(upbeat music) - [Danielle] America's love affair with Asian food hasn't just meant new dishes and unfamiliar ingredients.

It's also brought a new burst of entrepreneurial energy, as Asian chefs and restaurateurs strive to make their mark.

In this episode of Lucky Chow, I'll meet three of these entrepreneurs and learn the secrets of their success.

A young executive who's using his Thai auntie's recipes to take the fast casual giant Chipotle in new directions.

A godfather of Asian cooking who applies the lessons he learned in the fashion and software industries to his James Spirit Award winning restaurant.

And a former entertainer once known as the Vietnamese Madonna, who's reinvented herself as the Bahn Mi Queen of Southern California's Little Saigon.

Join me to see how they cook up big business while honoring their culinary roots.

(upbeat music) Here in Los Angeles on a busy West Hollywood street, a pair of side-by-side restaurants are testament to what vision, planning, and meticulous execution can accomplish.

For years, Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle, wanted to take his massively successful concept, healthy fast food made from responsibly sourced high-quality ingredients, and extend it beyond burritos and tacos.

That idea became a reality when Tim Wildin, the company's director of concept development took his boss on a research trip to Thailand.

He showed him that fast casual was already a way of life in Southeast Asia, where fresh, healthy, quickly prepared food is never far away.

The result was ShopHouse, a growing chain where Tim oversees the design and decor, based on the traditional shophouses of cities like Bangkok, Hanoi, and Singapore, and a fast fusion menu that makes Asian flavors and ingredients as accessible as a Quarter Pounder.

- So the way the menu works is you choose one thing off each section of the line.

First we have our Napa cabbage and baby kale salad, chilled rice noodles, jasmine rice, or we have our brown rice.

You're gonna select one of those.

Then we have our pork and chicken meatballs, steak laab, chicken satay, and then our organic tofu.

Again, select one.

- What is that, charred corn?

- This is our charred corn.

It's got a little bit of garlic, some sesame seeds, it's really mild.

We've got a little bit of the sweetness from the corn.

It's really great.

So we have first our spicy red curry, then we have our medium green curry, our peanut sauce, and these are all three kind of considered curries or coconut milk-based.

They've got different levels of spices.

Then we have our Tamarind Vinaigrette.

That one's sweet and tangy, it's really good.

We have our pickled vegetables, papaya slaw and herbs.

This one's more sweet and sour.

This one's got a little bit of peanut in there.

It's got a lot of flavor.

And then herbs, we have cilantro and Thai basil.

- Yeah, it's really good.

- Yum, everything thing looks really good.

How did you start ShopHouse, what was the idea behind it?

- I was working in the marketing department for Chipotle, and I was working on a number of projects really closely with Steve Ells, our CEO.

And I kept hearing Steve say that Chipotle's model would work with any kind of cuisine.

And simplistically, I understood that to mean that it means buying great ingredients, cooking them right in front of people, and serving them in a way that's totally customizable and allows them to have whatever they want, right?

So, that's how I understood the model, and just a light bulb went off and I thought, oh my God, Southeast Asian food, Thai food specifically would work so well in this format.

And the reason I thought of it is because I was born in Thailand.

I came here when I was little, but I'd spend every summer back home in Bangkok, and growing up just surrounded by food.

My aunts and my mom, I think Thai people in general really like, food is so much a part of the day.

It's like when you're having breakfast, you're talking about lunch, and when you're having lunch you're talking about dinner and breakfast the next day.

So I just grew up with that.

And food there, food in Thailand, is really everywhere.

You kind of can't walk down the sidewalk without running into street vendors, or shophouse restaurants that spill out into the street.

And many of them work sort of just like we do, really, I mean in terms of people take rice or noodles and different curry toppings and things like that.

So I saw a real huge opportunity, especially in the Asian fast food space in America, I think there's so much room for improvement.

And especially with Southeast Asian flavors.

So one of the great things about the design of the kitchen at ShopHouse is that it's completely open.

And that allows guests to see exactly what we're prepping and cooking for them.

And you know, it's food that obviously takes hours to prepare, but it just takes seconds to serve.

So putting the woks up front right near the service line was very intentional, because that's like, that's the sexy, you know, it's the hot flame and it's so nice and the crews are rocking it out.

