‘I Just Wanted To Cry, But In A Good Way’: Chef Rachel Miller On The Pandemic Success Of Lynn’s Nightshade Noodle Bar

Even for restaurateur Rachel Miller, it can be hard to nail down exactly what it is they offer at her wildly successful Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn.

“I even have a hard time describing it sometimes,” she joked during a Tuesday interview on GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “Ultimately, I love Vietnamese food, and my background is in French cooking, and there’s so much history and so much to learn there and so many rabbit holes to fall in. ... We just make really cool food for really cool clientele.”

Miller Zoomed into the show as part of Boston Public Radio’s ongoing series about restaurants navigating their way through the COVID-19 pandemic. Though her Vietnamese-fusion spot had the misfortune of opening just months before March of 2020, Miller said careful planning allowed them to succeed where other restaurants couldn’t, tripling their business in COVID-19’s wake.

“It was wild,” she told hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan. “It was indescribable. It was so busy I just wanted to cry, but in a good way.”

Miller’s success was a long time in the making. She spent much of her early years bouncing around various pockets of the South, where the Virginia native said she had difficulty getting taken seriously in the restaurant industry as a queer, Jewish woman sporting tattoos and a mohawk.

Once she made her way north, though, she said she found a community that was more welcoming to her left-of-center approach. After years spent working in butcheries, restaurants and her own pop-up shops, she eventually found a home for Nightshade on Exchange Steet in downtown Lynn.

Now, with the pandemic evolving into its bizarre vaccine-rollout era, Miller’s latest hurdle has been her decision to require proof of vaccination for customers dining indoors. The move came shortly after one of her close associates tested positive for the delta variant. Online criticism, she explained, came just as swiftly.

“We put out the mandate, [and] had a 24-hour cycle of getting discrimination claims and people calling me a Nazi,” she recalled. “It was super weird, but it got to a point where I just couldn’t read it anymore.

“The solidarity piece was the biggest one for me,” she said, of the factors influencing her mandate. “Because people have been unwilling to get vaccinated and wear masks and participate in us moving through the [pandemic], my industry has just been crumbling. So for us to be sitting here and hospitable, and [adopt] this ‘customer is always right’ attitude, which I do not have... no thanks, you know?”

Making her own decision in lieu of a statewide order, she said, was an uncomfortable one.

“Honestly, we’re not scientists, and we’ve been put in this really uncomfortable political arena,” she admitted. “Ultimately... people are still dying. This is still terrible. The delta variant is taking over, and regardless of whatever anybody wants to fight about on Facebook, we don’t feel safe.”

But in the weeks after her mandate went into effect, Miller said community support has outweighed the negativity brought by online trolls.

And things have only gotten busier.

“We’ve gotten so much support from it,” she said. “And getting supportive emails from our clientele in the medical field is really what [affirmed]” the choice, she added.

“From a moral perspective, it felt really nice to be supported by people that know so much more than us about this,” Miller said. “And that’s ultimately why I’m going to keep it.”