After Hurricane Helene took everything, a Fayetteville restaurant’s new owners are rebuilding one dish at a time.
For Lam Mai, 42, and his wife, Chanel Mai, 45, the storm that struck North Carolina in September 2024 took everything: their home, their car and their restaurant business, according to the new owners of Saigon Bistro at 1040 Bragg Blvd. Lam Mai said that at the time, they owned a Vietnamese restaurant called Cam Ranh Bay in Banner Elk near Grandfather Mountain, a business into which they had poured three years of hard work.
Without flood insurance, he said, they had no safety net. The couple returned to Las Vegas for a time, where Le Cordon Bleu graduate Mai said he had previously worked as a chef under Bobby Flay, to figure out their next steps. That’s when, he said, they heard about a small restaurant for sale in Fayetteville…