It's amazing fresh vegetables.

I mean, if you walk around the kitchen, you know, if you look here, you know, all these refrigerated drawers, it's just so much fresh produce.

These are seasonal squash, tofu, our meats.

So basically everything is out for people to see and trust and know that we're cooking.

- [Danielle] Tim puts everything out where customers can see it and trust it, including the strongly flavored sauces that gives the ShopHouse bowls their kick.

- So this is called Nam Prik Pao, it's a chili jam.

- Nam Prik Pao.

- Nam Prik Pao.

And it's quite thin, you'll see.

Traditionally it'll be quite thick, but we thin it out so that we can, so we have such high heat in the wok, it reduces quite nicely.

What this is tamarind, shallots, garlic, Thai chiles, palm sugar, and a little oil.

- I wanna try my turn at the wok.

- Awesome, you ready?

- Yeah, I think so.

- Okay, let's toss this in here.

And give it a few clicks and you coat them in the oil.

So you want to pull instead banging it down.

Alright, we wanna pull it toward us, right, just pull it toward us.

Pull it toward you.

- How'd you learn how to do that?

- I don't know, I guess it's in my blood.

- It's kind of like doing hot yoga, except that afterwards you've got green beans and roasted chile jam to show for it.

I'm curious, and you don't dumb down the flavors at all?

- Why don't you taste it and see.

- Okay.

I'm amazed at actually how spicy it is and actually how unsweetened it is.

You know, you would think that there's be flavor the farther you play up.

- I mean, there's some sweetness in this from palm sugar.

And again we use palm sugar and not white sugar, right, 'cause it's traditional.

There's a sweetness and a sourness from the tamarind.

There's the crispy bits from fried shallots.

There's that umami from garlic and salt.

- The research for this must have been really fun and involved lots of eating.

- It was born out of dinner parties in New York and a trip to Thailand and Singapore, and just a general love of food.

I mean, Chipotle is a food company, and so they saw the promise of this style of food.

I'm half-Thai and I've been cooking Thai food and Thai food is not the most measured thing.

It's intense, it's herbs, chiles, garlic, and shallots.

And whenever I've cooked, and whenever I throw dinner parties, I'm not measuring or following the recipe.

- It's like a pinch of this, a pinch of that-- - Yeah it's just tasting, and oh no it needs more fish sauce, oh no it needs more lime, oh no more garlic.

You can't do that with a chain restaurant, right?

So what we've done in working with Nate Appleman, who's a really acclaimed chef, he really taught me how to move these ideas for food into production.

So we have recipe cards.

But the strongest thing that we do is we have an amazing culture which allows employees to really sort of make decisions on the fly within terms of seasoning and in terms of tasting and in terms of thinking about food critically.

And it's sort of become one of the most rewarding aspects of my job is to see kids come in here, and it's just a job, and turning into a career, and really fall in love with food and tasting critically.

For example, when cooking on the wok, you know, we never set a timer, or things like that, that just doesn't exist in this kind of cooking.

So we tell them to look for things like char and smoke, or when the aroma changes, sort of dialing that in.

It's hard at first, but I feel like we're sort of perfecting it.

You know, the food is really sort of the last thing that ever suffers at ShopHouse.

- How has ShopHouse evolved in the four years that you've been in business?

- Right now it's really about concentrating on what we have and sort of making it better.

I mean, how ShopHouse has evolved is really sort of constantly looking back along our supply chain and figuring out how we can buy better and better and more consistent in my ingredients.

It's less than about developing new menu items or a limited time only offerings, which that really is the fast food model, right?

I mean, you think about fast food and our competitors out there, they rely on the next thing, which people then flock to the restaurant to try, and then they don't go anymore.

And then they have another limited time only thing.

We don't do that.

I mean, it's the kind of food that you could eat sort of every day, I think.

- [Danielle] Because of Tim's vision and his years of hard work developing the concept, I can walk into a bright, airy space in West Hollywood and within minutes be eating a meal that reminds me of the flavors of the Thai night market.

ShopHouse is Tim's baby and there's a family resemblance.

He and his restaurant both combine American ingenuity with the very Asian obsession with food.

