Luke Nguyen on the soul of a restaurant

Luke Nguyen still calls Red Lantern his first baby. He was 23 when he opened it in 2002. When I asked about the hardest decisions he had made as a chef or business owner, he came back to closing it.

“I get emotional when I’m talking about it now,” he said.

He described the emotions of ending a restaurant that had been part of his life for 23 years. There was an attachment he compared to not wanting a child to grow up and leave home. Eventually, he said, it was time to put it to bed and get ready for what came next.

Red Lantern’s own closure notice lists its final service as 22 November 2025. For Luke, talking about the decision nearly a year later still meant talking about a place he had built as a young man.

We spoke at the Good Food & Wine Show in Brisbane on 24 October. The Vietnamese Australian chef, restaurateur and television presenter was there for a programme that included his Cooking School session, From Saigon to Brisbane. Our conversation moved from family restaurants to travelling through Vietnam, then to the small costs that can determine whether a business survives.

His account held two kinds of detail: the street-side meal that helped him imagine a restaurant, and the costs he now urges operators to count.

Before opening Red Lantern, Luke made a point of travelling. He knew that once the restaurant opened, it would demand his attention. Travel was a chance to learn before taking that step, and something he says he still makes time for each year.

He talks about visiting mountains and smaller villages, learning from the aunties and uncles cooking there.

On his first visit to Vietnam, his aunties and uncles took him on the back of a scooter to a street vendor. He remembers little red stools by the kerb, passing motorbikes, noise and the smell from a grill. As he described it, the meal and everything happening around it belonged together.

That experience helped him decide what he wanted his first restaurant to be: Vietnamese, with a sense of authenticity and some of that theatre.

“My first restaurant is gonna be Vietnamese, but it’s gonna have soul.”

For Luke, understanding a dish starts with finding out where it comes from. His travels, upbringing and family then shape how he tells its story on a menu. There is room to interpret it, but the original story has to be understood first.

He also wants people to look beyond the three dishes that so often stand in for Vietnamese food: phở, bánh mì and rice paper rolls. He eats and loves them himself. His point is how much regional variety sits beyond them, and how much gets missed when a whole cuisine is reduced to a few familiar orders.

Growing up inside his parents’ restaurant, Luke saw the business and ate well. As a child, he did not fully understand the sacrifices behind it.

Now a parent himself, he sees the work differently. It was his parents’ livelihood, he said, and they worked for their family. That upbringing strengthened his work ethic. It also made him think about finding a balance that allows quality time with his own children.

His approach to cooking has changed with experience as well. He described the drive of a young chef to be creative and modern, then the process of reining that back as he matured. Increasingly, he wants to let the produce carry the dish: good ingredients, fire and Vietnamese flavours, without doing too much to them.

Working in Australia and Vietnam has taught him to reconsider the restaurant around that food, too. A concept that succeeds in one market cannot simply be dropped into the other, he said. The expectations differ, and each experience changes how he works in the other country.

The street-side meal gave Luke a picture of the restaurant he wanted to build. His advice to people running small independent and family-run restaurants now begins with the numbers: learn the business fundamentals first.

He described tighter margins than when he started and the need to examine every cost. How many chillies go into a dish? How many lemongrass stalks? How many napkins are being used? These were his examples of the small decisions that need to be measured.

“Everything needs to be costed.”

Luke did not present hard work as a substitute for that knowledge. He said operators have to be willing to work extremely hard, but know the numbers first.

Luke said he believes Brisbane’s food and wine scene is now surpassing Melbourne and Sydney. It was his assessment of a city he spoke warmly about returning to.

“It’s almost like I’m always on a working holiday when I’m here.”

Red Lantern has closed, but the curiosity that helped Luke imagine it is still there. At the show, he described watching other chefs’ demonstrations, looking in on cooking classes and visiting food trucks to see what people were making.

Asked what still excites him most about food, his answer was simple.

“Constant learning.”