Bobby Chinn in Dubai

I'm coming here to cook at Anise. I'm giving some cooking demos. Bun Bo, which is a Vietnamese dish. It's actually one of my favorite dishes because it really does exemplify Vietnamese food. Its simplicity, its sophistication just really represents the type of food that they do there. It's a cross between a salad and almost soupy-like. So the quintessential recipe in Vietnam would be Nuoc Cham, which is a fish sauce, sugar, water, a little garlic, chili if you want it spicy. And it's a sweet and sour sauce, which is a dipping sauce. The dish is traditionally made with a beef stock with sweet and sour elements. So I've created this kind of like a cross between a French technique of deglazing and making a beef jus from my beef when I sear a piece of beef and then I use Nuoc Cham sauce and I get an instant sweet and sour beef broth. When I talked to a lot of chefs about what they knew about Vietnamese food, these very knowledgeable people on Japanese, Korean, Thai knew nothing about Vietnamese food. And I thought, well, I'm going to go check out the food. And what I discovered was a cuisine that is so unique, considering it's in Southeast Asia, is totally different from the rest of Southeast Asian cuisine. The Vietnamese have been influenced by both, as far as I'm concerned, the two major contributors of modern cuisine in both East and West, which would be the French and the Chinese. And they've borrowed techniques and made their cuisine uniquely their own. And they made it really well. And when you think about what they've done, is they've made modern cuisine a thousand years ago. We're all now coming across like we've got to be sustainable and go local and all this other stuff. We want light and fresh and we want raw. And they've done it all. It's up and running. It's in its embryonic stage. It's got teething problems. It's a work in progress and always will be. And I think that's the restaurant industry. You cannot rest on your laurels. And you literally have to find out what works. And a lot of things don't work that you thought were going to work. And you just adjust it until it starts to work. And you're flexible. One of the things that I've done, and I've been very fortunate to have this TV show, which allows me to travel all over the world, in essence, because they just keep on giving me more countries, is that I get to see the most humble human beings providing the most unappreciated service of feeding people day in, day out. Reagan liar, Bush liar, Clinton liar, Bush liar, Obama talk on me, why like this, why? Yeah, I'm familiar with the politics. And I have a great love of my Egyptian roots. And I was brought up by a really wonderful family. There's a family and an extension of family and friends that are the children of your parents' friends. And just this huge, incredible, socially, to be socially accepted, was the most comforting thing for me.