‘Real straight-shooter’: Lady Chu’s founder is famously brusque. She has her reasons

This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

The first time I meet Vietnamese food dynamo Nahji Chu, I mention, apologetically, that I’m in a bit of a hurry as I have theatre tickets. She’s unmoved. “If you don’t have time, then don’t come here,” she says, airily, snatching the menu back off her restaurant table. “This isn’t a fast-food outlet.”

A lot of people in hospitality would probably love to serve up similar home truths to their demanding customers. The difference with Chu is that she actually does. As the head of the MissChu empire that once included a catering business and a series of nine restaurant-tuckshops in Sydney, Melbourne and London, the “rice-paper-roll queen” could afford to be direct. But even now, after that company crashed spectacularly, and she was forced to start again from scratch, she is no less blunt.

Along the way, the diminutive figure with the over-sized personality has become loathed by some but, in truth, loved by many more. And even those who don’t admire her style adore her food. With her Lady Chu restaurant expanding rapidly to colonise most of a Potts Point side street at Sydney’s Kings Cross, it’s hard to deny her entrepreneurial flair and culinary genius. But at the same time, she’s also extremely skilled at making enemies.

Very recently, when City of Sydney rangers demanded, mid-service, that she move some restaurant planters they said were obstructing the footpath, she let fly a foul-mouthed rant against both them and the anonymous complainants who had brought them to the scene. “I’m just trying to make Australia a better place for everyone,” she told Good Weekend. “I think we’ve lost our way with ridiculous laws in hospitality and, if I have to go to jail to fight them, I will.”

It’s that brusque manner that sees her regularly branded an Australian Basil Fawlty or our version of Seinfeld’s outrageous Soup Nazi – impatient, dismissive and belligerent.

“She’s been called so many names over the years,” says Warren Fahey, musician, cultural historian and former chair of the Potts Point Business Group. “The Dragon Lady, Nazi Nahji … but, really, she’s extraordinarily generous and can be very welcoming. She’s a force to be reckoned with. Instead of knocking politely on doors, she knocks them down and rides straight through the red tape.”

Vietnamese-Laotian Chu, 55, who was given asylum in Australia in 1978, knows she has a reputation for being pushy and terse to the point of rudeness to some of her customers, but she’s unapologetic. Sometimes, she thinks, people deliberately wind her up just to see her in full flight. “I’m not like that all the time, but because I have that reputation, people coerce it out of me. They want that. It’s a little bit like when someone is grinding metal and the sparks are flying, you’re meant to look away and put some protective sunglasses on. But with me, people go, ‘Let’s grind the metal and all watch.’ ”

Lady Chu’s signature Peking duck pancakes and rice paper rolls.Credit: Louie Douvis

Roslyn Street is a backwater off the main Kings Cross drag of Darlinghurst Road, or it used to be before Chu took over a lease of one empty shopfront in 2020 during COVID-19, and then another, and another, until she, these days, has five shops in a row. Now, from Wednesday to Sunday each week, the pavement is transformed into an alfresco 90-seat restaurant with white-clothed tables, sofas, parasols, candles and huge pot plants festooned with fairy lights. Locals have dubbed it Rue de Chu.

Chu thinks of it like Monopoly, with her own Mayfair being the Gaudi-inspired building on the end that once housed fine-diners Gastro Park and Metisse, where she can now operate her commercial kitchen. Her get-out-of-jail card, she says, is the tens of thousands of dollars she says she’s paid the City of Sydney in fees and fines for putting tables – and pot plants – where she’s not allowed. “She’s a real straight-shooter,” says film producer Rebel Penfold-Russell, who first met Chu when she catered a charity event. “But I wouldn’t like to stand in front of her! She works so hard, though, and is incredibly generous and great fun.”

Every working day, Chu’s there on the frontline, as executive chef, restaurant manager and maître d’, taking bookings, seating people (or not), writing down orders, supervising the kitchen, doing the accounts and the marketing. “I’m doing at least three jobs at once,” she says, as the orders flood in for her signature tiger prawn and green mango rice paper rolls, her roast suckling pig banh mi, her Peking duck pancakes and rich and spicy beef and pork soup, bún bò Hue. “What comes out of that is my efficiency, which comes off as being quite abrupt.

“But when did you ever see Kylie Kwong seating people? When was the last time you got seated by Justin Hemmes? When you come to Lady Chu, I’m the one who’s there, doing it all. And that comes with me yelling sometimes. But it comes more from a place of efficiency than anything else.”

In 1975, after the Laotian civil war was won by the Communist Pathet Lao, Chu’s mother and four of her siblings vanished overnight. A few months later, her father took her and her remaining brother on a stealthy nighttime crossing of the Mekong river to Thailand, daubing them in mud so they wouldn’t be seen. Just as they reached the Thai side, however, they were caught and thrown into a Thai jail cell with 40 other prisoners. They stayed there for three months, Chu suffering a bout of TB, until her father was able to bribe the guards to free them using hidden silver bars from Laos’ heroin trade. When they reached a Thai refugee camp, they were met by a miracle. “On the first day, standing in the distance, was my mother!” Chu says. “So I was reunited with her and my other brothers and sisters and aunty, and from then on, we always stayed together as a family.”