(upbeat music) On Beach Boulevard in Westminster, the sights have me wondering where I am.

Is this California or have I stumbled into a corner of Vietnam?

The names of the supermarkets, restaurants, and salons in the suburban strip mall tell a story of displacement and immigrant striving.

And it's here in Orange County's Little Saigon that I'm meeting Lynda Trang Dai.

She's a former singer whose sexy costumes and provocative performances earned her the nickname the Vietnamese Madonna.

And now that she's embarked on a second career as a restaurant owner, she still looks the part.

There's a backdrop of really popular Vietnamese stars in the background.

Are these all your fans?

- My friends.

- Your friends?

They all visited you here?

- Oh yeah.

- The menu at Lynda Sandwich offers Vietnamese favorites like pho, banh mi, and sweet thick coffee, served with a side of sex appeal.

I'm so intrigued, I mean, how did you decide to open a Vietnamese celebrity cafe?

- I didn't start out with this restaurant, I started out as an entertainer, you know, Vietnamese entertainer.

I was so blessed, I never knew that I got, you know, so much support and got so successful, you know, to my people.

Thank you so much, you know.

But because of that, because of all the support and all the love they've given me, making me so big and then so unexpected, truly I love most is my addiction is shopping and eating.

So, you know, eating.

And I love to eat so much that everywhere I go, I would just throw my luggage at the hotel and just head straight out and look for the best restaurant there is, you know?

'Cause I love to eat so much.

But my most favorite food is Vietnamese, I have to say it.

Because we have so many different kind of dishes.

We have at least like a hundred different kinds of dishes and more, because we have the North Vietnamese, to the Central, all the way down to the South.

And every city, every part of Vietnam is different kind of food.

- [Danielle] If this is what Vietnamese pop singers eat when they're on the road, then they're eating a lot better and healthier than their American counterparts.

- From the outside, it's just seeing all the patios to all the way to the back room, I did everything on my own, 'cause I really love to do interior designing, like decor, you know, I love it so much.

Right from the chair, the couch.

I designed this whole place, the wall, the color theme, everything.

When they come here, I want them mainly to enjoy the food.

But when they want to hear me sing, it's better if they go to my concert.

So I am now going to make a Lynda special.

As you can see, that's one of our main special sandwiches.

So, it's a French bread, and I'll cut it up.

And this is my secret recipe, Lynda sauce, which, you know, it's like mayonnaise.

When you eat it has to be good.

So it has to be perfect.

So I have to make sure it's spread out evenly.

- [Danielle] So what is that you're putting on now?

- And this one is banh tay as you can tell.

And then this is the coconut pork.

That goes on there.

I made it different from everywhere else's.

We put a little shredded chicken on there, too, you see?

So the chicken, we have the cucumber.

And then this is the hot pepper, the chile.

And then we put the chile on here.

And this is very, very different from everywhere else.

Nobody puts this, but to me, onion is really flavorful.

We have this very famous sort of meat sandwiches.

This daikon vegetable.

Very interesting.

- Daikon carrot.

- Carrots, yes, and mix in, you know it's vegetable.

So this is very popular for Vietnamese sandwiches.

You put these cilantro on, and this gives it a good taste, too.

So that's the Lynda Special.

See, it's five star, and it really tastes like five stars.

I made sure.

- I love banh mi because, I mean it's probably the most well-known Vietnamese.

- Sandwich.

- Well food, finch, if you wanna call it.

But I also just, I mean it's born of such history.

You know, the French call it bloodization of Vietnam.

- I would say it's Vietnamese, but it's influenced by the French is because of the baguette.

- [Danielle] Right, and it's such an authentic fusion cuisine.

- [Lynda] Right, you know, and it tastes so good.

I prefer this over a hamburger any day.

- [Danielle] Thank you, I'm gonna dig into this.

- [Lynda] Okay great, I'm glad.

- [Danielle] Do you consider yourself an entertainer or an entrepreneur or both?

- Both.

- [Danielle] Lynda's entrepreneurial spirit means she has less time these days to spend on the stage.

But if it gives us a good banh mi, I'd say it's worth it.

