CHEF PHAM BRINGS HOT CHICKEN CRAZE TO SALT LAKE CITY

If you’ve been keeping your eye on culinary trends, you might have noticed an abundance of Tennessee styled hot chicken concepts crop up over the last ten years. This is likely in no small part to Chef Viet Pham, founder of hot chicken restaurant Pretty Bird. With four locations and counting, Pretty Bird is bringing the heat to Salt Lake City through a perfected hot chicken recipe and culinary excellence.

Pretty Bird chef Viet Pham grew up around food—his parents were caterers and managed a number of catering trucks. As he got older, he found cooking was something he was good at and, most importantly, liked. “Friends would come over and I was always the one cooking, grilling, barbecuing—it’s something I’ve always really enjoyed,” he said.

Pham decided to take his new passion to the next level when he took a break from college to attend culinary school, which he described as a mixed experience. “I wasn’t being challenged and my peers didn’t seem to take school very seriously. The required internship, proved to be an invaluable experience. It’s where I really cut my teeth as a cook,” he said.“I’d never pushed myself harder in anything I’d done up until that point. I knew that being a chef at this higher level was what I wanted.”

When an opportunity opened up for him to open a restaurant in Provo, Utah, with a friend, he jumped on it—even though he’d never been to Provo. Although the partnership was tense, it set the stage for Pretty Bird; unsatisfied with the job, “on my free days I would drive to Salt Lake City, explore different spaces, and just fantasize about the kind of restaurant I would open.” It seemed to be kismet when he found a property for rent on Craigslist that the owner wanted to turn into a restaurant. “The next day, I was let go from my truly unsatisfying job, and I signed the lease soon after for my own place. “

The space became Forage, Salt

Lake City’s first tasting restaurant. The innovative restaurant gained Pham some media attention; enough to star in a number of Food Network shows, including Extreme Chef and Iron Chef America, and even beat Bobby Flay—twice. Eventually Pham ended up on Food Network Star, where the winners get a chance to host their own show. He was eliminated halfway through the season, but while still in LA he traveled to see a friend who was in the process of trying to convince a chef from Memphis to move out to LA to start a fried chicken restaurant. “This was 2012 and hot chicken wasn’t a thing then. When I tried that chicken, I knew immediately— I’m going to open up a fried chicken restaurant.”

From 2012-2018 Pham spent continued on page 126 continued on page 114