A food fan: Chef and author Luke Nguyen in his Sydney restauant, Red Lantern.
JOHN DONEGAN / 1826 MEDIA
Luke Nguyen’s earliest experiences with food weren’t all great. As a kid helping out in his parents’ restaurant in Cabramatta, western Sydney, it was hard for him to understand that he was learning a craft that would become his life.
We’ve met at the Lindrum Hotel in the city. He is super-poised and a natural storyteller. And he has a great story to tell.
I asked whether his interest in food was inspired by the restaurant. “Out of slave labor, yeah,” he says. I searched for the smile on his lips but it wasn’t there.
“Our days were: waking up at 5am, getting ready for school, going to the restaurant, helping the folks set up the restaurant, setting up front of house, by 7.30 go to school. There was no time to prepare our lunch. It was ‘Go across the road to the bakery and get a bánh mì thit’, which is a baguette filled with pork and paté and mayonnaise.”
After school Nguyen and his three siblings would catch the train to the restaurant, where they would help prepare dinner service until 6.30pm, then head home to do homework, chores and go to bed. “It wasn’t fun,” Nguyen says. “There was no childhood. It was work. Maybe the youngest one is a bit spoilt, but for the three of us there was no childhood there.”
How did he feel about that? “We resented it for a long, long time. We resented that we had such a different upbringing to our friends. We resented that we couldn’t ride our bicycle around the block. We resented that there were school camps and swimming carnivals and excursions (which were regarded as) a wasted day. You don’t go to those things, you work.
“All of those days we missed out on because we had to go to work. Now, as an adult, I know the work mentality has been ingrained in my system. Maybe I wouldn’t be where I am today without that work ethic. I still work really hard.”
Since those days surrounded by the food of his parent’s birthplace, Luke Nguyen has carved an impressive career. He owns Red Lantern, a well-regarded restaurant in Sydney’s Surry Hills; he hosts Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam on SBS and has written three books on Vietnamese food, the latest Indochine, a superb volume exploring the French influence in Vietnamese cooking.
When he finished high school he wanted to open a restaurant but felt he needed to travel first to experience first-hand the food culture. He also knew how tough and demanding the restaurant business was. “I knew, by working in my parents’ restaurant, that when you open a restaurant, that’s it – your life’s over!”
Travelling to his parents’ country opened his eyes to the life they’d lived before they fled the communists by boat. “Going to Vietnam was a really good experience because it made you understand why your parents were the way they are,” he says. “I saw where they lived, how they lived, and where they were brought up. Both sides of the family had market stalls. A really tough industry – outdoors, vegies, fish. They sold exotic fruit in Saigon, District One. Wholesalers.
“When I went there for the first time at two in the morning I thought ‘Wow’. It was dirty, a lot of heavy lifting, you had to compete with all the other people, you had to wake up at crazy times, and you would do this every day of the year, except Chinese New Year. I couldn’t imagine myself doing it.
“There were 12 kids in each family, and the eldest had to look after all the siblings. It really slapped me in the face. All that resentment, all of those doubts, all of that disappeared, because I thought ‘I get it now’. All Australians who complain about what they have should look at what others have to endure around the world.”
Back in Sydney, Nguyen knew Vietnamese cooking but didn’t understand how to run a business. So he tried to get jobs at the best places in town, in the kitchen and managing the restaurants. When he opened Red Lantern he saw first-hand what it was like to work every day except one – Chinese New Year.
“Red Lantern used to be southern Vietnamese cuisine because that’s all I knew,” he says.
“My parents are from Saigon; I learnt from them. And Cabramatta is all southern (Vietnamese). I wanted to learn more about other areas of Vietnam I’d never been to.”
He closed the restaurant for a couple of weeks and made another trip to Vietnam with his partner Suzanna Boyd, a photographer. Starting in the north, they worked their way down. “I discovered so many different dishes. Vietnamese food is so regional, so diverse, like Italian and Indian. I documented everything, talked to street-food vendors, stall holders at markets.” The result was his book The Songs of Sapa.
But Nguyen realised that books lacked the visuals, the smells, the sounds, the feel of the place. “I thought ‘I really need some movement, some visuals’.” Television was the answer. So three years ago he created his own production company and pitched a show to SBS.
