A Thai restaurant regularly ranked as one of the Birmingham area’s best is temporarily closing due to a family emergency.

Blue Pacific at Hoover Food Mart notified patrons Sunday afternoon via Facebook post that it would close this week.

“We’ve had a family emergency in Thailand that requires my parents to travel back,” said the post. “We are closing the restaurant starting Wednesday August 9th and we will post an update to when we plan to open back up. We are so sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused and we appreciate everyone’s understanding.”

It wasn’t clear which family member wrote the post. The mini-mart and restaurant was opened in 2015 by Sam Aroon, who operated it with his wife, Prachit, and her brother, Dominic.

The format was unusual: When word-of-mouth began to spread soon after its opening, a reviewer entered to find “the convenience store to the left, a small industrial kitchen in front of us, and three small tables to our right.” Aroon later added more tables to meet rapidly growing demand.

Blue Pacific tends to feature in “Best Thai restaurant” rankings for the Birmingham area, including recommendations published by Yelp.com and soul-grown.com.

The restaurant’s Facebook post said that a reopening date hadn’t yet been set, but an announcement should come “in the next few weeks.”

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