Welcome to my website. I am the author of ‘Vietnamese – Simple Vietnamese Food To Cook At Home’. I am a photographer and film maker. You can book into my supper club, Vietnamese cooking classes, buy my book, check out my photography and lots more here.
Please follow me on instagram @loveleluu – Thank you so much for visiting x
Best Food Photographer in London
The supper club is held in my home in London Fields, Hackney. It is like a dinner party in the tradition of a Vietnamese feast with homemade Vietnamese food.
Vietnamese food is about the balance of flavours, of sweet, salty and sour – there is no measuring device that can ever match your own taste buds.
After spending a good few months writing a cook book, I felt reluctant to blog. All my words were used up in the book and I stood in the dry words desert facing untitled documents on my laptop with the thirsty cursor line tapping away in vain hope that it could fill a page, a sentence, a line, a word…
I died a death when I saw Brandi Carlile at The Islington Assembly Hall. She sang so beautifully, her country songs of love, loss and stories of people gone in the morrow broke my heart further. She touches a fractured nerve in me but somehow I love the pain of her words, sorrow, wisdom and tune. I wept shamelessly as I sat next to the only vacant seat in the house, as if I had found a Jesus in her and she knew everything I had ever felt. And that was when I was reborn again, a new skin, a new firmer, guarded heart.
Life started again with Richard Vines, (as it does), who is my liberal, generous and charming dinner companion. We went to Ravinder Bhogal‘s supper club at South Place with the ever smiley, kind and loveable Francesco Mazzei, owner and head chef of L’Amina. He has the most beautiful hands and soothing yet infectious giggles. It was as if the dead winter was forgotten as they pumped the life back into me and things just kept shinning despite our weather.
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| PD James |
I hoovered around the legendary PD James, aged 92, at Greene & Heaton‘s (my literary agency) 50th Anniversary party and was completely spellbounded by the superior and grand aura she has as she sat there with her cane and smiled at all the young people standing around her. She inspired a string of imaginations. I saw her for weeks to come as a young woman, perhaps with strawberry blonde hair typing away on a heavy desk with a typewriter on one day and scribbling with forceful excitement on another with a wholesome wrinkled notepad. If I am lucky enough to live into my nineties, I would still hope to attend lots of parties and shout into someone’s ears about how young people just don’t get it!
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| The Clove Club |
But then I was thrown right back into reality, into Shoreditch (with the hipsters and young people whom I am so jealous of because they are fresh out of art school and they don’t get it yet). We ventured to The Clove Club, a new restaurant by one of the Young Turks, Issac McHale. I went with Rocket & Squash (read his well informed review here). I loved it there, its 5 courses of whatever they are going to give you, you eat it. Its good!
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| Viajante bar with exquisites |
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| aged beef at The Corner Room |
My clan of loyal and loving friends is where its at. What better than a family get-together to swap stories, exchange anecdotes and share raucous cackle at The Scolt Head over roasted seabass and duck breasts. I love the more civilised nights too with a smaller group of friends at Vinoteca drinking prosecco on tap while lining the belly with their great tapas selection and trying all the different wines and never wanting to go home.
Like I didn’t ever want to go home when we were at The Bootleg Banquet for my friend Adele’s birthday and all my friends from Central St Martins where there. We ate so well, the lamb racks were incredible! And the party poured onto Shoreditch High Street where 15 years previous, we were the masters of the bars and knights of the party houses before everyone flooded there. We stood, stopped and still where-shall-we-go? We had become parents, purchased houses, became successful, got jaded and flew in the breeze. Our eyes had seen more than it had ever done but we still laughed as loud and as wide as we used to, if not even more so. We still ‘cussed’ each other, bigged each other up, beated each other over and then laughed and laughed and laughed and danced outrageously in Jaguar Shoes.
To family, cheers Nima who flew back from LA. To family, we all say. To family, I say, as a sister, a motherly friend, as I feel the happiest that I could ever be in the company of brothers who have such big hearts, who love their wives, girlfriends and children; who pave their own successes and failures and yet among each other’s company are still the young gifted wide eyed boys who met at aged 18.
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| Gizzie Erskine at her book launch Skinny Weeks & Weekend Feasts |
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| Tori Haschka at her book launch A Suitcase & A Spatula |
In a more refined manner, I have been dinning well and had beautiful ceviche at The Corner Room; One Leicester Street served a memorable razor clam dish; Social Eating House serves a great ravioli and octopus carpaccio; had a huge orgasmic foie gras at Angelus; can never get enough of the scallops with apple at Duck & Waffle and the ridiculous feeling of being happy when on the 40th floor of The Heron Tower; everything at Elliots in Borough Market is amazing; the most delicious smooth hound and white sprouting broccoli with a hint of anchovy at The Quality Chop House; octopus at Boqueria Tapas; pizzettes and everything at Spuntino; the most beautiful fish and chips at The Ivy Club; I had some buffalo mozzarella with Aldo Zilli at Fratelli La Bufala; as per standard, excellent dim sum at Leongs Legends; a very good scotch egg at Brigade – they work with The Beyond Food Foundation, and offer people who have been at risk of or have experienced homelessness the opportunity to take part in an apprenticeship program.
