Like many television stars, Nini Nguyen popped up out of nowhere. The acclaimed chef and cooking instructor made her national debut as a contestant in the 16th season of Food Network’s reality competition show Top Chef and quickly became a fan favorite. Despite an early out, Nguyen impressed the judges so much, she was invited back only a season later as part of the cast of Top Chef: All-Stars L.A.
Despite a quick rise to fame, what viewers don’t see is the work it takes to get there. A native of New Orleans—a city known for its cuisine—Nguyen has always had a deep love and respect for food. She would eventually study business at Louisiana State University; she graduated, however, during the Great Recession. That, paired with stagnant wages, provided the opportunity for Nguyen to take a risk. She jumped into work at Sucré, a New Orleans pâtisserie, and worked her way to three-Michelin star restaurants in New York.
Now based in New Orleans again, she is writing the next chapter of her journey—through Dặc Biệt: An Extra-Special Vietnamese Cookbook, where she celebrates Vietnamese and New Orleanian cuisines and shares the memories that made her the chef she is today.
diaCRITICS spoke to Nini Nguyen about New Orleans, Vietnamese cuisine, and her career.
Many people don’t know that there’s a Vietnamese community in New Orleans. They always think California’s where all the Vietnamese people are. Can you tell me what it was like growing up Vietnamese in New Orleans?
I’m so happy to come from New Orleans. In the 1970s, my family came over to America and I feel like a lot of Vietnamese people gravitated towards New Orleans because it was so reminiscent of home. When you go to the French Quarter in New Orleans, it really looks like the French Quarter in Vietnam. My paternal grandmother speaks French, so it was nice to have some people here speaking French, and it was just easy to adapt. That was a big part of why people moved here: because of the jobs, and the church, and the similarities, from the climate to the culture, to just having a home base with a lot of other Vietnamese people coming together. I am the byproduct of that movement, and I’m really proud to be from New Orleans. I think more people need to know that Vietnamese people exist in the south.
New Orleans has a special place in American culture. Part of that is its food. How would you describe the food culture you lived in as you were growing up?
Growing up, I ate mostly Vietnamese food. My mom worked and my grandma would take care of us. [My grandmother] shucked oysters; she would work at three in the morning and would get off around one. She’d pick me up from the bus stop and she would always cook. We always had dinner at 6:30 and it would be cơm gia đình, which is family style meals where there’s always a meat, a veggie, a soup, and rice. When my grandma came to America, she just didn’t stop cooking Vietnamese food. She just found ingredients that was similar.
I was introduced to New Orleans cuisine through my aunts and uncles. They would work at seafood shops—what we call corner stores, which is kind of like a bodega. Vietnamese people started to work at corner stores and they started to learn and cook the cuisine here. I remember my uncles making po boys, my aunt making gumbo and learning these very, very unique dishes from Louisiana. A lot of Vietnamese people respect the cuisine here; it has so much history and they didn’t really change it. They make the food the way that they learned.
After almost 50 years being here, we’re starting to see the playfulness in Vietnamese food in the city. it’s a very happy place for me to see the city of New Orleans welcoming Vietnamese food so much. It’s rare that you don’t go to a restaurant and there’s a bánh mì version of something or a phở version of something, or Vietnamese restaurants that get to have their own New Orleans twang. The culture here is so inviting. I am really excited to see Vietnamese food weaved into the fabric of the culture here.
What are your earliest memories of food?
I think hospitality has always been in my blood. I was the kid who would always have snacks, and if anybody came over, I would always offer them. I loved serving people, which sounds weird, but it’s very much that I think I got a lot of positive reinforcement as a kid. My grandma’s friends would come over and I’d invite them to eat anything that I was eating, whether it was chips or candy or something my grandma made. That’s where my sense of hospitality sense grew: in a Vietnamese household, kids, you’re supposed to walk around with a tray and offer and mời everyone. You make sure everyone is welcomed and respected before eating.
But my oldest food memory is when we would go to chợ chồm hổm, which is the Vietnamese farmer’s market. This is not like the cute farmer’s market—there’s ice on the ground, fish on top of the ice, everyone’s selling the same thing and loud livestock. It was so stimulating to me. I would always wake up at 5:30 in the morning on Saturdays and go with my grandma, and I’d be so upset if she didn’t take me. I was always the kid that wanted to go to the grocery store. I was always looking at stuff, doing things, and seeing how people shop. That was always my curiosity.
What made you want to be a chef?
It was my senior year in college. I was in business school at LSU, and I went to a bakery called Sucré, and it was the cutest thing. They had macaroons, they had chocolates, they had confections, and it was just nicely styled. I walked in the door and I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to be a chef. I want to make food.
I graduated in 2009, and at that moment, the market wasn’t so good. I was waiting tables, while entry level jobs were like $8 an hour. I made more serving tables even though I got this degree. I decided I was going to just go do what I wanted to do.
I enrolled in culinary school for a semester, but then realized that they required you to get a job at a restaurant. At the job I was I’m learning so much and they’re paying me to learn and I’m paying culinary school to kind of teach me something, but they’re not really teaching me things I need to know. I decided to drop out and then started becoming really particular for the chefs that I worked for.
How did you get from there to Top Chef?
Getting on Top Chef changed a lot for me, but it was a lot of things that led to that.
