HI, I’M NGUYEN. I’M NO ONE SPECIAL.
I MEAN, I’M JUST A VIETNAMESE-AMERICAN “KID” WITH A MOM AND DAD WHO LEFT THEIR HOMELAND AT THE END OF THE VIETNAM WAR AT THE RESPECTIVE AGES OF SIXTEEN AND SEVENTEEN, CAME TO THE STATES, GOT KNOCKED UP, HAD A KID WHO WAS A PICKY EATER (ME), MOVED TO THE GREAT STATE OF TEXAS, GAVE BIRTH TO MY MUCH MORE ARTISTICALLY TALENTED YOUNGER SISTER VIVIEN (NOT ME), AND WORKED NEARLY AROUND THE CLOCK MANAGING LOCAL 7-ELEVENS TO AFFORD US A BETTER LIFE.
I (barely) grew up on chips and queso, hamburgers and hot dogs, and other kinds of standard American fare (T.G.I. Friday’s chicken fingers and their long-forgotten creole mustard are still my JAM. Ohhhhh yes!). I resisted eating Vietnamese food because I couldn’t understand being “just Vietnamese” growing up (the diaspora dilemma). In a magazine interview, my mom threw me under the Vietnamese heritage bus and told them I ate only burgers and hotdogs, and I was constantly bullied for being a “Chinese kid” (those kids are more educated, know better now, and I’m even friends with some—my contribution to society). I went to college locally where I stuck to delusions of being a doctor, so much so that I even took the notorious eight-hour medical school entrance exam, the MCAT, during which I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor and proceeded to take the best and most influential nap of my life.
All that time, I never thought about how food played such an integral part in my life. My first job was as a bag boy at a grocery store; my after–high school hangout was my friend’s Indian restaurant (and the buffet line was subsequently my “study area of preference”); and my big dream as a kid was to host and pay for a dinner in a luxurious revolving ballroom restaurant like the one at the top of Reunion Tower in Dallas for ALL my friends. I used to eat like a football player, and my favorite personal sport was to see how many Thanksgiving dinners I could squeeze into one day (I believe five was my record—no amount of tryptophan is gonna put me DOWN!). A dot.com job gave this doe-eyed twenty-one-year-old kid a personal expense account that grew to nearly $25k per month, which became my fine dining and wine education (but not much wine because my tolerance for alcohol is laughably low), and I surf more food porn than any straight man should ever admit to (I can’t help it, there’s so much of it).
To put it simply: I love food.
Let’s level with each other here right from the start. I am literally the biggest fuckup I KNOW! I have friends who are far more successful, make more money, have seen more of the world, and have contributed much more to society than I have. But recently I figured out that I have one God (or similar deity)–given talent: I am stupid enough not to give a flying fuck about anyone’s opinion. And when I have my mind set on something, I try over and over and over again until I succeed, prove people’s opinions wrong (the greatest fuel to my man-child-like drive), or—on the not-so-rare occasion when I fail and fall on my face—look like the biggest fool trying. My soul begs for completion, and begs to see if an idea really is as idiotic as people think it is. That’s the best way I can describe . . . the one thing I am best at.
This realization didn’t become evident until I accidentally delved into the restaurant business with my wife, Thi, my Kitchen Ninja and Starry Kitchen’s not-so-secret weapon. Calling my profession an accident may sound unappreciative (and it’s not meant to because I have so much respect for all small business owners), but owning a restaurant wasn’t our original dream. But it made sense as the next step of a far-fetched idea, born out of unemployment, about running an underground and definitely illegal restaurant out of our tiny apartment in North Hollywood, California, right in the heart of Los Angeles’s infamous (San Fernando) Valley.
Back in the mid-aughts, Thi started cooking all sorts of fantastical Asian dishes, taking pictures of them and posting them on Facebook. (This was pre-#foodpornrevolution, and when taking pictures of food [with film] was still wholly owned by Asians—but not anymore.)
Then in 2008 the economy went to shit. Thi lost her job in advertising the next year and vented on Facebook about finding another job in advertising, as one does. The response was unanimous: “Advertising? Pffft! YOU SHOULD COOK!” After about two months of cajoling and finally coercion, we hosted our first lunch service out of our tiny apartment.
We flyered three hundred apartments in our building and advertised on Facebook our “restaurant,” which we called Starry Kitchen. We debated the name for no longer than . . . one minute, and named it after Thi’s favorite Cantonese cooking show at the time on the TVB television network from Hong Kong (drop this on any Cantonese-speaking person in the free world, and you’ll get instant street cred), which we knew we’d be stuck with if whatever this would become worked.
