Lettuce Entertain You Opens a Restaurant Exploring Southeast Asia in River North with Thai Dang of HaiSous

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The push to open a restaurant is typically stressful, burdened with last-minute menu tweaks, incorrect furniture orders, inspection delays, and sleepless nights as opening day approaches. 

Not for Thai Dang.

“I slept really well,”  he said on Tuesday, October 14, the day Crying Tiger, his new Southeast Asian restaurant at 51 W. Hubbard St. in River North, opened. “I slept for more than eight hours.”  

That’s not just because the James Beard-nominated Dang already runs an acclaimed restaurant, Pilsen’s HaiSous Vietnamese Kitchen. It’s thanks, he said, to his partnership in the venture with the large and successful group Lettuce Entertain You, which has been operating restaurants for longer than he’s been alive. 

The idea for Crying Tiger came from Lettuce’s Amarit Dulyapaibul, who is a managing partner of some of the group’s more youthful restaurants: Ramen-san and Sushi-san, Three Dots and a Dash, the new-this-year Gus’ Sip & Dip. Dulyapaibul is Thai and comes from a restaurant family; he wanted to open a spot celebrating his heritage and Southeast Asia writ large, and approached Dang, who had collaborated with Ramen-san and consulted for Lettuce. (Dang first came to Chicago to cook at Lettuce’s bygone L2O.) HaiSous is the favorite Chicago restaurant of Dulyapaibul’s wife.

Dang brings some of the Vietnamese cooking he grew up with and has highlighted at HaiSous to Crying Tiger, with dishes like a cold cabbage and chicken salad (goi ga) and charred betel leaf-wrapped beef (bo la lot) on the menu. But it ranges as far afield as the Philippines and Hong Kong, reflecting the travels of Dang and Dulyapaibul together as well as their staff’s backgrounds.

“I have a chef that’s from the Philippines. I have a chef that’s half-Lao and I think a quarter Cambodian. I have a chef that is Vietnamese American, born here,” Dang said. “We all borrow techniques from each other and ingredients, so it seems like there’s a lot of commonality in all of our cuisines,” he adds. 

For instance, the Vietnamese dipping sauce nuoc cham is similar to Thai nam jim or Lao jeow, and various varieties can be found throughout the Crying Tiger menu. A twist on the Hong Kong dish prawn toast stuffs the prawn into the Chinese donut youtiao, with herby nam jim to soak into the deep-fried crags. A whole grilled branzino comes with lemongrass nuoc cham. 

Then there’s curry, which exists everywhere from India to Japan with wide variations in each region between. Crying Tiger is pounding its own curry pastes fresh for four Thai versions, including luxed-up noodle khao soi with wagyu short rib and confit duck in a peanutty panang curry.

Thai dishes are most represented on the menu – there’s even a pad thai, in a clay pot with lobster – but there are also detours into Laos (a crispy mussel omelet), Myanmar (dried chili and cumin lamb that also recalls Northwestern Chinese food), and Malaysia (the flatbread roti is grilled as a side). 

Desserts are by Lettuce pastry chef and Netflix's School of Chocolate winner Juan Gutierrez, with a signature Thai banana-flavored recipe served in the shape of a tiger face. “It’s the coolest thing,” Dang said, sounding like a kid with a sundae.

Despite Crying Tiger’s location in clubby, touristed River North as an outpost of a corporate restaurant group that mostly focuses on American and European food, Dang said that the restaurant is not pandering or dumbing anything down – the only gestures towards “accessibility,” he said, are writing the names of dishes in English and organizing the menu in a familiar way.

Even the drink menu – by the respected Kevin Beary of the neighboring Gus’ Sip & Dip and Three Dots and a Dash – is intensely Southeast Asian. There’s freshly made sugarcane juice, pickled plum soda, coconut water with tea served in a coconut, and, of course, Vietnamese iced coffee and Thai iced tea. Many of those same flavors also show up in the alcoholic cocktails: Thai tea milk punch, a freezer martini incorporating lemongrass and Thai herbs. (A cocktail bar will open later this year in the basement, with a theme to be announced.) The wine program was curated by Lettuce’s Richard Hanauer, with light and bright wines to complement the herbal, zingy food.

Dang enthused about relying on Lettuce’s partners for the beverage program, allowing him to focus on the food. “I have a team of people that are around to help me: illustrators to help me with the menu, logos… I have a marketing team, I have a PR team,” he said. “I cannot explain to you what an amazing feeling it has been to see an operation that someone created 55 years ago.”

When his mom’s cousins, who built the tables and chairs for HaiSous in Vietnam, lost a client for a big shipment of chairs, Dang wondered if he could use them for Crying Tiger, and his Lettuce partners agreed to buy it. He and Dulyapaibul wanted to reference the accordioning scissor security gates they remember from establishments around Southeast Asia, and found that the company that originated them still exists in Chicago; they incorporated them into the design. 

“Honestly, it’s been the most amazing journey of my life,” Dang said. “I’m getting goosebumps, because people dream of these moments.”