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 Vietnamese food. The emphasis of Tam Tam is on drinking food. The culture of Quang Ngoc is basically somewhere that Vietnamese go to grab a bite and also party. I work with my husband. I'm the head chef. He curates the wine list. We really embodied Quang Ngoc culture that we want to bring to Miami. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tam Pham. 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 because I like the quietness, having the whole space for myself. I don't have to stay behind or corner or sharp anywhere. This is halal goats from Australia. They come frozen and already cooped up. We go through about 15 pounds a day. Halal goat is a lot less gamey. And also the animal is just treated way better. Vietnamese curry is found in the South of Vietnam where Indian immigration came over in the 50s. It comes with egg noodles, one of my favorite ways to eat curry. Every batch of curry, it takes about like a pound of lemongrass. I get this from my auntie. You know how in Vietnamese we call everyone auntie? She's just this kind of my mom's age. She has a Vietnamese produce shop. And you know it's Vietnamese when half of the store also sells nail supplies. So fish sauce is basically fermented anchovies. 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 our 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 wants to fix it for me. Oh, yay. Turn back on. When I moved here, there was maybe one or two Vietnamese restaurants here. So I just started learning from the internet, from YouTube, just so that I can start eating some of the dishes that I really miss. 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-blown restaurant that's packed out every night. If you look closely to the bottom, you start seeing this beautiful pond 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 off, sweat the shallot, create a steam so that the fond gets softened 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 find. 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. Massaman paste is really similar 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 was 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 once we don't have an actual recipe for it. All the recipes are 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, 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 MSG 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 braise rather than roasting. Timer is on. Three hours. It's now 1 o'clock. We need to move on to our caramel fish sauce. Our 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 braise chicken. You can use the sauce to braise 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 because 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 don't want to drink that, but thank you. 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 represents Harry and I, the two people that came together to create Tam Tam. The two things need to work hand in hand to create a perfect quán nhậu, 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. It could really burn you. This is where the fish sauce gets caramelized. It also turns into this completely different sauce. When I was little, I did think at some point I might be a chef. 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 proved 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 sambal, which is fermented chili paste. It's not too spicy. It has a nice tanginess to it. A lot of Vietnamese food gets fermented because one, people really enjoy that 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 o'clock. Better get going with my bitterleaf wrapped lamb. Let's go. Thankfully, we had a prep shift yesterday where a lot of this miso broth's 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 bitterleaves. It has this licorice-y flavor, but when you start to give it a nice char, it turns super sweet, very fragrant, smoky, and it grows so well in South Florida just because of the similarity in weathers. So what I like to do is mixing the dry and wet ingredients 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 gonna be dry. So this lamb wrap dish comes with a lettuce wrap setup. There's nothing that is more representative of Vietnamese 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 pass by this beetle beef stand on the side of the road, and the aroma brings such memories to me. So the second that my auntie told me, hey, I have beetle beef in my backyard. Let me know if you ever need. I was like, I definitely need to put that dish on the menu. All right, I just rolled like a hundred of this. My scallops just got here. I'm gonna 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. Honestly, one of the best scallops I've ever had in my life, too. We have five pounds of scallops here. I usually do 5% lime 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 nuoc cham, which is a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce, paddy herb oil, Thai basil, and fried garlic. To me, Vietnamese food is also really bright and acidic. The lime zest adds a nice citrusy 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 continue to push the envelope. It's gonna 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 sous chef is working on a really special R&D dish right now. If it's ready, I'm gonna have to take some photo for it. This is Adrian Ochoa, my very talented sous chef. He's been with Tam Tam since our pop-up time. And he's currently working on a new special for us for our spring menu. I spoke to our meat guy, Brandon, and what he suggested was, and he said he hated the name, but the Thor's Hammer, which is basically like an Ossobuco hind shank. And what we settled on was marinate it and leave it alone for two days, sous-viding 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 lined the plate with banana leaves. We wanted to give it a more impressive presentation. Adrian also adjusted the cooking temperature and time. Looking at it right now, I think he nailed it. It's gonna be a little 151 up top. Gonna light it on fire as we take it to the table. The overall goals 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 shrimp paste really come through. It could probably use a tad more salt, 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 vinaigrette 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. Adrian 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 food cost should be about 20 to 30% of the price on the menu. For a dish that has a really high food cost, like this one already, we're not gonna do 20 or 30%. We probably gonna cut some loss to that. But at the same time, it satisfy our needs 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 plate up another one so I can take the photo. My dad got me my first camera when I was 16. And when it was time for us to open a business, 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 an 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 look appetizing. You like that? Yeah, I like that. Well, let's just then let's light it up. It's gonna like give a little bit of a flame off the top. Surprisingly, I always like with like meats and things like that, I like to do sparkling. So I do have the wonderful like crement de jure that's gonna be rosé. It's gonna have some body to it. And then the sparkling is kind of gonna cut through that real meatiness 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's about to open. Usually my day ends when the last table's set down. So that's about 10 o'clock. But right now you really have to go. So goodbye.