I worked in pastry here in New Orleans. I ended up working at Sucré, the place that inspired me to be a chef. I worked there and had a crash course on how to make anything pastry in high volume. Then I worked at Coquette, where I really learned how to plate and learned more refined techniques and restaurant-type desserts. Then I moved to New York, and I don’t know how, but I was lucky to be able to choose from three different three-Michelin star restaurants to work for. I ended up at 11 Madison Park. I worked there for two years, and it was tough.
It was tough in the beginning, not as tough as The Bear makes it seem, but it was really hard. It taught me how to be a chef and how to have really, really high standards and how to encompass hospitality in everything that you do. I really would not change that experience in my life. I got to meet so many amazing people and work with a lot of very, very talented people. It made me on top of my game.
Then I worked for Dinner Lab, a startup company that did pop-up dinners in unconventional spaces throughout the US and I would travel and have three days to make a dinner for 120 people, five courses. It was chaos, and it was just the perfect training for Top Chef: sometimes equipment doesn’t work, you’re in a really weird space, you have to shop and make things, and then you’re in a satellite kitchen, so you have to make do with whatever you have. I find that chefs who’ve done Dinner Lab for a few months and then they go onto Top Chef, they do really well. I switched over to savory cooking, and then I helped chefs from all of these high-end restaurants, giving them a platform to make a five-course meal of whatever they want, whatever depicts their personality as a chef. I got to learn different types of cuisine, different hacks on how to make things. There’s so many ways to cook anything. I got to absorb that for a year and a half, and it’s really shaped me and how I think and how I cook food.
Then I helped open a recreational cooking school in New York, and that’s when I really fell in love with teaching. I love to teach. I taught cooks and it just brings me joy to see people being able to replicate the things I make, sometimes even better.
And that’s when I got onto Top Chef. The first season that I was on, I was on and then I was off. I wasn’t on for super long, but when I was on, I think I was on fire. I was very proud of the food I made, and I luckily made enough of an impression that they invited me to do All-Stars.
The All-Stars season is what really changed my career because we filmed it right before the pandemic, and then the pandemic happened and it aired, and so many people watched because they had nothing else to do.
It was such a fun season to shoot. I also started my virtual cooking classes during that time because everyone had to learn how to cook all of a sudden because restaurants are closed. It really helped shape where I am today.
You talked about working at these Michelin Star restaurants. Many of these chefs come from French culinary backgrounds. How did that work with your background as a chef from New Orleans, as a chef who is Vietnamese American?
At the Michelin Star restaurants, it is always very European leaning. But I worked in a kitchen where they made a map of where everyone calls home. It was a global map, and it was just so diverse. And something we did at Eleven Madison Park was we would make family meals. If it’s your last week there, you would have to make whatever cuisine that you cook. I made Vietnamese food, and it brought me so much joy. It was like that addiction of feeding people and getting people really excited to try something different or new.
How did you find your identity as a Vietnamese American chef?
I’ve always kind of tapped into my Vietnamese cooking. It was something different and unique and I felt like a lot of people enjoyed it and it made me special. But as I got further in my career, I really honed in and I feel like I’m the most me Vietnamese I’ve ever been in my life. I think it’s because not only that I realize the significance it is for me, but for a lot of other people for representation. My first season of Top Chef, when I made nước mắm or something that’s very classically Vietnamese, a lot of people who messaged me. It was so nice to see this.
I did the virtual cooking classes. I would make Vietnamese dishes and I would always think no Vietnamese person would join my class and that it was probably for everybody else. But so many Vietnamese people came and it really touched me because a lot of times they were like, “Thank you for doing this. I really want to get connect with my heritage, but I either don’t have my parents anymore, they’re gone” or “I have a language barrier with my parents,” or “my parents just refuse to teach me how to cook like this.” It made me feel like I had a responsibility to keep this alive.
How has Vietnamese cuisine—its perception, how people look at it, its development—how has it changed since you were a child or since you began your career?
Here in New Orleans or the Gulf Coast, I feel like there’s so many similarities [between Vietnamese and Louisiana cuisine]. We have a lot of shrimp, we have a lot of catfish. That’s stuff we eat in Vietnam. In some way, I think things haven’t changed, but in other ways things have changed. We have bánh mì shops that kind of look like they’re serving po’ boys. And influence can go both ways. Vietnamese food has influenced New Orleans cuisine and in the way people eat here. I love that after there’s a big party, I will see my friends at the phở shops that are not Vietnamese on Sunday morning hungover. Everyone’s like, “Oh my God, I’m so hungover. I need my cure-all.”
It’s almost like our culture has kind of permeated into New Orleans culture. In ways culturally, the food is way more accepted, especially here in New Orleans. It’s become more popular, too. I think there are really cool chefs now in America, Vietnamese American chefs that are about my age, maybe even younger, that are doing really interesting things with Vietnamese food. And it’s quite beautiful.
Nini Nguyen is a New Orleans–based chef and cooking instructor. After starting her career in some of the country’s most innovative kitchens, such as Coquette in New Orleans and Eleven Madison Park in New York, she competed in season 16 of Top Chef, as well as Top Chef: All-Stars, becoming a fan favorite. At the beginning of the pandemic, she leaned into her passion for teaching, originally honed at Cook Space in Brooklyn, New York, and built her “Cooking with Nini” virtual classes into a robust business. The classes, which she teaches several times per week, are wildly popular and perpetually sold out. (Photo: Kimberly Ha)
