San Antonio just lost another restaurant, and it’s a cheekily-named Asian staple that’s been part of the food scene here for almost two decades.<\/p>\n
Suck It: The Restaurant, a mainstay of the Medical Center area, will close at the end of the year, the restaurant announced <\/a>on social media on Friday, September 11.<\/p>\n “Thank you San Antonio for an awesome 16 years. I started off as a hookah and bubble tea lounge near UTSA in 2010. I met so many amazing people and had a chance to be a part of your lives. Many of my customers that came in to study while smoking hookah or drinking bubble teas have since become doctors, nurses, teachers, dentists, chefs, cyber security, I.T., and I remember one kid that eventually became @eldereats<\/a>,” the post reads.<\/p>\n Chef-owner Vinh Hoang, presumably the author of the post, added that he’s done wedding bubble tea catering because the couple’s first date was the the\u00a0boba and hookah lounge, also pointing to graduations, baby showers and more that San Antonio has “allowed\u00a0me to be a part of.”<\/p>\n Suck It has had a few different iterations in San Antonio. Its origins are as a boba tea and hookah lounge that opened\u00a0near UTSA in 2010. In 2016,<\/a> Suck It: The Restaurant opened in the Medical Center area and kept the cheeky name. Then, Suck It Mixology came to St. Paul Square downtown<\/a> in 2022, with Suck It Asian Kitchen soon behind. In 2024 came another development \u2014 Suck It Asian Fusion & Boba<\/a> \u2014 in collaboration with Sari Sari Filipino Restaurant off Highway 151 near Alamo Ranch.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the post, Hoang pointed to what he called “a lot of ups and downs over the last 16 years with Suck It, mostly lots of ups.” The original hookah lounge closed in 2019 as he\u00a0focused on the other food and drink concepts. Google currently lists the St. Paul Square outposts (Suck It Asian Kitchen and Suck It Izakaya & Sushi) as permanently closed, and a strange saga recently unfolded with the Highway 151 location.\u00a0<\/p>\n