It was on TikTok and during the Covid-19 pandemic that Tue Nguyen began her rise to stardom, posting videos of her Vietnamese food recipes. But for the 25-year-old cook, it’s time to cross over to the other side of the screen, with the opening of her first restaurant in Los Angeles.
“My Mom’s Kitchen”
“I wanted people who watch my videos to be able to come and try my cooking for real,” adds the dark-eyed brunette with discreet tattoos, in a black “Chef Tue” print suit.
After having gone through a cooking school to acquire the basics of the profession, Tue Nguyen has relied mainly on his family heritage to master gastronomy. “I only really learned to cook when (…) I really looked at what I had grown up with. And that’s the taste of my mother’s cooking,” she explains.
Her mother and stepfather are the main sources of inspiration for this immigrant from Vietnam, who came to the United States as a child. She is reminded, “every time” she is in the kitchen, that she “should do good things and trust (hers) likes her,” she adds.
Tue Nguyen, or @TwayDaBae on social media, began by posting “mukbangs,” live videos of her tasting food. But it was her recipe videos that made her really popular on platforms like TikTok.
“Here, it’s cleaner”
And when she realized that her followers wanted to eat as much as they wanted to learn how to cook, she thought: “Come on, I’m going to take this opportunity to not only learn, but also to develop my cooking style.”
Do some chefs become famous in their restaurants before becoming media stars? Tue Nguyen took the opposite approach and began taking the recipes that had made him successful online in the real world, first in pop-up restaurants across the United States. He is also on the site of his first “pop-up” launched by Di Di, open since Thursday, July 20.
Despite hundreds of thousands of subscribers on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and videos being liked millions of times, she’s not afraid of having her recipes looted. “Many times, my online recipes are very easy to follow,” she says. “It’s neater here,” she warns in her restaurant, where large wicker armchairs, golden lamps and tropical plants decorate the space.
Between her beef carpaccio, honey-glazed shrimp and traditional fried rice, she hopes her style, a cross between the techniques learned in cooking school and the recipes she grew up with, will help her establish herself in the competitive Los Angeles food scene.
“I have my story. I have my heart. That’s really what makes this place special,” she says. “This restaurant is here to pay homage to the culture that raised me,” adds Tue Nguyen.
Source: BFM TV
