--- title: "D.C.-area Vietnamese chain Roll Play plans to expand" url: https://burnaze.com/article/8d14af86-be38-4fb7-977f-2125bbb43c1c source: "Nation's Restaurant News" original_url: https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/d-c-area-vietnamese-chain-roll-play-plans-to-expand author: "Bret Thorn" category: "Restaurants" industry: "Restaurants" topics: ["Development & multi-unit"] published: 2026-05-12T21:19:38.000Z modified: 2026-10-31T13:18:41.897Z image: https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/bltea7aee2fca050a19/bltf45d44eccbd35ac5/6a039b89a7ab03d65c34e729/roll-play-bowls.jpeg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale --- # D.C.-area Vietnamese chain Roll Play plans to expand **TL;DR:** Happy Endings Hospitality plans to expand its customizable Vietnamese brand Roll Play, which currently has three locations in Northern Virginia. The company aims to grow Roll Play into a national brand, with each location grossing around $5 million per year. *By Bret Thorn, originally published in Nation's Restaurant News on 2026-05-12. [Read the original](https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/d-c-area-vietnamese-chain-roll-play-plans-to-expand).* ## Story Happy Endings Hospitality has a lot of fun playing with the names of its restaurants. The group started in 2012 with Chasin’ Tails, serving Cajun seafood boils in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Falls Church, Va., and now it also operates boba shop Teas’n You, Hawaiian restaurant Lei’d Island Kitchen, and its growth vehicle, Roll Play, serving Vietnamese spring rolls, summer rolls, pho, rice and noodles bowls, and bánh mì sandwiches. They also operate upscale Vietnamese restaurant Nue, which is the French word for nude, and Ǎn, a health-forward Asian bowl concept that’s also the Vietnamese command to eat. Co-founder and CEO Tuyet Nhi Le plays down the double-entendres. She said of the company’s name, Happy Endings, “It’s about making sure that every guest that walks into your establishment leaves happy, no matter what mood they started with.” The name for Chasin’ Tails comes from one of her business partner’s cousins in Louisiana. “It’s a saying in the South (related to crawfish): ‘Suck that head, pinch that tail,’” she said, not denying that there’s dual meaning there, too. As for Roll Play, since it’s all customizable, “You get to make your own wraps, so you get to play,” Le said. Each of the concepts is a single location, except for Roll Play which has three locations in the Northern Virginia communities of Tysons Corner, Falls Church, and Rosslyn. And each one grosses around $5 million per year. That area has a lot of great Vietnamese food, particularly at Eden Center in Falls Church, but Le said she felt like the cuisine, as delicious as it is, wasn’t accessible to the uninitiated. Le and her partners, all family and friends, opened the first location of Roll Play near the Tysons Corner Mall, but the 1,500-square-foot space was too narrow for the Chipotle-style scoop-and-serve model they were hoping for. So instead they installed kiosks, which she said were fairly unusual at the time, in 2015, and assembled the food to order. By happy coincidence, it turned out that the kiosks proved to be helpful in explaining the food. “Because we had a digital screen, they could see what different ingredients go into the food — what’s cilantro? What’s Thai basil?” she said. And the menu was simple. “We just had the staples that we love: pho bánh mi, vermicelli noodles, fried egg rolls and fresh rice paper rolls.” That resonated with the Tysons Corner lunch crowd who wanted food that was quick and tasty. They were busy from day one, but that proved to be challenging, too: Pho broth takes at least 24 hours to cook. If you run out, you can’t just whip up another batch. “We didn’t think pho would be that popular, but it was,” Le said. The pickled carrot and daikon for bánh mì also takes a day to marinate, she said. “Even just rolling enough egg rolls by hand to meet the demand was hard,” she said. “We’ve had to figure out a lot over the past 10 years.” And the menu has evolved. They tried breakfast for a while, but that didn’t work. “We found out that when it comes to breakfast, people like the traditional breakfast — they love bagels,” not Vietnamese food. But two of the restaurants open at 9 a.m., and close at 1 a.m., and the Rosslyn location, directly across from D.C., is open 24 hours a day. The Falls Church location is now getting ready to move to allow for more seating, something their guests were interested in. “I guess maybe people in this area want to move away from eating out of paper cups and bowls,” she said. “They want fast, but they also want the nice bowls and utensils to eat out of, too. We're trying to meet both demands.” That said, all of the restaurants also do a lot of delivery. “I think having the different dayparts allows for different groups of people — and more revenue, essentially,” she said. The menu itself has also evolved, moving from simply promoting Vietnamese food — even true of Chasin’ Tails since crawfish boils are popular among the Vietnamese in Cajun country, too — to also promoting more healthful eating. That’s especially true at Ǎn, which opened last year, but at Roll Play, too, the meat is now locally sourced, with grass-finished beef and chicken raised without antibiotics. Roll Play eliminated seed oils two years ago, cooking in avocado oil and frying with Zero Acre Farms’ fera fruit oil. “So we try our best to source the best ingredients, as much as possible, but of course we have to consider the price point for guests and not make it too expensive where they can’t afford it,” Le said. Menu items start at around $15, with premium items like oxtail pho in the $20-$23 range. The average per-person check is around $20 to $25, as many customers who order less expensive entrées add Vietnamese coffee, spring rolls, or other add-ons. Although concrete plans aren’t yet in place for a fourth location, Le said they definitely plan to expand. “We want to grow to as many locations as possible in the area, and then hopefully we’ll be a national brand one day.” ## Entities - unit expansion (topic) - QSR (sector) - Nation's Restaurant News (publication) - Northern Virginia (location) - Bret Thorn (person) - customizable menu (topic) - vietnamese cuisine (topic) - Roll Play (company) - Happy Endings Hospitality (company) - Tuyet Nhi Le (person) - Chasin' Tails (company) - Teas'n You (company) --- Originally reported by Bret Thorn, Nation's Restaurant News (https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/d-c-area-vietnamese-chain-roll-play-plans-to-expand). Summarized by Burnaze (https://burnaze.com/article/8d14af86-be38-4fb7-977f-2125bbb43c1c).