Cousins, once removed Owner revamps landmark deli with Vietnamese flair By: Ben Waldman Posted: 3:52 PM CDT Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023 Last Modified: 4:04 PM CDT Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 08/08/2023 (1013 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When a sign hanging outside a restaurant comes down, it’s fair to consider the possibility the business inside has seated its last customer.

So when the blue-and-white striped marquee above Cousins Deli was removed last fall, after the watering hole sat idle for the better part of three years, many passersby on Sherbrook Street near Wolseley Avenue made the same assumption: owner Yen Nguyen had given up.

Who could have blamed him?

When the pandemic began in the spring of 2020, Nguyen, the third owner in the 40-history of Cousins, submitted, like the rest of us, to the uncertainty of a COVID future. Within days, he closed up shop, determined instead to care for his parents — now 87 and 96.

“I didn’t want to live the rest of my days with the regret of getting them sick,” says Nguyen, who is impish and jubilant at 50. “I felt that the world was one bubble, and the three of us were an appendage. I could not have one foot in both worlds.”

So as the pandemic went on, Nguyen allowed Cousins, which he bought in 2000, to lay dormant. He considered leaving the restaurant business behind and becoming an esthetician, but he did not have the proper comportment for a career requiring such stillness. Without the restaurant, he “felt a profound sense of loneliness.”

Seeking a fresh start, he took down the sign and put up a new one proclaiming the impending opening of Yen’s Kitchen + Bar. In one quick swap of advertisement, he began forging a new future for one of West Broadway’s oldest restaurants, founded in the early 1980s by Stu Lavitt and his cousin Richard Steiman.

Lavitt opened Cousins as a New York-style deli and grocery shop after buying out the owner of Gibson’s Grocery, a shop that had served West Broadway since the 1950s. Along with his wife Ruth, Lavitt used Cousins as an outlet for his more outlandish sensibilities, hosting tarot readers and fortune tellers, with names like Magic Mike and Mme. LeFleur, not far from where they kept the knishes.

“We attracted a lot of weird people,” Ruth Lavitt says. “A lot of characters.”

Chief among them was Stu Lavitt himself. He was known to hand out toys like matchbox cars to grown adults as they came to nurse a cheap beer. He would throw a ball that would scream as it stopped bouncing. He hung rubber chickens from the ceiling. Rather than saying hello to customers as they walked in, Lavitt would quack. “I just liked quacking,” says Lavitt, now 80 and living with Ruth in Vancouver.

Artists were attracted to Cousins for its lived-in feel, and of course, its cheap prices. “We had all the musicians and photographers,” recalls Lavitt, grasping for their identities. “What’s his name with the hair? He came in.”

Soon, the artistic crowd Cousins catered to saw in Lavitt not just a character, but a character actor. In 1992, he was cast in Guy Maddin’s film Careful. In 1993, he acted in Taken for a Ride, directed by the Winnipeg Film Group’s Dirk Schwipper. He played a leading role in the 1995 WFG short film Gavin Frogboy.

But soon, the Lavitts grew tired of the strain of the business, so they sold in 1997 after a respectable 14 years at the helm.

The next owner stuck around for only three years, after which, a new era came knocking. Nguyen, who moved to Winnipeg in 1992 from near Ho Chi Minh City, bought Cousins, and was now proprietor of a Jewish delicatessen.

He kept the knishes on the menu, but made some changes to the space, removing the drop ceiling to reveal the original, 1950s pressed tin ceiling. He expanded the dining room into the space next door, formerly occupied by William’s Hairstyle Cottage. He put in comfortable nooks and playfully mismatched seating. “I wanted it to be a second living room,” he says.

Nguyen became known for his caring demeanour and rapport with his customers, plus his annual New Years’ Eve bash, coinciding with his birthday on Jan. 1. But when he had to deal with familial medical situations, Nguyen veered further from day-to-day operations.

And so when the pandemic began, the restaurant went dark.

“We were worried… Yen is such a lovely, warm person, but he just wasn’t visible.”–Ann La Touche, longtime customer

“We were worried,” says Ann La Touche, a longtime customer. “Yen is such a lovely, warm person, but he just wasn’t visible.”

Without the business to run, Nguyen says he lost his wits. He needed to get back in the kitchen, and to re-energize the restaurant. Nearly a year after the sign went up, Yen’s Kitchen + Bar finally opened late in June.

There aren’t many visible differences: the booths are all the same, as is the homey lighting and the disco ball shimmering in the distance. “We do now have Wi-Fi,” he says.

What has been updated is Nguyen’s eclectic and constantly shifting menu, which includes braised Catalan pork belly, gumbo, and Cousins mainstays like chicken korma and roti. Nguyen is also leaning into Vietnamese cuisine, adding banh mi and salad rolls. The most expensive item on the menu is the $15.95 chicken roti.

Since reopening, Nguyen says his loneliness has been replaced by overwhelming gratitude.

He was shocked to hear throughout the pandemic how many people missed visiting the restaurant, and has been floored by the support for his latest venture — a not-so-distant cousin to the business that lived there before.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com