UMAR NGUYEN

BRISBANE, QLD

The former chef has found a niche supplying quality seafood and professional advice to restaurants.

In April 1981, Umar Nguyen’s heavily pregnant mother stepped on to land after a harrowing boat journey from Vietnam just as her waters broke. She gave birth to Nguyen on Kuku Island, in Indonesia’s remote Anambas Archipelago. Her daughter’s malesounding first name is a legacy of the doctor who delivered her. “I’m just thankful I wasn’t named after the other doctor there. Apparently, his name was very much like ‘testicles’ in Vietnamese,” Nguyen laughs.

Growing up with a passion for cooking, Nguyen became a chef, but after acknowledging she was missing much of her own daughter’s life, established her own business as a seafood provedore four years ago, sourcing and selling seafood to her former colleagues.

However, the transition into the male-dominated business was not as smooth as she had hoped it would be. “There are not many female fishers compared with men, and it’s the same with chefs. I’m Asian, so I just naturally look young, too,” says the 39-year-old. “So, I got talked down to a lot. It really bothered me at first, but I just had to learn how to deal with it and not let it affect me. I had to prove I knew what I was talking about.”

Today, Nguyen, known in the industry as ‘the fish girl’, is highly regarded for her knowledge of seafood and her ability to act as an intermediary between fishers and chefs – letting the latter know what’s new, what’s in season, where and how it was caught and, often (thanks to her background as a chef) how to cook it.

Her products include extraordinary bright-blue orbs of wild scampi roe, prestigious abalone and wild-caught fish from Northern Australia, but her passion is educating chefs about all local seafood, including some of our most underutilised species. “My job is simply to get people to eat more seafood. We have so much diversity in Australia, I mean, we have more than 5,000 species of fish. We’re very blessed.”

“I HAD TO PROVE I KNEW WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT.”

UMAR NGUYEN