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| Social Eating House – Octopus |
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| Foie Gras – Angelus |
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| Nice rooms at The Dean St Town House Hotel |
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| Scallops at The Ivy Club |
However, the best meal I have had in a long time though came from the beautiful garden of Sophie Dening as James Lowe (Young Turks) served up a BBQ using the finest, in season, freshest of ingredients. This is just a different calibre I say to myself as I devour. His steaks were incomparable to many of the steaks I had ever had, even his salad dressings tasted like magic. This is the succulent life, this is how its all supposed to be done. It was just totally amazing!
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| James Lowe |
So thats why I’ve been M.I.A and not really blogging. I’ve been eating, enjoying every bite of this delicious life and trying to cure my heart of ills and singing along with Brandi Carlile, for the sorrow will always be deep inside.
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| Thanks to my friend, Rosie Birkett for taking me to some of the places! She beautiful! |
Create beautiful photographs of the food that you cook at home with just a few simple steps.
If you enjoy taking photos of a kitchen creation, it can be easily incorporated into the ritual of cooking itself. I usually take my daily food pictures with my iphone. Just one snap and off I go and eat it all up!
I have a few props to set up at the ready, especially while waiting for water to boil or things to cook. I create a simple scene and a mood on a table surface so that it is ready for when the food is cooked. After all, you want to eat the food as soon as it’s cooked and while it’s still warm.
Backgrounds can be simple, like the table itself or pieces of fabric such as tablecloth or napkins. Chopping boards and serving trays add an element of style and homeliness to the image. Plain walls and areas with no personal clutter work well, otherwise make birds’ eye view shots.
Props give food a sense of belonging and personality; you can have lots of fun with it. Sometimes it can be as simple as the book you’re reading or cutlery and kitchen utensils – whatever it is you need to eat the food or to serve the food.
Look at the frame of the picture and see how the props and food are angled. Avoid pointing things towards one direction, or it might look too composed.
One way is to fill the frame with items in a zig zag, from top to bottom, so that the eye can move all around the picture. Avoid things that aren’t relevant to the picture, for example a TV remote control.
Ideally, the image is there to create a desirable mood for the dish or ingredient and is supposed to bring on food envy and make people want to recreat the dish.
Food photographs are hugely dependant on good natural daylight and it should be used whenever possible, even if it means preparing dinner at breakfast during the winter months. Daylight adds a natural dimension to food because it will show the true and natural colours of ingredients.
Always bring the food to the nearest window to take a photo if you can. If using artificial lighting, place the food underneath the lamp to light it to avoid shadows or invest in a daylight bulb.
Styling the dish is the second important element. Sometimes I prepare a styled plate of food with a small amount with every ingredient visible, but never as much as I would eat. Showing a huge plate of food is never that appetising to the viewer.
Be minimal with garnishes and sauces. Try not to cover everything in gravy but instead have a jug of gravy on the side. When plating the food, try not to use any burnt bits or overcooked ingredients that have lost their shape. Place the best looking bits on top to show it off.
If the dish is complicated, like a roast dinner, it is best to use fewer props. If it is simplistic, like pasta with pesto, go for more props. When selecting a mood for the picture, consider the weather and the seasons. Think about the main colours of the food, for instance if it’s a plate of pasta with green ingredients, add a dash of red or yellow somewhere, be it with a slice of chilli or lemon or the red handle of a parmesan grater.
I always share a quick snap of the food that I cook on Instagram. Then I go and load a lot more onto my plate and eat it all!
For more food photo inspiration, take a look at the Good Food Channel’s Instagram.
Uyen Luu’s new book My Vietnamese Kitchen is now available to pre-order on Amazon.
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| my studio |
When I got a publishing deal for my cook book, I intended to do the photography for it but like when I was a teenager, I now have no technical ability in digital photography to make the picture the way I want and nor do I have the experience in still-life and food photography (other than everyday blog photos). I acted like a diva when told that I had to have a photographer and didn’t like that idea at all. But I succumbed and chose a photographer. I chose someone with the least commercial clients listed on her website and probably the youngest but one I thought lit all her pictures more perfectly. I am old school after all. Its just me, my camera and the daylight usually and I wanted to work with someone with the same artistic idea. I would be the food stylist.
In Clare Winfield, not only did I find my eye’s soul mate but a concise, determined and direct partner. She was someone who soon knew exactly what I was thinking because she was thinking it herself and where I was coming from because she’s been there too. When I laid the food down, she felt the mood and atmosphere of the recipe itself. She was someone who was also out to play and be a little daring to make something as beautiful as it can be but also modern and poetic. It was as if we were cut from the same piece of cloth. I totally love her!
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| mackerel ceviche |
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| tried using miniature models but they were too small |
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| fin and flounder supplied the best looking fish |
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| I couldn’t resist- who doesn’t dream of being massaged on a bed of salty chips |
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| sardines in coconut water |
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| the plate was really wrong, we tried to make it right but it was still wrong |
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| one of Rosie’s jobs was to hold up props |
It was the last of summer but the sun clung onto us as if we were talking about a revolution. We drank white wine spritzers under the shade of a pomegranate tree and talked about the nonsensical things that seem to make sense when you’re with someone whom you can easily call your honey.
