunch to try to make ends meet. Now I’m open for seven days a week, running fourteen services and having a ton of overhead,” he explains. “Opening up a food stall helps mitigate some of that risk.”
The new food stall will bear a new name: Saigon Noodle Club by PKR — a signal that customers should expect something a little different, both in terms of food and maturity. When Nguyen came up with the name Pho King Rapidos in 2017, he “hopped on Gmail and signed up for a free email account because I was afraid someone’s going to steal the name because it was like so clever,” he recalls, then laughs. “And you know, nobody cares.” (If you haven’t caught the joke yet, just say the name out loud: “Pho King Rapidos, Pho King Rapidos, phoking rapidos, fucking rapidos.” Yep, you’ve got it.)

“We’ve had to fight with people considering our name to be crass,” says Nguyen, adding that for on-air stories, the interviewer would often be hesitant to say the business name out loud. They’re still proud of the name, he adds, but “we aren’t going to serve the same menu we did at Avanti or the food truck, so the name change, the evolution, would help with that.”

At Edgewater, the focus will be on fun, comforting, affordable, fresh noodle bowls with fusion influences. “Sometimes Shauna and I, if it’s like an indulgent night where we stay in and then get to order Chinese takeout…coming home and just, we just love eating lo mein out of to-go boxes, so we were like, ‘Let’s do noodle bowls, but let’s do our takes on them,’” he explains.

Expect the couple’s take on traditional Vietnamese noodle bowls with grilled meats, rice noodles, herbs and pickled vegetables. But also expect stir-fried noodles, Italian-pasta fusion, and longtime favorites like the wings with sticky icky sauce. They’re even considering bringing back cult favorites like the tomato noodles inspired by a recipe of Nguyen’s mom. “She would core out a tomato, stuff it with a pork filling and then braise it with a tomato sauce,” he recalls.They served it with a thick egg noodle at the Avanti stall but removed it from the menu when it didn't sell. In Park Hill, though, the dish did extremely well, and even today, many of their customers ask for it.

But when you have a history, you’ve developed a portfolio of top-hitters, and as much as Seaman and Nguyen want to push themselves to do a different menu, there’s definitely an internal struggle over eliminating some popular PKR items. For example, are they really going to leave their chicken-over-rice dish off the menu? That's the dish that PKR has been known for since the food-truck days. “We’ve carried it for the last four years, and I don’t know how to not have it on the menu, but I don’t know how it could flow," muses Nguyen, thinking of the noodle bowls.

Nguyen will have a while to decide: The Edgewater Public Market stall isn’t scheduled to open until early summer. In the meantime, they’ll start testing recipes; in about two weeks, they'll begin hiring and training new staff. “If you were interviewing me [two years ago], I would have tried to open in two weeks. You know, I’d just slap it together and we’ll figure it out as we go,” laughs Nguyen. Now they’re taking a more deliberate approach — especially since a stall allows far fewer opportunities for customer interaction. “The staff having the menu knowledge and understanding and answering questions when we are a Vietnamese-ish stall and people are not familiar with some of the ingredients or the flavors or dishes," he explains. "It’s important that our team’s able to articulate those things to the guest.”

On top of that, there’s the usual logistics prep of getting the POS set up and applying for Edgewater permits and licenses. This won’t be the final step in PKR’s journey; the dream is ultimately their own space with a liquor license that they can fully control. But until then, loyal fans are excited to know that they can again taste PKR's bomb-ass food very, very soon.