The Beginning
Food for Uyen Luu, has never been just about eating. It has been the language of belonging, of memory, of home — and of the home she has been building for others, one table at a time. She arrived in England from Saigon in 1983, a small child in a new country where no one could say her name. The food her mother cooked in their Hackney council flat was the thread that held everything together — star anise broth simmering on the stove, bánh mì assembled with quiet precision, the unspoken rule that you never compromise on flavour, on quality, or on integrity.
The Books
That inheritance became the foundation for four cookbooks. My Vietnamese Kitchen (Ryland Peters & Small, 2013), her debut, gathered the family recipes passed down through generations — dishes made in the homes and on the streets of Vietnam, woven through with personal memory and a foreword by Raymond Blanc. Vietnamese (Hardie Grant, 2021) followed, the inaugural pick for Jamie Oliver's Cookbook Club and named one of the best cookbooks of the year by The Observer and Time Out London. Then Vietnamese Vegetarian (Penguin Random House), celebrating the full abundance of plant-based Vietnamese cooking, and Quick & Easy Vietnamese (Penguin Random House), shortlisted for the Guild of Food Writers Award — a book born from the belief that Vietnamese food should be as easy to make on a Tuesday evening as a bowl of pasta. Each book carries the same conviction: that the rule of sweet, sour, salty, umami, bitter and hot is all you really need.
The Supper Club
In 2009, she started the supper club that would become the heart of her culinary life — cooking Vietnamese food every weekend from her Hackney kitchen for anyone who wanted to come. Fifteen years on, it is still running, still cooked by her and her mother, still the kind of dinner where strangers become friends around a table. The supper club, as she has written, is how she funds her many lives.
The Cooking Classes
The cooking classes grew from the same instinct — a desire to pass on what she knows, to make Vietnamese cooking feel achievable and joyful for anyone willing to try. Both happen in Hackney, east London, the neighbourhood that has shaped her since childhood.
The Substack
She writes about all of it — the cooking, the memories, the life lived around tables — in her Substack journal, Around The Table. It is where the stories that don't fit in cookbooks find their home.
