Miami’s Best New Chef is Making The Vietnamese Food of His Childhood | On The Line | Bon Appétit

I started cooking when I first moved to Miami 10 years ago just out of desperation for vietamese food the emphasis of TM is on drinking food the culture of guango it's basically somewhere that vietnames go to grab a bites and also party I work with my husband I'm the head chef he Cates the wine list we really embodied Guang culture that we want to bring to [Music] Miami good morning everyone my name is Tam Fam I'm a chef owner here at Tam Tam in downtown Miami we have a lot to do today so let's get to work took us about a year to get everything decorated just to show how old this spot is here's a photo of the courthouse in front of us being built and the courthouse was built in 1920 and we are like right here so we've been here for about 100 years it's now noon I have a lot to do the first thing I'm going to do is go Curry I like to be the first person here cuz I like the quietness having the whole space for myself I don't have to say behind or corner or sharp anywhere this is halal goat from Australia they come Frozen and already cooped up we go through about 15 lbs a day how goat is a lot less gy and also the animal is just treated way better Vietnamese Curry is found in the south of Vietnam where Indian immigrations came over in the ' 50s it comes with egg noodles one of my favorite way to eat Curry Curry every batch of Curry it takes about like a pound of lemongrass I get this from my auntie you know how in vames we call everyone Auntie um she just this kind of my mom's age she has a vietamese produce shop and you know it's viames when half of the store also sells nail supplies so fish sauce is basically fermented aneles it adds a lot of umami flavors I have a lot of guests who taste our goat Curry and I just do not believe that it's goat all right first we're going to have to sear the goat no of course it's going to happen right now so we're having some issues with of stove which is a kitchen nightmare this is Harry this is my partner he's also the handyman of the kitchen whenever I have problems he usually want to fix it for Me Oh yay turn back [Music] on when I moved here there was maybe one or two vietamese restaurant here in so I just started learning from the internet from YouTube just so that I can start eating some of the dishes that I really missed so Harry suggested that we should also start hosting dinners for our friends and family Tam Tam started out as a supper club right in our backyard and now it's a full plow restaurant that's packed out every night if you look closely to the bottom you start seeing this beautiful fond that we have in the bottom so we're going to be building the curry right now we're going to start with shaved shallots with the heat of sweat the shallot create a steam so that the font gets sof and then eventually released into the gravy goat itself in Vietnam is usually like a drinking protein you come in you have a lot of the time proteins that you usually don't fight just keep an open mind just know that food is going to be great and the drink is going to be even better it's a party at the table Mason p is really similar to to red curry paste it's only a tad sweeter with more chili and also Tamarind paste the best Curry powders you can find in Vietnam is Indian curry powder because curry powder were introduced to Vietnamese food through Indian immigrants what I'm doing right now is pounding lemongrass which is actually a very essential step pounding lemongrass helps to release all the essential oil this used to be a Cuban diner for about 20 years this is actually something that was left over from the Cuban Diner all right now we're going to go in with our lemongrass I make this dish specifically ones we don't have an actual recipe for it all the recipe is right in here we are a very new restaurant the cuisine is quite unfamiliar to a lot of my staff I trust my staff to do certain things but when it comes to bigger dishes like the curry itself I like to make it myself eventually I will have to pass on the torch right our coconut some fish sauce this is MSG just like sugar is responsible for sweetness MSG is the purest form of umami which is the fifth taste I like to add Ms to some of my dishes just so it can round out all the sharp edges of the flavors and put aluminum foils on top of it this way it's going to brace rather than roasting Tammer is on 3 hours it's now 1:00 we need to move on to Al caram fish off F fish sauce wings so we have six quarts of sugar in here we're going to keep the heat on about medium low this sauce is actually a really popular sauce in Vietnam you can use this sauce to brace chicken you can use the sauce to brace fish here we have had the wings on the menu for the very first Supper Club event that we ever did I don't think I'll ever be able to take it off cuz people will be very upset it's nice crunchy sweet salty it's a little Tangy from the lime juice the wings are marinated overnight in a mixture of salt fish sauce garlic and a little bit of vodka I was really deep on the internet one night so when you add vodka to a frying dish the second it hits the oil it will release a lot of steam which makes your crust very light and Airy that's why we have two bottles of skull vodka in the kitchen obviously we don't drink that you you you don't want to drink that now it is not a hard sauce to make I like to make it myself just so we can keep the consistency Tam Tam was named after me in Vietnamese name heart or Soul when you put Tam Tam together that means two hearts or two souls and in a very you know cheesy ways it represent Harry and I the two people that came together to create Tam Tam the two things need to work hand in hands to create a perfect um Buel which is the concept that we're trying to be so now that the sugar has turned into caramel we're going to move on to the kind of fun part but also very dangerous part of making this dish which is adding fish sauce into caramel it's going to release a lot of steam could really burn you this is where the fish sauce get caramelized it also turn into this completely different sauce when I was little I did think at some point I might be a chef at I think I looked down on the position a lot also my parents wanted me to be an engineer a classic Asian story huh I have proof to them that this is a career worth pursuing and I can also make good money out of it now we're going to go in with our sandall which is fermented chili paste it's not too spicy it has a nice tanginess to it a lot of V food gets fermented because one people really enjoy that um funkiness that fermentation gives but also I think preserving for a country that used to be poor like Vietnam having access to food year round used to be an issue now we're going to go in with half of the amount of garlic that I have we're going to wait for the sauce to cool down completely before we add the rest of the