![]() ![]() Súp Noodle Bar was set to open in the middle of a well-trafficked shopping center on Beach Boulevard in Buena Park, a vibrant thoroughfare dominated by Korean restaurants, markets and businesses the mall was anchored by crowd-pleasers like H Mart, Daiso and 85☌ Bakery Cafe. It’s kind of like the brain of the restaurant.”Īs he was working through the story he wanted to tell with his first restaurant, Nguyen considered his audience. “Knowing the point-of-sale system, you know the whole entire restaurant. Their director of operation was awesome, so I learned a lot from her,” Nguyen said. restaurant, the Fat Cow, where Nguyen became an IT technician while also picking up occasional shifts in the kitchen when cooks would call out. Nguyen worked on an innovative iPad-based point of sale system that made its way onto Gordon Ramsay’s reality television show “Kitchen Nightmares.” The celebrity chef then had the system installed at his L.A. I know every single position in the restaurant,” he said. “I started out by working as a dishwasher, busboy, bartender, barback. He had always possessed an interest in technology, and the post allowed him to draw from his time watching a busy kitchen operate, from his top-floor perch in Vietnam to his experience working nearly every job in a restaurant. In 2011, Nguyen stepped out of the kitchen, taking a job with an IT firm that created and managed point-of-sale systems for restaurants. Nguyen left school before graduating, but he followed his instructor chef Jimmy Wang, currently the culinary director for Panda Express, to work in the kitchen at Wang’s now-closed San Gabriel restaurant, Hot Stuff Cafe. In 2009, his family purchased Pho Pasteur in Rosemead, where he helped manage the restaurant for a year and a half before heading off to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena. ![]() “And every day, they’d clean up and start again.” I was fascinated by how it all worked,” Nguyen said. Everyone would be in the front, and I was the only kid - 6, 7 years old - running in the back. When meal service was over, he’d sometimes slip into the kitchen to fashion leftovers into his own creations. He was a big kid, and even then, he remembers the rice pots being six times his size. He remembers the arguments he’d overhear but marveled at the teamwork. “The coordination between every part of the kitchen, and they only have 30 minutes for lunch - that’s the tricky part,” Nguyen said. A curious child with a perpetual appetite, Nguyen was drawn to the chaotic symphony of the factory’s kitchen and cafeteria, where 4,000 hungry workers filed in twice a day for meals. Nguyen’s culinary origin story began in southern Vietnam, where he, his parents and four younger siblings lived in two rooms on the top floor of their family’s busy chemical factory in Ho Chi Minh City. ![]()
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