Nikki Tran is an accidental chef. When the chef didn’t show for the opening of the restauranteur’s third eatery in Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, she stepped into the kitchen. Using what became a signature ingredient changed Tran’s kitchen fortune by landing her on celebrity chefs’ favorites lists and on several noteworthy TV shows.
But that doesn’t mean that the serial entrepreneur with restaurants in her home country and the noteworthy Kau Ba, in Houston, Texas, hasn’t faced challenges. She’s experienced discrimination because of her race, gender, and sexual orientation. With a hearty helping of pandemic pressure, Tran has navigated obstacles with an outsider’s perspective, resolve, and an eye toward teamwork.
Opening her first restaurant happened on a whim. After a few years away from Saigon while working in the U.S., Tran returned to find a booming culinary scene in 2011. “There was a big food scene,” she remembers. “It seemed like a good thing, or an easy thing, to open a restaurant. It was the nicest mistake I’ve ever made.”
She found success and two years later was set to open her third restaurant. Then the chef she hired no showed — three hours before opening night. She stepped into the kitchen to cover because she had to. “I just remember being terrified. I had never cooked in a commercial kitchen before. The flame on the stove was really high and so powerful,” she recalls.
The restaurant had popular success because one of Tran’s famous friends frequented it, but the customers’ reviews were less than stellar. She overheard one customer remarking, “This is not for human consumption. This is for pigs.”
That comment lit a fire under her to not only become a better chef, but also to stand out. First, she decided to put down the MSG. That choice was unheard of in Vietnamese kitchens at the time. “I didn’t want to mask the taste of the food,” she says. “The ingredients I had were so good, they didn’t need much seasoning.” If she was going to season, she wanted to do so strategically.
Cajun seasoning she’d brought from the U.S. to Vietnam proved to be just the flavor hit she was looking for. It became especially crave-worthy when she began serving Vietnamese-style boils that substituted local river prawn for the traditional crawfish. “People went crazy,” she remembers.
Tran’s Viet-Cajun cuisine attracted top chefs to her Saigon doorstep, including Chris Shepherd who later convinced her to open a Houston restaurant. It also landed her appearances on Phil Rosenthal’s “Somebody Feed Phil” and David Chang’s “Ugly Delicious,” both Netflix shows. These features “boosted my career,” she says. “Before the pandemic, people would fly from all over the world to eat at my restaurant because they saw me on TV. It gave me more strength and confidence.”
Tran has called upon that confidence when she’s faced discrimination.
In Vietnam, female cooks are rare in commercial kitchens, and when they’re present, they immediate land at the salad station. It’s difficult, if not impossible, for them to progress up the kitchen hierarchy from there. “It’s not just in Vietnam. It’s in the U.S.,” she says. “Being a female chef is hard enough, but being a gay, female, Asian chef is even worse.”
She hires Asian male line cooks and says she constantly faces challenges as they balk at her leadership and fail to listen to her instructions.
“Men think women can’t be in a commercial kitchen because they aren’t strong enough or fast enough,” she says. “One guy in Vietnam said, ‘You can’t compete with me.’ But I’m not competing with him. I’m just trying to do my own thing.”
She’s done her own thing at Kau Ba, which she opened in 2018. The restaurant’s name literally means “third son,” but in her native language the connotation is much closer to “underdog”—a role Tran identifies with.
Her outsider nature has been a boon. “My background of not being a chef has helped me see things differently. It’s a disadvantage, but it’s also an advantage for me,” she says. A former employee at Micron, an American company that produces memory chips and flash drives, Tran believes her training has helped her be exacting in the kitchen.
She’s also drawn upon her roots. Her grandmother is one of her culinary inspirations. In post-war Saigon, the matriarch fed a family of 10 with the food she picked, caught, and, occasionally, purchased. “I started thinking of her and creating dishes from my childhood,” she says. “I wanted to bring out something other than pho, spring rolls, and Bahn mi. People already know them. They don’t even belong to the Vietnamese anymore because they’re so universal. I wanted to serve things I eat when I sit down with family at home — I just present it in a nicer way.”
The pandemic tested Tran’s identity as a chef and the tenacity she inherited from her grandmother. Prior to COVID-19, she was jet setting between her Houston and Saigon restaurants every few weeks. Since the pandemic descended, however, she’s been stuck in Vietnam due to travel restrictions and its exorbitant costs. She’s been coordinating with friends and a female cook to run Kau Ba in her absence.
The restaurant is holding its own. It’s not profitable, but it’s not losing money. She credits that in large part to customers whom she’s treated like family and who have remained loyal throughout the pandemic. She has also placed a premium on teamwork. “You have to communicate and let everyone on your team know, we’re struck in this together. We have to fight it together. It’s everybody’s problem to get through. We have to be united.”
She brings a global perspective to supply chain shortages — “Onions are like gold now,” she says of the situation in Vietnam — and to rising wages. “The table has turned. The employer has to treat employees better and value them more. It may be bad for our businesses [to pay more money], but it’s good in the way that the working class won’t have to work so hard to put food on their own tables. We have to see the bigger picture. And in the bigger picture, it’s going to be better.”
As many workers resign and restaurants shutter, Tran is hoping to inspire women to enter the food and beverage industry. She gives out free classes and consultations. “If you really love it, and you think you can tough it out, don’t let anyone stand in your way,” she advises.
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