Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Three hot-topic food authors
Foodies who love to cook and those who just like to read cookbooks won’t want to miss three hottopic titles.
Nguyen-Win situation
Easiest way to land a book deal? Wait for a publisher to come to you.
No successful author would recommend that path, but that’s exactly what happened to Nguyen Tran, who triumphed with Starry Kitchen, an illegal underground restaurant he started with his wife, Thi Tran, in their Los Angeles apartment.
Over the years, he’s enjoyed a gold mine of publicity from the New York Times, the New Yorker, Food & Wine Magazine, NPR and the Cooking Channel. So why even write a book?
“My publisher approached me,” said Tran, an adamant multitasker, chatting by cellphone while he walked his dog.
Three years ago he quit the restaurant, which had become a foodie destination. “We were on an emotional low and a professional high,” he said, explaining that he announced a Kickstarter campaign to raise $500,000 in 30 days. He made it to $150,000 — yes, even his “screw-ups” reveal a crazy-like-a-fox Midas touch.
“I feel like the secondary goal was money and the primary goal was to push so hard that another door would open.” What that door was, he couldn’t say.
But it did open a window of time to write a book, a deal he initially turned down.
“I told (the publisher) to (buzz) off and then I thought about it. I came back and said, ‘I need it to be a handbook for someone to start their own restaurant or to be scared (senseless) out of it.”
The resulting text chronicles his wild ride. Born to Vietnamese immigrant parents, he grew up in Dallas, bullied for being different. Eventually he earned a computer science degree and landed a lucrative dot-com job. When that world dot-bombed, he moved to Hollywood, where he sold TV reruns, then worked in the William Morris Agency mail room.
But the economy hit the skids in 2008 and, desperate for rent money, he started Starry Kitchen, which got busted by the health department for operating without a permit. Unfazed, he skirted the law for three months, then went legit, but not entirely, because he failed to pay his state sales tax. His staff tired of reduced paychecks and walked out. He replaced them with volunteers and soldiered on. Done with Starry Kitchen, he closed it and opened Button Mash, another hit.