In her aunt’s makeshift cafe in a Thai refugee camp in 1977 (Chu fourth from left, her aunt Yen and mum at left.)Credit: Courtesy of Nahji Chu

After three years being shuffled around camps and eking out a living growing vegetables and selling Vietnamese pho, in March 1978, they were flown to Australia and arrived at the migrant hostel in Villawood, in Sydney’s south-west. Chu was thrilled. “There was a tap for water, and I had my own bed,” she says. “But the food was terrible. Tip Top bread and butter that you ate with sugar on, and cereal out of cardboard boxes. We’d never seen anything like it. And school was brutal. The Australian children used to taunt us and bully us, there was so much racism.”

Five months on, the family was sent to the NSW Hunter Valley to work on a chicken farm in Cessnock. After the mandatory year, the family piled into their old Ford Falcon 500 station wagon to drive to Melbourne, where Chu’s aunt was running a black-market noodle shop in her home. They moved into a house in Richmond, where neighbours were amazed they kept and killed their own chickens. Chu’s family were similarly alarmed at and disgusted by frozen chickens in supermarkets.

Quitting university early, Chu worked in fashion, where she helped dress Kylie Minogue in her famous leather jacket for the movie The Delinquents. Later, she studied marketing and journalism, then worked for small-bar entrepreneur Vernon Chalker, becoming his catering manager, and later James Orloff in his business BITE, modelled on the UK’s Pret A Manger.
Burnt out by hospitality at 34, she found a job in banking and was promoted to a post in Sydney in 2004. There, she was surprised to find long lunchtime queues at takeaways but no Vietnamese food on offer. The next step was obvious: she had learnt to cook from her grandmother, who once rattled pans for the king of Laos, and she knew about catering. She quit her job, sold some art to raise cash, and in 2007, MissChu was born in a Darlinghurst back street.

The MissChu fax machine was instantly jammed with orders, so Chu started using email and organised a team of e-bike riders to deliver her rice paper rolls, dumplings and Peking duck pancakes. “It was way before Uber Eats started,” says Chu, who used her photo on her refugee visa as her logo. “I was the first person in Australia to do something like that. I knew this business was my calling. I could be fast and supply good, healthy food. It was an instant success.”

Expansion was rapid, with five outlets in Sydney, two in Melbourne, and one in London, a total staff of 280 and an annual turnover of $25 million. By 2014, she was planning more outlets and having talks with a franchise company which had worked with restaurateur Bill Granger to globalise her business, incorporating streetwear and a TV show. She became the poster child for refugee chic and a champion of Vietnamese culture.

She “owned” racist taunts with her motto, “You ling, we bling”, she delivered a spirited TEDx Talk on rights for refugees and, during a memorable appearance on ABC TV’s Q&A, berated the other guests for refugee detention policies and “bombed” the show with a poster decrying: Fruitless Debate. But then, on her first-ever holiday, in the south of France, she received a call saying MissChu was in debt and trading while insolvent. It was a complete shock.

“We expanded so fast that the plane was flying mid-air and didn’t even have time to refuel,” she says. “It was too fast and too popular and there were too many staff and too many cooks, and it all got beyond me.” She’s adamant that the business was sound, but that she wasn’t able to keep track of where the money was going or being taken. She filed for voluntary administration that year. Three Melbourne outlets are still going, now operated by her former business partner, Gabi Machado.

Lady Chu branding, which features the outline of her visa photo, a red bar across her eyes and Joan of Arc-style armour.

She withdrew, depressed and suffering insomnia, but then returned again in Sydney with her new company Cocochine Catering and then with Lady Chu, funded by her COVID super withdrawals and loans from Justin Hemmes and her aunt in Melbourne, who runs the successful Box Hill restaurant, Indochine. Her logo this time is the outline of the same photo on her visa but with the eyes hidden by a red bar, and dressed in Joan of Arc-style armour. “Lady Chu is such a friendly, warm, convivial, stylish place, and she’s made it that way in her image,” says regular customer, barrister Bret Walker. “But at no stage are you ever confused who’s in charge. She could teach a sergeant-major his job.”

Expansion is still on the cards, including a range of sauces, dog treats for customers’ pets and various art projects. She’s still busy, busy, busy. “Look, I know I should be outsourcing all of this, but the thing is, when I was MissChu, everyone said, ‘Delegate, delegate, delegate!’ ” she says, her pet staffy, Archie, at her feet. “I delegated the f--- out of everything and then look what happened. I’m also sick and tired of being in the background and all my people being quiet and that’s why I’m loud, sometimes rude and obnoxious because I have to make up for the silence that I see in my community, which is just our culture.

“I have way more trauma and depression than anyone I’ve ever met, but I still work, pay taxes and provide a community service at a very affordable price. So when you guys come to me with a sense of entitlement, it kind of rubs me up the wrong way.”

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