It wasn’t fancy. We buzzed guests in, directed them to take the elevator upstairs, then set them up on our communal patio shared with other residents (and future Starry Kitchen confidants) full of random chairs in the middle of a concrete high-rise paradise. I sat at a little folding table with a printed picture of our dog and mascot, GQ (who was more recognizable and well known than we personally were in our complex), taped to the front of the table, and took orders for plates of Thi’s version of Asian comfort food directly influenced by the Kogi revolution happening in LA at the time—such as Vietnamese Thit Kho (braised coconut pork) or Korean kalbijim (braised Korean short rib stew). There was a suggested $5 donation, and after guests voluntarily dropped money in the box (I never touched it) I yelled the order back into the apartment—like at your favorite greasy-spoon diner. Our friends came out to support us (we knew we could guilt them all into at least one meal). But then, surprisingly they liked it! In fact, they loved it. And those friends brought friends, and friends of their friends brought more friends.
The party grew so much that we added a Wednesday “dinner service.” Yelp reviews began to pop up, which brought in even more people. Our patrons were pretty random, but my favorite group was the game developers, dominated by my small cadre of friends who had graduated from Carnegie Mellon. If anyone was the catalyst for our explosion, it was them. Suddenly, our apartment became the No. 1 Asian fusion “restaurant” listing in all of LA on Yelp.
Then, LA Weekly found us, which brought us patrons from San Francisco and New York City. As we began to receive more press, we got even bigger—big enough that the health department found us.
But even when the health department thought they had us, I was already in negotiations to take Starry Kitchen into a real establishment with proper permits. I offered myself to become their poster child—Illegal Restaurant Goes Legit—but they didn’t care and gave us a verbal slap-on-the-wrist warning to shut down instead. (We didn’t.)
For the next three months, we operated Starry Kitchen in “black-ops mode” behind closed doors until we finally locked down a former sushi joint in downtown LA where we could finally serve lunch to hungry workers out in the open as a regular . . . restaurant! On our last night in our apartment, we invited everyone, and 130+ people came into our home for our most popular dish, our infamous Crispy Tofu Balls. Everyone wished us farewell from the underground into the world of legitimacy.
It’s been over seven years since we began Starry Kitchen in our apartment. But it feels like we’ve been in this business our entire lives. It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come from turning an illegal dinner party into a full-blown lunch restaurant, closing that restaurant down, then reinventing ourselves three times, not including the numerous side “quest” projects we blindly try because I guess I get bored. Rather than looking for new jobs or staying put in the ones that didn’t satisfy us, which we probably should have done, we walked down the road less traveled—a torturously unbeaten path paved with metal-screw-made salads, working in two inches of sludgy water, crab-claw-cut cuticles, and, most consistently, being broke through the process. Not just the path of owning a restaurant, but the pursuit of a concept and idea so deceptively simple I now understand why most people are reticent to admit it’s even possible—to do what you love and to make a living doing what you love.
It still surprises me when people tell me how much the Starry Kitchen story resonates with them—kind of like how the original popularity of our underground restaurant initially surprised me. I understood that our friends and neighbors would love the idea and the food, but the fact that it attracted strangers from all over the country amazes me to this day. But the older and wiser I get, the more I understand why our story speaks to so many people. It speaks to people because it’s a great representation of the proud American tradition of not giving a fuck and going balls-out.
What follows is the true story of Starry Kitchen, all of our illegal and extracurricular culinary adventures that inspire the food we make—told through anecdotes and tall tales—and chock-full of drool-inducing recipes with as much food porn as these pages can hold, spanning the Asian food spectrum (and some not-so-Asian dishes because we’re American, too, dammit!). Every recipe has a story, particularly for us. Stories about how we spawned a restaurant, a brand, and a stream of pop-ups and brick-and-mortar successes and (many) failures that wouldn’t exist without the recipes that earned us coverage in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Food & Wine, NPR, Vice’s Munchies, the Cooking Channel, and more.
They are a celebration of our food, our culture, and our personality, and a reflection of how mind-blowingly more delicious food simply is once you learn the context and soul behind it. When we ran Starry Kitchen out of our apartment, my job was the front of house, host, storyteller. While Thi cooked, I entertained guests with the story of all the events of Starry Kitchen’s evolution and all of the events that transpired as we were living it, and as we (scarily) continue to live it now, through the inspiration, harrowing conflicts, tremendous triumphs, and all the miraculous support we don’t deserve and have had. We’re living the next unknown chapter of our lives.