Photo by Davin Tarr

Food writers’ heads turned the other day when Toki Underground, the madly popular ramen house on H Street NE, announced it would not open for Valentine’s Day following the death of one of the restaurant’s staff. Also announced was the postponement of a pop-up Vietnamese restaurant, “Pho U,” at Montserrat House on Ninth Street NW.

Today, on TBD, Kim Chi Ha writes that it was Toki chef Thang Le who passed away suddenly. Le, along with Marvin toque James Claudio, was the driving force behind “Pho U.” Ha remembers Le not as a close friend, but a good acquaintance with whom she’d struck up a good dialogue:

Le had passion, and he was loved. I’d heard a lot about him, through mutual friends, before actually meeting him. They always referred to him as “du ma” — a Vietnamese insult that can also be a term of endearment — so when we finally met, I had to ask Le to remind me of his real name. (They’d given him that name over a decade ago, when he was an aspiring DJ, and it stuck.) The other night, some of those friends and I took a shot of Jameson in his honor. At 32, Thang Le left too soon.