garlic so that when the sauce hits hot wings some of that raw garlicky flavor will come through and it will be so aromatic oops it's 2:00 better to get going with my bit leave rra lamb let's go thankfully we had a prep Shi yesterday where a lot of this m plas already prepped out when I have the whole kitchen staff coming in we all have to fight for counter space being a chef I get to call the longest one so these are B leaves it has this licoricey flavor but when you start to give it a nice Char it's turning super sweet very fragrant Smoky and they grow so well in South Florida just because of the similarity in wets so what I like to do is mixing the dry and wet ingredient together first just so that we don't have any weird pockets of dry ingredients in there this is the mixture of lemongrass and shallots Lamb by itself is quite lean so what I do is I also add a coarsely ground up beef mixture that has about 30% fat ensuring that the final product is not going to be dry so this lamp wrap dish comes with a lettuce wrap setup there's nothing that is more representative of vietamese food and flavor profile on a busy night I would have to roll out Lambs in the back as service happening in the front you would start with the bottom side up so because the bottom side is rougher it will hold on to the meat spread it to the side slowly but tightly have everything together walking back from school we would always is passed by this Beetle beef stand on the side of the road and the aroma bring such memories to me so the second that my auntie told me hey I have Beetle leaves in my backyard let me know if you have a need I was like I definitely need to put that dish on the menu all right I just rolled like a 100 of this my scallop just got here I'm going to have to go cure some scallops these are U10 scallop from new high Port just about an hour outside of Boston they are fresh never Frozen um honestly one of the best scallops I've ever had in my life too we have 5 lbs of scallops here I usually do 5% lme zest 5% MSG and 5% salt so the scallop dish is raw scallop it's scallop Crudo dish curing the scallop firm up the texture it's served with coconut n Chum which is a traditional Vietnamese dipping sace PB oil Thai Basil and fried garlic to me venam food is also really bright and acidic the lime zest adds a nice CC note without me having to add a lot of lime juice Vietnamese people don't really like to eat raw seafood time goes on and as I have gained more confidence as a chef I feel a lot more free to kind of just put on things that I believe is very good and we can you know continue to push the envelope it's going to go back into the fridge for 30 minutes to cure and after that give it an ice bath it will firm up the texture of the scallops a lot more my Sue Chef is working on a really special R&D dish right now if it's ready I'm going to have to take some photo for it this is Adrian OA my very talented Sue Chef he's been with Tam tamam since our popup time and um he's currently working on a new special for us for our spring menu I spoke to a my arm meque guy Brandon uh and what he suggested was and he said he hated the name but the Thor's hammer uh which is basically like an asabuko uh hind shank and what we settled on was marinate it and leave it alone for 2 days sving it for about 16 hours then we finish it off in the oven for service this is my second time seeing this we ran it last weekend just to see people's reactions so we have already made some changes we line the plate with banana leaves we wanted to give it a more impressive presentations Adrian also adjusted the cooking temperature and time looking at right now I think he nailed it it's going to be a little 151 up top going to light it on fire as we take it to the table the overall goals for uh for me when I taste a new dish is that one it has to taste Vietnamese uncompromisingly it has to taste good it has to be fun to eat we also like to have different side dishes to go with the dish it's amazing the sh shrim paste really come through it could probably use a tad more salt yeah but the sauce is Rich but also really bright at the same time every time I'm reheating it the bone marrow inside actually renders out and then I'm creating kind of a vret with tamarinds white pepper Sichuan pepper my favorite way to eat this is with the firecracker eggplant teeny tiny little eggplants that you pickle I think it's very much ready to be on a menu agan is like one of my best friends if I don't like it I will it's very easy for me to say that sucks the general wisdom is is food cost should be about 20 to 30% of the price on the menu for a dish that has a really high foot cost like this one already we're not going to do 20 or 30% we probably going to cut some loss to that but at the same time it satisfy our needs to to do fun things to push the boundaries of the cuisine The Next Step before this can be on the menu is I have to take some photos for our Instagram and social media let's play up another one so I can take the photo this my dad got me my first camera when I was 16 and when it was time for us to open the business you know I just started learning how to do food photography my style of food photography was inspired by Bon Appetit magazine I really like that high flash definitely being a owner operating business I will have to wear different hats right it allows me to do things that I love which is cooking and taking photos Okay I like that good photography definitely has helped a lot with our popularity so the trick to make something look appetizing is the color temperature of my food photography is usually lean on the warm side we also add a lot of herbs and also red components helps to make something looks appetizing you like that yeah I like that well let's just then let's light it up it's going to like give a little bit of a flame off the top surprisingly I I always like with like meats and things like that I like to do um sparkling so I do have the wonderful like kontura that's going to be Rosé is going to have some body to it and then the sparkling is kind of going to cut through that that real metin of it so it's all about balance I think I got the shots thank you for joining me today I really have to get back to service door is about to open usually my day ends when the last table's uh set down so that's about 10:00 but right now you really have to go so goodbye

Channel: Bon Appétit

Views: 389,426

Keywords: best vietnamese food miami, bon app, bon appetit, bon appétit, day in the life of a professional chef, food, inside a professional kitchen, inside a restaurant kitchen, miami best restaurants, michelin chef, on the line, professional chef day in the life, tam pham, tam tam miami, tâm tâm miami, tâm tâm restaurant miami, vietnamese, vietnamese cuisine, vietnamese food, vietnamese restaurant, vietnamese restaurant miami, where to eat in miami

Id: TE7d0g4DXs4

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024