6 Questions with Mimi Lan of The Taste Curator: What Bourdain Said About Vietnamese Food and Why Chefs Need To Be On Clubhouse
by Sophie Braker
This article is from an interview with Chef Mimi Lan. If you want to know more about her, watch her videocast episode: BSP365: Chef Mimi Lan of The Taste Curator on Clubhouse for Food Creators.
Who was the first person to inspire you on your food journey?
My aunt who’s name was Nam. She passed away a couple of years ago. When my family first immigrated to the US in 1975, we settled in New Orleans, Louisiana. Nam would turn her tiny one bedroom apartment into a makeshift phở shop. My mom and one of us kids would take turns to come and help out. I got to see the power of her bowl of phở, how it could bring dispirited strangers together to share their hardships and their joys. It became a place for people to reconnect and to talk about what they left behind. It was something she couldn’t advertise. But word of mouth through the Vietnamese community spread fast. The neighbors thought that Nam was very popular and held a lot of parties.
I was a small child and all I could do was bring water to the guests. That lesson stayed with me. When it was time for me to become a chef, I didn’t have to think long to know what kind of chef I wanted to be. I wanted to do pop up dinners and wanted to be able to recreate that atmosphere of connecting people together to understand my culture and my people better through food.
What’s one thing you wish people knew about Vietnamese food?
The late Anthony Bourdain said it best. He said that Vietnamese food had the same sophistication and complexity as European cuisines. That is huge! People think that Vietnamese food is cheap, cheap eats, a bowl of this, a bowl of that. They don’t think twice about paying three digits for a Japanese sushi meal. But to go to even a sophisticated Vietnamese restaurant and pay high dollars, for some reason, people are reluctant to do that. I would really like to see that change in the future. Our food is just as worthy as other foods out there, to have the respect that it deserves. There is still a lot of education to be done and it just takes time.
Why/when did you start cooking professionally?
I grew up tinkering in the kitchen watching my family, my mom, my aunt cooking. So cooking to me was never foreign even if I didn’t really get into it full fledged until after I got married and had to cook. So then I began to fall in love with it. To me there’s nothing that sets the foundation like sitting down every night. It's a sacred time to communicate about your day and enjoy your meal. I like the European way of enjoying their meals for like three hours. They take it seriously and we Vietnamese do the same thing. We sit down to eat, no phones, no distractions, just to focus on the conversations. I tried to emulate that into my own family. And now that my daughter is out of the house and we are empty nesters, the thing that she remembered the most was that she missed our home cooked meals. That made me feel really good. At least there is a reason for her to come home now.
What’s a dish that best represents you?
Phở is the Vietnamese national dish. My food is always taking the original recipes that I grew up eating and bringing a little twist of my own. So my phở uses bone-in beef rib and I added truffle on it. When I experimented and came to that combination it was like WOW! That is even taking phở to the next level for those who love phở and thought you can’t improve this. Yes you can! Just a little twist here and there but not going too far away from the original recipes.
When we go to restaurants and we see dishes that are showstoppers, people just see it and think it's just a beef rib in phở. Those who don’t cook don’t understand the process of getting to that place. I did a lot of experimentation to get to that place. I experimented with oxtail. But the logistics of it are that it's hard to eat. You have to pick the oxtail up with your hand and kind of gnaw on it. It’s not like the best date kind of meal. You want it to be easy to eat. Finally when I did the ribs, when you have it arrive at your table, it looks like a showstopper. It's so tender it falls off the bone. So it may look caveman like but you just use your chopsticks and it just breaks apart right away.
If someone comes to one of your pop-up dinners, what can they expect?
The pandemic has changed a lot of how I operated my business. It used to be a big production with like fifty to sixty attendees and tickets always sold out. After the pandemic, people are more reluctant now to be in a big gathering so I’ve changed now to where I’ve done more like an intimate dinner. I find different ways to think outside the box which is the silver lining. Sometimes we’re stuck in a rut because it’s something that we’re always done before and it's worked. We continue to keep doing it again and again but there’s no innovation.
I partnered with a catering company and we did gourmet deliveries. We just did one for Lunar New Year with hot cakes, Dim Sum, and different layers of steamers. We also partnered with a picnic company, a luxury picnic company. They are starting to get really big locally for those who want to have the full experience of dining in nature. They go to places like the beach, the farm, your garden, your backyard. The company comes in and sets it up so beautifully depending on the occasion. They use different chefs to put on a multi course meal. So I’ve begun to work with those types of companies.
We can still create this dining experience. It's not just a meal. I’m not interested in cooking just a meal because you can get that at any restaurant. I'm more interested in the whole experience. I get to give them little tidbits on the dishes, the ingredients used, the people behind the dishes, why it was cooked like this, why this ingredient was used instead of others, the fact that Vietnam didn't have refrigeration so a lot of things were done this way or that way out of necessity. I like to educate people better on these aspects.
Can you recommend 3 clubs and 3 people to follow on Clubhouse?
Mimi’s Clubhouse recommendations
Clubs
People
Surviving the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Chef Mimi Lam immigrated to the States as a young child with her family. Hardship taught hard work, which motivated her to begin her journey as an award-winning boutique marketing owner for 15 years. After retiring the business and finally following her passion of cooking, Chef Mimi started her VIGLO (Vietnamese with global influences) pop-up dinner series.
Chef Mimi completed staging under two of the best restaurants in the world — three-Michelin starred restaurant “Per Se,” and two-Michelin starred restaurant “Gaggan Anand.” Her goal is to elevate Vietnamese cuisine and to bridge the gap of understanding between cultures.
Find more of Chef Mimi’s work: @thetastecurator on Instagram and Clubhouse, and online at Taste Curator.
Click here to read Mimi’s article The Power of Phở or “Anh” Tony - an ode to Anthony Bourdain
