HaiSous Vietnamese Kitchen

Thai Dang and Danielle Dang came out of Embeya to open HaiSous on Carpenter Street in Pilsen, with a stated intention of preserving heritage through food rather than fusing it - a distinction Time Out picked up on when it reviewed the restaurant, calling the result stunning and noting how rarely authentic Vietnamese cooking of this kind appeared south of Montrose Avenue. The menu is organized into salads listed as for fun, drinking food, house specialties, vegetarian dishes and pickled things, with crispy wings in caramelized fish sauce and an octopus salad with eggplant confit among the signatures, and family-style tasting menus for tables that want to be guided.

The drinks program is smaller than the food, but the non-alcoholic part of it is named and fixed rather than left to the server's discretion. An Alcohol-Free Spritz is listed at $10 with four flavors to choose from - blood orange and citrus, prickly pear and mint, blueberry Thai basil, and mango lime - which gives a non-drinker a real choice at the point of ordering instead of a single default. The rest of the non-alcoholic block covers Fever Tree ginger beer at $5, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite and ginger ale at $4, and sparkling water. Two items in that same block come from Marz Community Brewing in Bridgeport and contain cannabinoids: a Kush Party at 10mg THC for $14 and a cherry basil CBD at $10. They are clearly labeled on the restaurant's own menu, but they sit under the same heading as the alcohol-free spritzes, so anyone in recovery or otherwise avoiding psychoactive drinks should read the line rather than the heading. Strength here is a genuine three - a real, named, permanent offering, not a destination zero-proof bar. Time Out also noted that guests can order one of the tasting menus served family-style, which is the setting where a named, priced alcohol-free option matters most, because the whole table commits to a format together and a non-drinker who has to improvise ends up outside it. The restaurant runs Wednesday through Sunday, with a Sunday daytime service from 10am.