Chef Tu David Phu delves into his parents' past and discovers his own identity through ingredients

"Decades ago, if you wanted to cook Vietnamese food in a restaurant setting and have it respected, you had to cook it in a Frenchified Frenchified, Jean-George Vongerichten-in-sandals kind of way, " writes Tu David Phu, in the introduction to his new cookbook, The Memory of Taste. Growing up in a household where his parents rarely alluded to their past, the chef had to reconcile his family's trauma with his perceptions of what foods and ingredients were deemed worthy in his fine dining education. This compilation of recipes is an homage to the diaspora as well as a personal reckoning.

Evan Kleiman: Tell us a bit about your parents' experience and how that shaped your childhood.

Tu David Phu: I think for the longest time, I had a serious self-shame of myself because my parents weren't just immigrants, weren't just refugees, but they were marginalized people. And for the most part of my youth, I was poor, so being poor and growing up in a food desert, I don't have many associated good memories and living in those sort of situations. However, food was amazing through the genius of my parents, of being resourceful. But to kind of paraphrase and summarize, I always ran away from who I am, the things that we represented, the things that we identified with. We didn't see it on TV. We didn't talk about it in school. Naturally, as a kid, you want to identify with everyone else is identifying with, right? For a quick insight of how my childhood was, we didn't celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas. I wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. I want to be like the other kids so I could come back from vacation and tell them how great it was.

Phu's aunt supported his father's side of the family by mastering and selling a version of this fish cake and tapioca noodle soup. Photo by Dylan James Ho and Jeni Afuso.Fish sauce, obviously, is absolutely critical to Vietnamese cooking. How can we distinguish between a good fish sauce and one that may be inferior?

It must have also been difficult, this layer of hiddenness with your parents, the fact that they didn't really want to talk about their experiences in Vietnam, and the trauma they went through leaving and the struggle to get to the US. Was there a through-line that you experienced about their past through the food?

One hundred percent, all people of war have PTSD, right? There's no person of war that comes out of it unscathed. There's a heavy weight that's on their shoulders, and because there's a weight on their shoulders, usually the experiences that they go through are oftentimes horrific. The way my parents digested that was they were silent about it because they didn't want to relive those horrific experiences. And the way that translated to me was that I didn't know anything about my parents, right? For me to respect myself and understand where I'm going in life, I need to know where I come from.

As I got older, I got more curious. And the only place I got insights to my parents' childhood, to their memories, or what they thought, or how they fell in love, which humanizes the element of your parents. I got insights of that with my mom growing up just with cooking and ingredients, because ingredients would trigger these food memories that were tied to these other elements and other sides of my parents that I didn't see or didn't understand or didn't know. 

You worked in fine dining, and when you still had that bifurcated situation about sort of having respect for this food tradition that you came from that was played against this sort of idealized image of what is good or bad in a fine dining kitchen. Could you talk about when that began to reconcile a bit for you, and when you began to value your parents' experience and how it started to become more integrated in how you cooked and how you saw cooking?

I think my eyes really opened when I really started to work for an amazing mentor, an amazing woman named Suzette Gresham, who is the chef and owner over at Acquerello. I think it's 30 plus years, two Michelin stars cooking progressive Italian food, or Italian cuisine, regional specific. They were doing that at a time where Italian cuisine was only afforded for places where it was just spaghetti, meatballs, pizza and lasagna, and just having those deep conversations with my chef and the evolution of Italian cuisine and the work that they put in to try to bring that narrative forward here in the United States, specifically in San Francisco, really opened my eyes to sort of the prejudices that we learn and the lenses that we learn from and undoing those lenses and doing the work to I try to avoid the term elevate but honor ingredients, no matter where they come from. That was a place where I was able to really micro focus on food narrative, food stories and histories, which I'm a huge fan of. 

If you want to backtrack it further than that, there's a cookbook that I really fell in love with. It's called A Mediterranean Feast by Clifford A. Wright. I know this, yes, you know that book, but my excitement for that book is that, you know, it gave a deeper lens to what Mediterranean cuisine is, or what European cuisine is and including the North African Muslim Moors and Roman Empire and everything in between. And learning that Madrid itself, the capital of Spain, is a Muslim name, right? And looking at things and giving credit to things, cuisines, cultures, traditions, for what they truly are and not what we prefer them to be.

Phu's parents met at a market on Phú Quốc Island, where his father sold fish. Photo courtesy of Tu David Phu.

I would love it if we could talk about your pantry staples. You talk about how looking at somebody's pantry is so intimate, and how it's more allowable than, let's say, looking at someone's medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Let's talk about some specific items. Tell me what you use dried corn silk for.

My mother used to buy corn and in shucking the husk off, she'd always ask me to save the corn silk. The corn silk can be steeped into, can be dried and steeped to make a tea and or it could be cut into shorter threads to throw into a stir fry. And even though it's mostly fiber, it's no different from what the Japanese do with okara. Okara is just a leftover pulp from making soy milk. Even though all the protein and most of the protein nutrition has been trained out of that and pressed out of that, okara is high in fiber, which is great for your diet, but also it's a filler.

That's a great question. Just like balsamic vinegar, it shouldn't have anything else besides grapes, right? It's basically, it's basically fortified wine turned into vinegar. Same thing with fish sauce. It should just have sea salt and anchovies. Anything else in there is a flavor enhancer and or filler. If you want to judge the quality of fish sauce, it should only have two ingredients, no more, no less. 

You said at the beginning of our conversation that your family is from Phú Quốc off the coast of Cambodia and Thailand. How does the food from the island contribute to the overall canon of Vietnamese cuisine?

