Is there a connection between the food you love to cook on these trips, outside of work, and the menu you serve at Anchovy and or Cá Cơm?
JY: I think Thi's got quite a broad palate; it goes the whole spectrum across cuisines, whereas Anchovy and Cá Cơm, they’re more Vietnamese focused, so there's a slight crossover, but we eat a lot of random bits and pieces.
Thi: It's also the produce, and connections with people you of meet on the road. Remember that lady who was so obsessed with her stone fruits?
JY: Oh yeah. She wouldn't let people touch them – she's a stone fruit purveyor [laughing]. But to buy her fruits, you can look at them, and you can point to what you want, and she’ll pick them for you. You're not allowed to touch them, but they're really, really good.
And how would you describe Anchovy and the menu there to someone who's never been?
Thi: [Turning to JY] You're a bit more articulate than I am.
JY: Anchovy and Cá Cơm are both platforms for us to showcase the techniques and culture behind Vietnamese cuisine itself. So, you wouldn't go to either of them looking for stereotypes of the cuisine.
Thi: But also, it's very personal, you know. It’s a very personal expression of what being Vietnamese Australian is.
JY: As a reflection of someone's Vietnamese heritage having grown up in Australia; influenced by anything and everything.
Thi: Right now, we've got a dish on, which is Bánh Tiêu, a fried, hollow sesame bread, a little bit sweet, a little bit chewy. And we've paired it with French onion dip. Because I just remember going to every single party in the Western suburbs where my friend's parents would just serve Cobb and French onion dip. It's quite personal. It's just a really nice balance between Vietnamese Australian kind of growing up. Which makes it, I guess, unique.
And Anchovy turned 10 this year! Are there any particular milestones or memories of that first decade that really stand out to you?
Thi: I think the milestone is actually turning 10.
JY: Yeah. In the current climate.
Thi: And I think another milestone is that we opened Cá Cơm in that time. And I think just having so many young chefs or front of house come through our doors over the years to see what it takes to open a small business. Now we've seen a handful of our staff go on to open their own version of an Anchovy, which is really nice to see that legacy continue on.
JY: I think if I were really to pick a milestone, as a business what we've hopefully been able to do, is it's somewhere where young Asians can come and work for us, and it's something that they're proud of. It’s not just lip service to heritage, we're actually actively doing something to showcase and promote Southeast Asian values and Southeast Asian culture.
I think over staff meal, for example, we talk about a lot of things that maybe they've thought about before in their periphery. But as a 10-year-old business, we found a lot more confidence in ourselves to say, okay, this is what we should be proud of and not let other people dilute it because of pricing or because you're embarrassed or whatever it is. And I think a lot of our younger staff of Southeast Asian background, they're drawn to us because of that, rightly or wrongly.
And to have that integrated into your workplace, especially as a young person, will be transformative to who that person becomes, the way their career goes. Bringing it back to the book – part cookbook, part memoir. Can you tell us a bit about what the project means to you?
Thi: We first got approached to write a Vietnamese cookbook, and it kind of transformed, moving closer to a memoir. It was a very personal journey for me. I've spent the last 10 years giving to the restaurant, giving to the team and not, I think, looking after myself mentally. And I think a lot of my past surfaced at the points I’ve been really, really stressed. And growing up in, you know, very unfortunate circumstances with domestic violence and child sex abuse, which in migrant communities is such a huge thing and is quite taboo to talk about it. When I was going through the hardest points in my early 20s, I didn't have or know of a story, or a person, that I could relate to in the same way. And I think when we spoke to our publisher about this idea of sharing the personal side of the restaurant and us, we thought we could, potentially, help at least one person.
JY: The publishers wanted a book on Thi’s food. And for me, it was really, really hard. It's hard to talk about Thi and her career and her food without talking about her past, because so much of it has influenced everything…At first the publishers were talking about having a ghost writer with Thi. But as the conversations went on, I ended up writing the book with Thi because it was just a lot, and by that point I'd known Thi for 10 years.
Thi: It’s very personal. And I don't know if a ghost writer can share in that, necessarily. I think you did a great job.
JY: Thanks. And then the book also formed a platform or an extension on which we could tell a lot of the aspirations of Anchovy that you don't necessarily get on the plate. It gave us a platform to articulate a lot of ideas and perspectives on a broad range of topics like the authenticity of cuisine and the pricing. In the Báhn Mì shop [Cá Cơm], someone called us out one day and said, why don't you do espresso-based coffee? And it's like, well, the Vietnamese were colonised by the French. Therefore, we've got filter coffee. We don't have espresso-based coffee. We weren't colonised by the Italians. So little things like that, we can put in the book and we can discuss—you can't tell that story while you're serving bread rolls.
Thi: By the way, I spoke to a customer and he loved that section. He read it and was like, “Oh my God, that was a genius comeback.”