(upbeat music) From a humble banh mi shop in a strip mall, I've traveled to San Francisco's Ferry Building, a bustling temple to California's artisanal food culture.

I'm here to visit one the market's main attractions, a Vietnamese restaurant that has set a new standard for sophisticated American cooking and was named the Outstanding Restaurant in America in the 2014 James Beard Awards.

Its chef, Charles Phan, was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1977, just in time to fall in love with the pioneers of California cuisine, like Chez Panisse and Zuni Cafe.

But as a child of immigrants, he tried a few more practical careers before he found his way into the restaurant business.

- Like most Asian family, my dad was, I wanna be an artist, I wanna be a potter.

- Oh did you?

- He was very upset so, I instead of Cooper Union I chose Berkeley to do architecture so I can appease him.

So I was very much in the design and I just kinda, and also there are a lot of stereotyping of Asian not in the design field, you know, Asian being math and science.

Although, I should've been done math and science, I probably would become a millionaire by now.

So I ran a sewing shop for a little while.

- Did you, in the US or where?

- Yeah here, and I ran a sewing shop.

I started a men's line designing clothes at a retail store.

- Did you?

- So I went belly-up in the early 90, lost a lot of money.

People didn't pay us, we didn't pay, you know, so we go belly-up.

So we constantly, I mean, that's where all my business skill and learning about business come from.

After the garment business I went and worked for a software company and I just talked my way into this software.

I had no computer background.

So I said I'm gonna go start in the food business, yeah, I really like the food business.

So for eight months, I look around.

Back then there was no Craigslist.

It was just a wanted ad.

And I looked at it.

How many restaurants I wanna buy and it just, I couldn't buy them.

I remember there was a little shop in the Tenderloin and I begged this guy to let me have it.

He say no.

I was in downtown Oakland, a little coffee shop.

I mean, I can see the vision and I begged him to give it to me, they didn't.

They end up giving it to Starbucks.

And I boycotted for months, right?

I was like I won't drink this.

Anyway, that was my dream.

- So what do you think it takes to be an entrepreneur, because there's this idea that everybody wants to own their own business and be an entrepreneur, but I don't think everybody should be an entrepreneur.

- You won't know until you try.

I mean if you try five time and fail every time, you're completely broke, I think maybe it's time to give up.

Maybe you don't got it in you.

I remember opening Slanted Door and all I had was $20,000.

I negotiated the rent, 2000 bucks.

And I had put away and we raised some money, borrowed some money, and I just knew that all I had to do was just put away $24,000.

That's one year worth of rent.

I was living with my mom at the time.

So I didn't have a lot of expenses.

It was just me and my brother.

I convinced my brother quit his job to come work.

And just me and him, we didn't have dishwasher.

And we would just wait until pile gets up and one of us go back there, like either one of us cook or one of us wait table, it doesn't really matter.

A few months later, we got my aunt.

And finally I think on the fourth month I hired one dishwasher.

- Is your family still involved in your business?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that dishwasher I hired, the second dishwasher now is one of my sous chef that been with me ever since.

He's still here.

- And you probably made him a millionaire.

- Not quite, not yet, not yet.

But that's, entrepreneurship, I think you, it's better you do it before you have kids and get married, or married's fine because your wife could probably fend for herself.

You completely broke, maybe she can pay for, she can support you.

- [Danielle] In his latest venture, an American whiskey and oyster bar called Hard Water, Charles has moved away from Vietnamese cuisine.

It's the next step in an evolution that began in the early days at the Slanted Door, where he was determined to change the ways Americans thought about Asian restaurants.

- We were serving like $5 pot of tea in 1995, and that's just unheard of.

I mean, the spring roll was $4.

Imagine your tea cost more than your appetizer.

But we were selling these super expensive Chinese oolong that no one was doing.

And some customer comes in and gets upset because every Chinese restaurant they go to, they get free tea.

But I was just like no, we're not doing that.

- No, you really broke the mold.

And then, as well, I think something that you're really well known for as a chef is using local, sustainable seasonal ingredients, and crediting the purveyors on your menu, long before this whole movement became mainstream.

- Well, it start from growing up in a little town Da Lat in Vietnam.

I grew up with really good food.

