An affair of the heart

LUKE Nguyen's record-breaking Vietnam food series has notched up some personal milestones, too.

Luke Nguyen in his show on SBS.

IT'S BEEN a good year for Luke Nguyen.

His new television cookery series has been picked up by more than 50 territories worldwide, including the prestigious Cooking Channel in the US. He recently became the face of the newly launched Food Network Asia and is working on a new book exploring the French influence on Vietnam’s culture and cuisine.

But for the telegenic 32-year-old, whose sunny, relaxed on-screen demeanour has won him a legion of fans, it is personal milestones that are of greatest importance.

“It’s not just about food; for me, it’s about discovering my culture,” Nguyen says of Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam, the series which sees him traversing the South East Asian nation meeting locals and recreating regional dishes. That the show has become SBS’s most successful debut program in the international sales arena has a certain piquancy for a man whose parents fled Vietnam by boat in 1977 when his mother was pregnant with him.

After being turned away from Malaysia, the desperate family carried on to Thailand, where Nguyen was born in a refugee camp. “My parents have never spoken about it much,” he says, “but the more time I spend in Vietnam, the more I understand them, why they disciplined me the way they did. And I understand myself a bit more, too.”

Nguyen was a year old when his family made it to Sydney. He grew up in Cabramatta and now conducts culinary tours of the area in addition to running his Surry Hills restaurant, Red Lantern. He has travelled many times to Saigon but his parents – to his great sadness – refused to return to the place that held so many bad memories.

It was while researching his cookbook, The Songs of Sapa, that Nguyen began toying with the idea of a food program that would document his interactions with market-stall holders and street vendors, and his reunions with the extended family who have continued to make a living on the land in Vietnam. “I realised I couldn’t express everything in writing; the smells, the colours, the sounds and textures,” says Nguyen. “So the idea of doing a cookery and travel show in Vietnam was born.”

It was to be no big-budget affair: no location scouts, no team of food experts devising recipes and preparing food in advance, no huge entourage. The show is unscripted and Nguyen seeks out the locations as well as devising and preparing recipes, which are often thrown out at the last minute in favour of a regional specialty suggested by an onlooker. “The beauty of the show is that it is so chaotic,” Nguyen says. “You’ll have 1000 people standing around watching, screaming at you that you’re doing it wrong, that you forgot to add something or there’s not enough fish sauce. It’s a lot of fun. The Vietnamese embrace it and so do I because I don’t stop learning.”

Filming in a foreign location was made easier in Nguyen’s fi rst series, which focused on southern Vietnam, because so many members of his extended family live in the region. Series 2, which debuted last night on SBS One, was more difficult in that he had little experience of the country’s north. But he was not entirely without family support. After much coaxing, he convinced his parents to return to their homeland. “I always felt guilty that this was the country of their birth but they had not returned. Now they come with us everywhere we go and are finally seeing all of Vietnam. I think it’s very important that they have.”

For Nguyen, his most memorable times filming are when making connections with those far removed from his own life: The bright eight-year-old girl working at a mango stall who couldn’t afford to go to school and who inspired him to set up The Little Lantern Foundation, a charity aimed at training youngsters in hospitality or the group of kids he chanced upon in central Vietnam.

“In a tiny fishing village I met a lady who runs a school for disabled children,” he says. “All I could do was teach them a few tricks in the kitchen. We cooked together and then we all sat and ate in silence; the only means of communication we had were hand signals. But we knew exactly what each other was thinking.

“Later, some of the visually impaired kids picked up guitars and started to play, while another took to the piano. The rest of the kids were dancing. It was a magical moment, just one of those very special times. It was the first time I’ve ever seen my father cry.”

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