Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
A lion dance at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning. That is how you announce you are back.
July 3, 2026, at 630 S. Federal Blvd., the drums went off and the lions did their thing on the sidewalk, and then the doors opened for brunch. The place is called Rễ Tre. And if you have driven this stretch of Federal for any length of time, you know exactly what building this is.
This is the old New Saigon.
Here is the part people miss. That building has been in one family since 1987. That is the year Thai Nguyen and Ha Pham bought the space and opened New Saigon, which went on to become one of Denver's first Vietnamese restaurants and, honestly, the front door to Vietnamese food for a whole generation of locals. If you ate pho for the first time in Denver in the 90s or the 2000s, there is a decent chance it happened right here.
New Saigon closed in February 2024. The building sat empty after that. Just dark windows on a busy corner.
And now it is open again, run by the daughters who grew up inside it. An, Thao and Thoa Nguyen. These are not new owners who bought a legacy space and slapped a concept on it. Thao worked the front of house and the registers. Thoa and their sister Thu ran the boba drinks and the to-go orders. They know where every plate goes because they carried them as kids.
So the corner has stayed in the same Vietnamese-American family for almost 40 years now. Same blood, new chapter.
You would think the easy move is to reopen with the old name. Instant recognition. Everybody already knows it.
They did not do that. On purpose.
Rễ Tre means the roots of a bamboo tree. The sisters picked it to signal going back to their roots, but they deliberately left the New Saigon name alone. And here is the honest reason. They did not want to spend every day trying to replicate their parents' restaurant and their parents' expectations. That is a heavy thing to reopen under. So they gave the place its own name and its own identity, while keeping the family recipes at the center.
Roots, but their own tree. If you ask me, that is the smart play.
You cannot tell this story without the part that came before the restaurant.
Thai and Ha fled Vietnam by boat after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Thao was a baby then. Her father carried her onto a fishing boat crammed with somewhere between 100 and 150 people. They drifted three days through a storm before somebody rescued them.
Think about that for a second. A baby on a boat in a storm with 150 strangers. That baby grew up to run the registers at the family restaurant on Federal, and now she is one of three sisters reopening the same building under a new name.
That is not a marketing story. That is just what happened.
Rễ Tre is not a museum piece. It is a modern Vietnamese restaurant that takes the family recipes and puts a twist on them.
There is a real bar program with a Vietnamese lean. The Pandan After Dark is coconut and rum with pandan leaf. The Moonlight on Mekong is a kumquat Moscow Mule. Brunch pulls in French influences, which tracks if you know anything about Vietnamese food history. And An's signature dish, bò lúc lắc, the shaking beef, is on the menu. That alone is worth the drive.
Here is what most people do not realize. Rễ Tre is not some first swing. This family is all over the map already.
An owns Dân Dã at 9945 E. Colfax Ave. in Aurora, along with Thao. Thoa runs the Bánh & Butter Bakery Café right next door to it. And sister Thu oversees New Saigon Bakery & Deli on South Federal. So the name did not fully disappear. It lives on down the street.
Four sisters. Multiple concepts. One family that keeps building on the same corner of the city.
Denver made the one-mile stretch of Federal between Alameda and Mississippi the official Little Saigon Business District back in 2014. That district exists because Vietnamese refugees settled here after 1975 and built businesses one storefront at a time. Restaurants, bakeries, jewelry shops, groceries.
The sisters are open about what they are hoping for. They want Rễ Tre to be a spark. One anchor corner coming back to life, and then maybe the rest of the district follows.
Real estate wise, that matters more than people think. A vacant landmark building on a major corner drags a whole block down. A packed dining room with a lion dance out front does the opposite. It tells every other operator on the street that Federal is worth the investment.
So if you have not been down to this part of Federal lately, this is your reason. Order the shaking beef, get a Moonlight on Mekong, and know that the corner you are sitting on has been in the same family since 1987. Buckle up. This one is a real Radically Colorado adventure.