Chef finding right balance
LUKE Nguyen is not sure how he manages his busy life. He runs eight restaurants across three different countries, has a cookery school and is a dad to two- year- old twin boys.
“People are endlessly asking me: ‘ Luke, you’ve got restaurants in Sydney and Brisbane, and you’re opening in Hong Kong, you’re opening in Vietnam, you’ve got the cooking school, how do you do it all? And I just couldn’t tell you,” Nguyen said.
In his new show, Food Trails, he’s attempting to answer that question by giving people a glimpse into his dayto- day life.
It’s a biographical journey, which starts with a trip to Cabramatta in Sydney, where his Vietnamese parents opened a restaurant, and moves on to all the cities where Nguyen has opened his own restaurants: Sydney, Brisbane, and now Hong Kong and Saigon.
“It’s about what I do in those cities – what I love to eat, where I love to eat, what I like to do on my downtime. It’s a bit of a fly- on- the wall,” he said.
A huge part of his appeal is his passion and curiosity for food and cooking techniques. He brings that same sense of discovery to Food Trails and the cameras are on hand as Nguyen opens restaurants in Hong Kong and Vietnam.
“I open my first restaurant in Vietnam and that’s over a decade in the making. I’ve been wanting to open a restaurant in Vietnam for a long time,” he said.
There’s a lot at stake for Nguyen’s first restaurant in Saigon and there are a few rea- sons why it’s taken him so long to open there.
“It’s not only about finding the right location but it’s also about being ready; it’s a tough game in Vietnam,” he said.
“I’m Vietnamese and I’ve never cooked Vietnamese for the Vietnamese, so it’s like ‘ oh my God, am I ready for it?’ You’ve got to wow them or you fail because there are a million Vietnamese restaurants in Vietnam and they’re all so good.
“In that episode you really get to see the building of the restaurant and the stresses, the failures, it was really stressful.”
Some TV series are built around the opening of just one restaurant, but in this case that’s only one aspect of Nguyen’s busy life.
>> Luke Nguyen’s Food Trail airs on Thursday at
8pm on SBS