He met some resistance to his idea of filming in situ. People told him he’d need a studio. “But I wanted to showcase the real Vietnam,” he says. “To do that you rock up to a market stall and find that dish you love. Or borrow a stove from a street vendor. Having a male Vietnamese guy on the street cooking attracts so much attention (because) it’s usually women (who do the cooking).”
There were some bemusing cultural disconnects: “They ask me where I’m from and I say ‘I’m from Sydney, Australia’ and they ask me what I do and I say ‘I own a restaurant’ and they would go ‘Hang on. We open restaurants out of necessity’. My parents opened a restaurant because it’s all they knew. Vietnamese people would say ‘You’re in Australia, you’ve got so many different options, why aren’t you a doctor or a lawyer? Why choose this hard industry? Are you crazy?’.”
Despite not being a local, Nguyen was able to move freely around Vietnam filming the show. Speaking Vietnamese was critical. “My father used to punish me when we were having dinner and I was speaking English to my siblings, as you do,” he says. “Backhand.”
Didn’t he want his son to practise English? “Not in the house. He wanted to keep our culture and our heritage. I resented my parents for that. But (now) I speak fluent Vietnamese and I think ‘Thank God dad smacked me across the head’. There’s more understanding now.”
His travels gave him some understanding of the life his parents had led before they left Saigon. “They were poor, poorer than poor. They would sleep on floors; that kind of poor. My uncles and aunts still live in this area and still live like that, so I think if mum and dad hadn’t risked everything, I would be there, living like that.”
I asked Nguyen about what Christmas means in the Vietnamese culture. “As a kid Christmas Day wasn’t huge,” he says. “I had a very tough upbringing. We worked in the restaurant; there wasn’t much of a social life for us kids. We worked hard – my parents worked seven days a week. So come Christmas time it was just another day. Our big celebrations were Vietnamese or Chinese New Year.
“As I got older and started to become more Australianised, I thought ‘Hang on, everyone around me is celebrating Christmas, so I should as well’.”
Nguyen started to host his own Christmas celebrations. “It wasn’t your traditional roast and pork crackling – I didn’t know any of that stuff. A typical Christmas for me, if I was hosting, would be a seafood steamboat or hot pot. I’d go to the market, get the freshest seafood you can get.
“All I need to do is cook amazing broths, which I can do the day before. I didn’t understand how you go to a friend’s Christmas party and they’re freaking out, stressing out, and they have a horrible time. I didn’t get it. Food for me is about communal eating, but it’s also about communal preparation.
“On birthdays and Chinese New Year everyone would pitch in and help; it wasn’t down to one person to do it. That’s the way I’ve been brought up.”
The broth Nguyen would make – a pork broth with chicken bones, chargrilled dried squid and chargrilled dried flounder – would simmer for 12 hours. He would buy fresh prawns, barramundi or silver perch, calamari, mussels, oysters and scallops. There would be noodles, broth, vegetables, egg noodles and dipping sauces.
“There’d be a long table with 20 friends. A few burners in the middle, with the broth simmering away in the hot pot.” And everyone would do it themselves. “It’s fresh, it’s fun, it’s vibrant and there’s so many ingredients. Everyone dunks and dips. If you watch from the head of the table you watch all the hands go in and dunk and dip; it’s like a beautiful animation.”
Nguyen says he is amazed by what he has learnt in preparing his new book. “The French colonised Vietnam for almost 100 years, 1862-1954. I wanted to discover what traditional dishes were authentic Vietnamese, how many of them have French origins, how much the French left behind in Vietnam.”
He mentions pho – a Vietnamese staple – the origins of which come from the French word “feu” (fire). “It’s taking the marrow out of the bone with beautiful broth with charred onions and aromatics (the base of pho stock). I’m not saying the French designed this dish but they influenced it to a certain extent.”
Despite being extremely busy with his food and media career, he is still at Red Lantern as much as he can. “It’s a 50-seater, homey. They’re all regular customers. I do a lot of the floor as well. Very hands-on.”
For next year’s TV series, Nguyen used the Mekong River as a central theme. “Last series I was blown away by the Mekong River – where my family lived, in the delta – how this river is the source of life. I wanted to learn more about the river, which is the 11th-largest river in the world, so I travelled to where it begins, in China. It flows through northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and finishes in Vietnam. I’m moving out of Vietnam slightly and following the flow of the river, documenting all the villages and cuisines and cultures surrounding the Mekong River.”
All those early morning and late afternoons in his parents’ restaurant are, finally, paying off.