KOTO – a Culinary Journey Through Vietnam
When Australian chef Tracey Lister and her husband, Andreas Pohl, took a two-year sabbatical to live in Hanoi, Vietnam, helping to open a cooking school for disadvantaged youth was not on their agenda.
By chance, Lister met Jimmy Pham, who had founded KOTO – an acronym for “Know One, Teach One” – a business to help street children, which had outgrown its original space and was moving to larger premises. Born in Ho Chi Minh City to a Vietnamese mother and a Korean father, Pham migrated to Australia with his mother and siblings in 1980. Nineteen years later, armed with a degree in tourism, he moved back to Vietnam.
In the introduction to KOTO (2008), the authors write, “As a tour guide, Jimmy befriended a group of street kids. He felt that he himself might have ended up on the streets, had his family not left Vietnam […] The street kids Jimmy met came from families too poor to make ends meet: families who had to rely on their children to help out. These young people, who the Vietnamese call ‘bui doi’ (literally ‘dust of life’) often ended up working as street vendors, or as cheap labour in restaurants and on building sites. Many travel from the countryside to the big cities, where they live without official permits. Jimmy bought the kids food and organised showers. But after a while, he felt that this was just a quick fix, not a long-term solution.
“In 1999, he made a decision that would change the lives of many disadvantaged young people. Without any experience in development or hospitality, and armed only with his boundless optimism and a Women’s Day cookbook, he opened a small sandwich shop, to provide training and employment to a group of former street kids.
The shop was a success, and a year later, Jimmy decided to borrow more money from his family. He opened a larger training restaurant near the Temple of Literature, Vietnam’s first university. The establishment of a small, separate training centre near West Lake followed in 2001.
“Since then, KOTO has trained over 300 trainees in both cookery and front-of-house skills. Hospitality, English and life skills – ranging from budgeting to sex education – are also part of the course. Although many trainees come from very difficult backgrounds, KOTO has an extremely low drop-out rate, and virtually all graduates are snapped up by restaurants and hotels in Hanoi and beyond. KOTO graduates now work as chefs and waiters as far south as Ho Chi Minh City and the resort town of Mui Ne.”
Sadly, the school closed late last year – another victim of Covid-19, although Pham hopes to reopen it when circumstances allow.
The cookbook is divided into regions, starting in the north and travelling through Hanoi, the centre, the coast, central highlands, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and ending in the Mekong Delta. The recipes will make you crave Vietnamese food, with dishes of fried spring rolls, pho bo, crab noodle soup, mackerel grilled in banana leaf, lobster curry, steamed omelette with pork and cellophane noodles, crispy seafood rice pancake, hot and sour fish soup, and braised oxtail with five-spice.