Phú Quốc is the Sicily of Vietnam. We are so region specific. A lot of Sicilians will tell you that they're not Italian. They're Sicilian. It's not so much true in terms of what we would call ourselves in Phú Quốc, but it's true for the food. It's very region specific. We are well renowned for our fish cake. In addition to our fish sauce, our fish cake, we make it with king mackerel, which has a beautiful bite, texture, high fat, and oils. It's part of the mackerel family. And when you make it into fish cake, the texture and taste of it is a cross between pork or chicken, because it's so high in protein the way it translates into my family. 

When they make fish cake, they make a pork base or fish broth base soup with it that is mixed in with tapioca noodles. So think al dente bite noodles, lots of fresh herbs, bean sprouts and fish cake. Every time I go back, I have like five bowls a day. So I'm a big guy. For reference, I'm like 6’1” and 230 pounds. A lot of food can go in my stomach. 

Your parents met at a fish market. I would imagine the ocean is very relevant to your background.

One hundred percent. You know, where my parents are from, Phú Quốc Island, a lot of people refer to that as the Fiji of Vietnam. Is very beautiful, very gorgeous. Blue beaches, white sand, extremely gorgeous, untouched. So in every aspect of our meals, anytime we talk about food, anytime we talk about mental health, if I'm not feeling well, my parents ask me first thing, have you seen the ocean today? That's a very common statement in my family. 

In addition to that, in terms of food, you know, we're always using fish sauce. Our default for protein is always fish and that always was translated in my home in Oakland, California. I think naturally so, because my dad and mom met at a fish market. My dad was selling my mother fish. My dad was like this beefy, hunky, young guy that was selling fish at the market. And you know, he tried to woo my mom by selling her fish, by the way, love that, right? My dad became a career-long fishmonger here in San Francisco Bay Area, at Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf, he was able to allocate parts that weren't used, bring them home and nourish and supplement our meals, and they made amazing meals with it. A lot of salmon, a lot of tuna.

Do you have a preferred fish that you enjoy cooking with? And what's your favorite way to prepare it?

I love oily fish. I've always appreciated oils and fats. I didn't like this fish as much as when I was young, but I like it as an adult more and more. I love mackerel in all its shapes and forms, and I love sardines. I love them.

"Ingredients would trigger these food memories that were tied to these other elements and other sides of my parents that I didn't see or didn't understand or didn't know," says chef Tu David Phu. Photo by Micah Diele Photography.

Tell us a preparation that you love with sardines, for example.

One of my favorite dishes that is prepared with sardines is actually a recipe that's in the cookbook. It's a recipe called giäm nhung, and that means fish dipped in vinegar. It's one of the last meals I had with my maternal grandfather before he passed. That's one dish to heat every day until he passed away, and he lived into his, I believe, his mid -90s. Very healthy, very delicious. 

But because sardines have good amount of fish oil, even when they're fresh, we would debone the sardine, take the sardine filet and then dip it in this beautiful seasoned vinegar, lemongrass, ginger, makrut lime leaves, like very heavily seasoned coconut vinegar with lots of aromatics, very fresh, very bright, and dip it in there as if it were a shabu shabu for about 30 seconds. That flavor in that vinegar would run off onto the sardine filet. It would take the vinegar as a seasoning, and then we would take it and make a summer roll, rice paper, fresh rice paper, summer roll with it, dip it in some spicy fish sauce. I think that's the most delectable thing, right? That to me, that's like the equivalent of sushi, right?

That sounds so good. What was the tipping point for you that made you, after a decade, move away from Michelin star cooking and get to making food that was more meaningful to you?

I was working in a restaurant as an executive chef. I won't name the business, because it's not my intention to crucify any business, but there's just an incident where I inherited an inventory from a previous chef who was white that had a heavy inventory of Asian ingredients, and in my intention to be logical and just use up existing inventory, not being intentional to cook Asian food, the owner came to me and told me that this is not an Asian restaurant. We're cooking California cuisine here, and I'm not going to allow you to put these things on the menu. In my argument, I was saying that I had no intention to be more Asian than I already was. It was just my intention to use up the inventory ingredients. It was in that moment, I started to feel this heavy sense of erasure, was that people wouldn't judge me for who I am or what I am, but what I look like, and I can never get away from what I look like. 

And in that moment, I thought about my parents, and I felt that because this heavy sense of erasure was kind of trickling through me and and I was going through this moment of questioning my identity and my story, and not being able to run away from what I look like and how I am presented into the world. I went into this spiral of like, wanting to question who I am and learn where I came from. It naturally just kind of tail back to what my parents' story wasn't and because they didn't have any photos and there was PTSD, and they didn't want to tell they had this fear of reliving their past experiences, I felt like we didn't exist. And that's what I mean by erasure. 

When you're lost and you don't know where you fit in society, and you look at your colleagues and your friends and you see that they have family stories, and you don't have a family story. So what's your purpose in life? How do you fit in with the rest of human history? How do you fit in with the rest of the human family race? Why do you celebrate things? Why do you fall in love? Why do you wake up the next morning? 

I had all of that happen shortly after that incident, and from there on, I quit my job shortly after that, and I started doing these experimental pop ups that were paying homage to my memories with my mother and having this open dialog with diners — about what she did, how she cooked, and sort of our stories. And it was an amazing success, because people would come, not because I'm biased, by the way, not because the meal was amazing, but I was sharing these untold stories, and we would have everyone from, you know, immigrant, refugees from all different sorts of backgrounds, beyond Vietnamese sympathize over the stories about family, even American Vietnamese war veterans crying to me and having guilt because they've been part of the war. But seeing the human, seeing the human side of, you know, Vietnamese families, right? And vice versa.

Tu David Phu reconciles his family's trauma with his perceptions of what foods and ingredients were deemed worthy in "The Memory of Taste."  Photo courtesy of 4 Color Press.