Acclaimed Oakland-bred chef Tu David Phu pays tribute to people and places in his new cookbook.
“I’m a citizen of the earth with responsibilities to enact. To do that, I have to lead with human compassion. It’s found in the good people I admire and work with…,” says Phu, who will appear Sept. 21 at Calicraft Brewing Company in Walnut Creek to promote “The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between” (Penguin Random House, 240 pages, $32.50).
The book, co-written by Bay Area columnist and restaurant critic Soleil Ho, includes recipes for 85 Vietnamese and Viet American dishes, photographs by Jeni Afuso and Dylan James, and essays that reflect Phu’s Vietnamese, Khmer and Chinese ancestry as well as honors his parents. It profiles Phú Quoc, the island in Vietnam from which his parents fled the Khmer Rouge as refugees in the 1970s.
His philosophy, he says, “comes from my parents. It’s me talking from not the most glorious places. It’s from working with marginalized farmers, as a mentor in San Quentin, and other places of learning. No matter who you’re engaging with, you weigh what’s reasonable. If I have any power, influence, or skill as a non-college, un-conventionally educated man who happens to be good with food, it’s from people who taught me to be a better storyteller.”
Phu, whose resume includes Michelin-cited restaurants Chez Panisse, Quince, Acquerello, Daniel Boulud, Breslin, Gotham Bar & Grill and Gramercy Tavern, strives to prepare affordable, accessible and delectable food via no-waste methodologies and regenerative practices.
He developed his signature Vietnamese-California cuisine through “Ăn,” a weekly pop-up dining experience, and gained national attention on Bravo’s “Top Chef” Season 15, among many pursuits and accolades.
An advocate for food justice, he has partnered with Eat Real, Smart Catch, Asian Health Services, Stanford Medicine’s Nourish Project and shared his knowledge and enthusiasm cooking with incarcerated people in San Quentin.
His greatest lessons came when cooking with his mother during a food insecure upbringing: “Hunger is one of the cruelest things you can impose on someone. I’m familiar with opening up a fridge, finding nothing, and my mother telling me to drink water because it would fill up my stomach. I know what it is to have only rice and to have eaten so much rice it blocked up my system,” he says.
From his mother, a seamstress, and his father, a fishmonger, he received not just intense love, but techniques for making something to eat out of nearly nothing, or food most people toss as waste: heads, bones, scraps of seafood and lesser cuts of meat.
Relying on centuries-old wisdom in the use of spices and sauces is critical.
“I’d boil down the two most precious of those lessons as the use of peppercorns and our fish sauce, a Southwest Vietnamese thing. Vietnamese black peppercorns grow in a clay-like soil, comparable to Cambodian peppercorn. My mom refrigerated peppercorns so they didn’t go rancid, but to bring out the pungent, linger-on-the-tongue flavor, you have to toast them and course-grind only enough for one day, always fresh. The stuff you buy at the grocery store, it tastes like dust.”
Fish sauce sold in stores is a commodity by-product, packed with fillers such as yeast and salt to cover up the lack of anchovies, according to Phu: “I grew up with sauce that was only anchovies and salt. It’s deeper, darker, bold; almost like an aged scotch you need to make bloom with water to release the bouquet. I don’t drink spirits, but people soften scotch with water. My mom used coconut water, which made our fish sauce glorious.”
Classic Vietnamese dishes in “Memory of Taste” include Broken Rice, Lemongrass Paste, Everyday Fish Sauce and Phu favorites Rice Paper Spring Rolls and Hot Pot–Style Salmon Head Sour Soup. There’s also an emphasis on seafood.
A chapter called “We Are Inauthentic as Hell” features Caramelized Pan-Fried Pork Chops and Stir-Fried Bitter Melon and Eggs. Phu’s mother’s garden spurred Pomegranate Seeds with Chile Salt and a lovely-to-behold Banana Flower Salad.
Phu traveled to Phú Quoc three times in 2021. And in 2022, a whirlwind trip had him visiting farms on the mainland, including a co-op of women farmers who were practicing regenerative farming to encourage mangrove growth.
“Learning the backstories of ingredients we were using meant understanding the agricultural history,” he says.
Accompanied by a colleague whose father died prematurely of leukemia in his 50s due to contact with Agent Orange in the military, Phu and his companion wept when visiting a farm near where the father had been stationed. Phu says, “My grandfather was sprayed with phosphorus and died instantly. We were crying because both of us had lost family members and connected out of that destruction.”
With his first cookbook featuring recipes and traditions from his parents, Phu says, “They come from areas and people left destroyed. I cook from childhood memory and my mother’s spot-on creativity, in which there’s so much genius. For example, she made soup that’s a celebration of all the different kinds of sour and has an aromatic broth to poach the fish in, so it doesn’t get oily.”
Avoiding high-brow or “we’re cool” vibes in his writing, Phu notes the importance of crediting women. He says, “Men need to be better allies, give credit where it’s due. Too often in the chef field, they reserve credit for themselves. But food across cultures is matriarch-based. Instead, tell stories about women’s innovation when there’s no butcher shop, little money, or they’re reliant on a food bank. If I talk about these flavors, I have to trace back to where they came from, women like my mom.”
In continued efforts to achieve greater equity, Phu says, “The food space should be a place where there’s the betterment of progression: Be open, invest in good food, kids’ nutrition, crediting women, communal inclusion.”
He says restaurants should be community spaces where people unwind and trust they will be nourished. Kitchen and front-of-house staff must be treated with kindness and respect: “I have trauma triggers from my past and what I experienced cooking in kitchens. Pop-ups allowed me to connect with people, and especially from Vietnam veterans who would come, hug me, cry, unload their guilt. I learned the power of food to inoculate. That’s why I love cooking.”
In “Memory of Taste,” Phu highlights Vietnamese restaurants in Oakland he admires. Places where he dines have in common the stories of the people who own, work at or frequent them. Many of those people have become friends, emphasizing Phu’s certainty that food is not a recipe and understanding culture is not exclusively an academic endeavor.
Even so, he’s pleased with the book’s information on sustainability and opportunities for scientists and researchers to apply it. He says, “I learned that food experts don’t offer solutions, they listen. Because data changes, the spectrum of sustainability changes. The world, people, trends, climate anything can change in a blink. Success isn’t quantifiably fixed, the needle’s always moving. Food choices are a moral compass, and cooking is thinking about community. What I love about food and culture is that people will be studying, changing, and enjoying them for decades to come.”
Calicraft Chef’s Night Market with chef Tu David Phu’s cookbook release runs from 4:30 to 10 p.m. Sept. 21 at Calicraft Brewing Company, 2700 Mitchell Drive, Walnut Creek. Admission is free. Visit cheftu.com for details about “The Memory of Taste” tour events.
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