‘We both want to push the envelope’: Vietnamese chef John Nguyen of Le Garcon Saigon in Hong Kong on his collaboration with Thai Dang of HaiSous Vietnamese Kitchen, in Chicago
- Thai Dang’s family fled Vietnam and spent some time in refugee camps before being settled in the US, where he realised his passion for cooking
- He opened a successful restaurant in Chicago but had to start over. He has a fan in Hong Kong Vietnamese chef John Nguyen, who invited him for a collaboration
Refugees fleeing Vietnam caused a humanitarian crisis in East Asia. Between 1975 and 1995, 800,000 Vietnamese, most of them fleeing oppression under the post-war government, arrived overseas by boat. Many others did not survive the journey, falling victim to pirates or violent storms.
While the scars of this upheaval have not all fully healed, it did spawn a Vietnamese diaspora and a multigenerational global community.
One member of this diaspora is chef Thai Dang, of HaiSous Vietnamese Kitchen in Chicago, who was recently in Hong Kong for a pop-up collaboration dinner with John Nguyen, chef of Le Garcon Saigon in Wan Chai.
“I’ve known Thai Dang for four years now. He came from Chicago for a HaiSous pop-up before the pandemic and we’ve been in touch ever since. I’ve always admired his work because we both want to push the envelope and innovate Vietnamese cuisine,” Nguyen says.
Dang’s story is one of resilience. Born in Vietnam, he left the newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam for the United States with his family when he was six years old. They ended up in the state of Virginia, where his father worked as a carpenter and his mother as a farmer. When Dang, the youngest of nine children, told his parents he wanted to be a chef, it was not well received.
Dang’s father felt that being a chef was undignified. “All he said was ‘Your mother cooks and your sister cooks’. But I was lucky my mother was very supportive. So I left home at 18 and enrolled in culinary school.