Heritage and homemade fish sauce

From Anchovy’s front window, which overlooks bustling Bridge Street in Melbourne’s industrial, eclectic suburb of Richmond, it’s a straight line to the kitchen, where chef-owner Thi Le coaxes a tall fire to dance and roar beneath shelves of pots nested three-deep. Her partner, Jia-Yen Lee (known as JY), shakes zesty cocktails at the long bar that runs perpendicular to the pass, chatting to regulars perched at the counter.

There’s an occasional song – “Two melon, two parfait” – from the kitchen, a rhythmic rhapsody in shades of sapo and abalone. Next door, in the space that shares a communal wall with Anchovy, the couple’s banh mi shop sits dormant, awaiting the flurry of customers that frequent from 11am to 3pm for crusty bread rolls packed with pickles, red curry paste, fresh herbs and sardines.

On the bar, between elbows, is Le’s new cookbook, which was published in May. Viet Kieu – a massive compilation of more than 100 recipes and countless personal stories about the chef’s journey to the present moment – is an intimate and meticulously informed curation that reflects the traditions of Vietnamese cooking through Le’s lived experience as an Australian of Vietnamese ancestry. It’s also a raw and courageous exploration of the self, of migration, of unprocessed trauma, of family fables and of reckonings.

“The Vietnamese I cook is an interpretation of myself, of where I am: it’s time and place, it’s ‘place’ in Australia, it’s a mixture of traditions and being here, and [the name “viet kieu”] resonates so much with me because it’s a crossroads of two cultures.”

The first 73 pages are dedicated to foundations, both in the sense of introducing Le’s journey and providing building blocks that enable fluid creation in Vietnamese cuisine. A ready suite of bases and dressings (tangy fish sauce, fermented bean curd and fragrant sate, for example) means that whatever produce the homecook procures – ideally, Le says, seasonal, local and sustainably sourced – will be sensational. Le says that’s a reflection of what goes on in the restaurant too, with an estimated 90 percent of the book’s recipes reflecting the flavour combinations used in at Anchovy.

“Our strength as a restaurant, and the strength of the book, is actually all the sauces,” she says. “If you can master your sauces, everything is going to be yum.”

Viet Kieu eschews binary interpretations of “Vietnamese food” and instead explores the hyper-regionality and diverse seasonality of the country. Le emphasises the essentiality of cooking with produce unique to the region, and of being flexible to adjust to alternative ingredients, and highlights the importance of this at Anchovy. In Le’s own family, as one of four daughters being raised by a single mother, she learned that using what was available was fundamental.

“Everything we did was, you know, if you didn’t have something, you’d use something else to make it work,” she says. “It was that nimble kind of frugal mentality that helps.”

On tonight’s visit to Anchovy, the fish is cobia, shredded into a crunchy laap with homemade prawn crackers; abalone, sourced from southern waters, is served thick and crumbed in white bread atop a swipe of aged anchovy mayonnaise and a fan of mustard leaf. So it goes.

An image in the book captures one of Thi’s most treasured items: a worn notebook filled with recipes, ideas, tweaks and combinations that eventually end up on the Anchovy’s plates. The notebook is one of “quite a few” that Le has collected over the years, all ending up in apron pockets and kitchen shelves as she’s collected the proverbial ingredients of a brave, passionate life. Writing is a process of experimentation, constant innovation and personal exploration, she says: the same things Le hopes readers will encounter with Viet Kieu.

“This is what recipes are for: they’re a guide,” she says. “A lot of the recipes in the book are the DNA of the restaurant over the years, [which] comes from years and years of tweaking recipes, tweaking sauces … I just change and adapt.”