BECOMING A RESTAURATEUR

Chef Lily Hoa Nguyen, Founder & Executive Chef at Vietnamese Foodies takes readers on her fulfilling startup journey

Before moving to Dubai, Founder & Executive Chef at Vietnamese Foodies, Chef Lily Hoa Nguyen, worked in marketing for ten years in Vietnam, with Unilever in the household care department, L’Oreal in product marketing and various other project management roles. In 2012, she left Vietnam and moved to Istanbul with her husband, and after months of being unsuccessful in her search for work, decided to open up a small cooking class for people who wanted to learn how to cook authentic Vietnamese Food. These classes became popular very quickly, through word of mouth and online. Here Chef Nguyen discusses her journey to becoming a restaurateur in Dubai.

Your passion for cooking started from the tender age of 5, tell us more about how you got into this field.

I have always loved cooking, ever since I was very young. I am from a family of six and am one of four girls. In post-war Vietnam, it was all about making ends meet, which meant that my mother worked three jobs and my father was a sailor who spent long periods of time at sea. Us four daughters took care of the household chores while our parents worked, and somehow, cooking always seemed to fall to me. I loved it. I enjoyed cooking and feeding people, nurturing them with food. It came very naturally to me and when I had the opportunity as an adult to share my love of food and in particular, Vietnamese food through the cooking classes, I started to explore it more and thought that this was a good place for me to start as a career.

Tell us more about your experience when you got to Dubai.

When we first arrived in Dubai in 2016, the first thing we did was to look for a family home that had a kitchen that was big enough - and interactive enough - to continue with the cooking classes that I had originally started in Istanbul. Soon after we found the kitchen, I resumed my cooking classes which, like in Istanbul, also became very popular with classes twice a week and on weekends. It got to a point where it wasn’t viable to have them at our house so after a chance encounter, seeing a newly vacated restaurant in JLT Cluster D, we decided to open a restaurant in 2018.

How was Vietnamese Foodies conceptualized?

Vietnamese Foodies started really both out of circumstances but also through my love of sharing Vietnamese cuisine with others through the cooking classes, first in Istanbul and then later in Dubai. Throughout the journey of the cooking classes, we gained over ten thousand followers on Facebook which demonstrated, along with the popularity of our classes, that there was a wider interest in Vietnamese cuisine.

Throughout our opening and now, over four years later, Vietnamese Foodies was and will always be about providing a place where those who love Vietnamese food - both cooking and also enjoying it - can come together to share authentic, delicious food. It started within my family in Vietnam and extended to my own family as an adult and now, we’re able to share nourishing food with families across the emirate through our five locations.

Did you face any challenges?

We faced many challenges when we started, partly because I didn’t come from a traditional F&B background, so it was a very steep learning curve for me as everything was new. For example, I had no idea about how many customers were going to come, how many wait staff we needed, and how to use the POS system, just to name a few. We had many hits and misses at our first location in JLT, but most memorably, after our third day of being open, we had to close as we ran out of food and had to address all of the issues that happened in our first three days including issues with our POS system, food being delivered in the wrong sequence to the wrong table. We took a pause to address what could have been an ongoing issue, but what we saw was an opportunity to ensure that we got it right from the start. From that point, we started to build systems and processes, and what has ultimately become a highly skilled and professional team who support me to maintain the highest service and food quality across our outlets.

Any tips for first-time restaurateurs?

Being a first-time restaurateur in Dubai is a very challenging task. Beyond knowledge of customers, your target audience, and how to run a restaurant vitally, you need a good eye for the market and to see where the opportunity lies. This could be a very niche market in a niche area, where unmet demand is hiding. If you are the one who can meet that demand better than anyone else, you’ll be able to succeed.

What are your plans for the brand in the next 5 years

Since we opened our first location and testament to the team that we have grown, our customers have been messaging us asking us to open in newer locations, closer to them. These requests have come from customers both in the UAE and across the region, which is truly humbling.

It is difficult to say what the next five years will hold in this current situation but we’re planning more expansion in the UAE and beyond. We’re open to collaborations with partners and F&B operators to bring the brand regional. What is sure for us, is that our vision to bring more authentic, healthy and delicious Vietnamese Food to more people remains.