I came here, and I remember coming here, I didn't like the butter here.

And it was just like, this is not butter.

I was so spoiled in Vietnam, I was eating French butter, cultured butter, and I come here, this is not butter to me.

And this is not tomato to me.

So, you know, pretty much a year after we open, we switched to all sustainable all-natural organic food.

And the fact that I was going to school in Berkeley, you know eating at the Cheese Board, you know, shopping at Monterey Market, and Berkelely Bowls.

So I'm kinda used to, and I knew that you had to buy ingredients.

And when I first opened, I would go down to the, I drive a Toyota T100.

This is like the first big truck they made.

And I would go down to the produce market and I would look at every box before I buy, and sometimes I want half a box.

Half a box, I buy enough just for three days.

I won't buy anything, and I literally, even when we're really small we were like crazy, nitpicky about ingredients.

And that's because I never really know anything else.

I never work in a kitchen before, and we didn't have no credit, they wanna fill out more credit.

I used to walk down to the produce market, big wad of cash, and it just like I was buying drugs or something, you know.

I always like very interested in learning from farmer and I knew that you just can't buy commodity.

But in the beginning I didn't know any better.

Like Shaking Beef was born from just being frugal.

In the early years, they were still cooking for airline and they cut the medallion for a filet, and the tail, they don't know what to do with it.

So I one day he say, "You wanna buy this stuff?"

It's like $2 a pound.

I mean filet, even back then it was like $9, 10 a pound, and you have 28% waste.

So this is clean filet for $2, that's just like a dollar more than hamburger meat, you know?

And that's how Shaking Beef was born.

But it's really about finding that ingredient.

And every year we would retest.

If we find a new beef guy, we rethink, we have blind tasting to see, you know, not only they had to be sustainable and natural, but also they have to taste good.

And I think over the year we build up values.

I love it when a Vietnamese family said, "My grandma actually love your restaurant."

When they say that it's just like, oh man.

Like you just knew that, okay-- - Stamp of approval.

- Yeah, stamp of approval because they know what is good and there's no, hopefully she didn't see how much the granddaughter pay for it.

(laughing) There's always the fad, you know, at one point was fusion.

And one point was nouvelle cuisine.

They come and go, but my idea's always been a really, you know, traditional like using culture and food as a way to tell the story.

So I feel like my job is bring a little piece of Vietnam and bring good food to you, but not to invent some new technique or new presentation.

I'm not gonna wow you with some new idea.

But this is more like really classic idea.

- Chefs who bask in the bright lights of New York or Los Angeles may have a higher national profile.

But Charles Phan belongs on the short list of those who combine creative cooking, business acumen, and a fierce work ethic with the willingness to take a risk.

Hard Water, a minimalist take on a New Orleans oyster bar demonstrates his adventurousness, though its focus on whiskey was also a canny reading of where hipster taste was heading.

Pretty good for a kid from Da Lat.

- When we have money here, we go buy a McDonald franchise.

And because the scale of this country is so vast that everything, you know, it just, it's hard for people to get noticed.

And that's probably why they buy franchises and put it in the middle of the mall.

- It's a lot easier than having to come ideate and come up with something new.

- But I think that you're missing out.

And of course there are lot more places now have more interesting food and trends is changing.

And I think that, but once you get people eat better, healthier, it doesn't matter they're like super wealthy or super poor, they're gonna figure out a way to eat well.

Just the Asian community have proven that.

- So how do you limit all the things you wanna do.

I think that's probably the better question, 'cause you have so many ideas and there's opportunities everywhere you look, really.

- I know.

I gotta still save time for my gym, unfortunately.

And the partying, so.

- Oh right.

- So that's what's stopping me.

(laughing) - [Danielle] From neighborhood joints to globe spanning franchises, dedicated entrepreneurs like Lynda Trang Dai, Charles Phan, and Tim Wildin, are driving the growth of Asian cuisine.

And that in turn is driving the growth of the American food industry.

They did it through hard work and vision, but perhaps most importantly by not losing sight of what's on the plate or in the bowl.

The fresh noodles, fiery curries, and tangy fish sauces that with the help of their entrepreneurial skills, get translated into new American classics.

(upbeat music)