Chef Luke Nguyen: 'I Had A Very Dark Childhood'

It’s a high-risk business, isn’t it?Very high-risk. In Australia, we’re passionate about what we do, but the profit margin is not great. If you’re running a business at 5 to 10 per cent profit, you’re winning. That’s not a lot of return for all the hard work and hours you put in.

You have eight restaurants and businesses across Australia and Vietnam. Surely that constitutes an empire. How much do you earn across all of them?I … actually don’t know how to work that out! [Laughs] As for empire-building, you do have entrepreneurs and chefs where the goal is to create an empire: 20 restaurants across 20 sites in five years. For me, everything’s been really organic. I’ve been given opportunities and say, “Yeah, let’s try that!”

As a kid, you worked every day in the family restaurant in south-west Sydney’s Cabramatta. Some kids in that situation would run away from the industry. What made you stay?Yeah, when people ask me what got me into the industry, it was obviously slave labour. [Laughs] Of course, I hated working in the restaurant when I started. You want to be riding your bicycle around the block with your friends, right? But when I hit around 11 or 12, I was like, “Wow, I really love this.” I was raised in Cabramatta, and loved going to the markets and buying fresh, premium ingredients, then cooking and slow-cooking, learning that balance of flavour. When I was 23, I thought, “I want to stop talking about and dreaming about it. Just do it.”  I opened Red Lantern in 2002 with $100 in my pocket.

You opened Red Lantern in inner-Sydney Surry Hills with your sister, Pauline, and her husband, Mark Jensen. Is it a good idea to mix family and business?For us, it was great. My family – like a lot of Asian families – don’t talk very much about emotions or experiences. We communicate all these things – showing love and how much we respect each other – through food. If I want to see my parents, I invite them to the restaurant, or to our homes, and we cook and we chat and we laugh. Through the restaurant, our family has become a whole lot closer.

Say you’ve unlimited funds to serve anything for a banquet. What are you going to serve?Probably all the dishes I grew up eating, but trick them up. For example, a really beautiful bowl of pho, the first dish I cooked that my parents taught me, because it’s close to my heart. But I’ll shave fresh truffles through it; it’s a wonderful combination. Then some beautiful pipis with a nice homemade XO sauce with dried scallops, trick that up as well with some caviar through it.