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| My friends Anja, Beni & godson Leif |
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| Me & Leif |
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| Crispy pork belly with vermicelli |
Last Autumn, I received a publishing deal with Ryland Peters & Small to produce a Vietnamese recipe cook book. I was really happy. Even more so than I had imagine being. I have been writing since I was seven years old, moving my mother and her friends to tears. They were mainly letters to my father, every day I would look to the sky and see aeroplanes, recites my mother, but it has been two months and you have not returned…
I couldn’t believe that I had actually gotten a book deal because sometimes you think things are just impossible especially when these things have been cooked up in dreams from childhood. I had always had a big love for beautiful smelling books and I wanted to have one myself! I got that feeling people talked about, when an author is published for the first time. That awesome awesome feeling. I shook so hard with joy. I celebrated with my agent. I rode my bicycle very drunk with the biggest fattest smile on my face in the rain!
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| Crispy chicken wings with sweet chilli fish sauce |
My dream had come true and it had been staring me in the face for the past few months. I went to Vietnam to do more research and to take photographs. We have shot and produced a BLAD (book layout and design) for the Book Fair in April. The book will contain 50 recipes written and tested, 60 styled (by me) recipe photographs by Clare Winfield; 40 travel photographs by me.
I have been cooking over 50 dishes in the last couple of months, maybe three times then asking a friend to follow my recipe to see if it works. They have been amazing in helping me adjust the flavour as well as instructions.
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| Udon noodle soup with dill fish cakes |
It has been very interesting to see how people follow recipes. Some follow every detail and some find it very difficult to even when given the exact recipe someone else had accomplished with ease. Some people can’t believe how little cooking time is required with Vietnamese cuisine and cook further or do not understand that everything is in the prep.
It is so easy for people to confuse teaspoons (tsp) with tablespoons (tbs); a squeeze of lime depends on how juicy the lime is, a pinch of salt depends on how your pinch is; a splash of wine depends on what you regard as a splash and so on.
Therefore, I have been faced with different scenarios. The same recipe I have created can be produced in almost every way possible depending on whose cooking, their mood, how many distractions, how seriously they take the task, how well they know about oriental cooking, how fast or slow they are, how competent they are in the kitchen, how precise, if they bother to measure with scales and measuring jugs..
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| sea bass congee |
What I have noticed is that most people never taste when cooking when following a recipe (only afterwards when its done) and that there is this a blind trust in the author’s recipe and what will be will be with the fate of the dish. Which is why it is so important for me to test the dishes several times with different friends.
I am lucky to have so many good friends who are offering their time and dedication to my cause, to my book. I’ve had some fabulous evenings as everything gets eaten in the end over long conversations and laughter.
I have noticed that tasty food always makes people so happy that they give me so much back in friendship, love and respect. Sometimes, a group of my friends will gather from all over London to help me out and then to even comfort me on rainy days. Then I find out that in fact, they didn’t really come for the food but to just be there for me. I thank everyone whose helped me with all my heart.
I am finishing up recipe writing. Next will be some prose and then 3 weeks of photography – my favourite bit.
The book will be out in September 2013.
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| Ca phe creme caramel |
NB: These are not photos of the book, but tested recipes.
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| Film Still: A Vietnamese Christmas |
I was opting over four chocolate eclairs or two custard tarts and my waist line at my local supermarket when I sensed the body language of a thief. He was a very tall skinny man, dressed in skinny jeans, a black puffy jacket and a black cap. He picked up five or six packets of smoked salmon, the entire selection of it ever so swiftly but not quickly. He was being smooth, he was trying to blend in but he had his eyes covering his surroundings as he moved to the stationary isle where there was a blind spot for the staff and the other customers. Except for me. I had continued to linger toward him in my green duffle coat with the hood covering my face and my basket in arm; also, trying not to be seen, by him. I, too, was trying to act normal as I spied with the sides of my eyes and the lucidity of my ears.
He reached to the top shelf when I stood beside him and he pretended to look at brown envelopes and a white piggy bank. I felt the awkwardness and a sense of danger. I will turn a blind eye now, I decided. I had a feeling of fear in the face of someone doing something wrong. I will let him steal, I said to myself and then debated: do I care? Should I care? Its a big supermarket monster, should I risk a scene; have the guy after me in the future or be violent towards me over a supermarket chain? No. Its not like its an independent shop like the ones I used to have whereupon I learned all the tricks of the thieving trade, (where I have no problems raising an alarm).
I heard him undo and redo his zip. Phew, I can turn around and continue to shop as the shelf I was stood at was clear of any baked goods. The smoked salmon was out of sight and he was still making out as if he were interested in envelopes and a piggy bank. I had let him steal the smoked salmon. He knew I knew and it was my power to release him, to let him go. I turned my back, took another blind eye and he dashed as quickly as he could out of the shop. I felt just like a thief.
I remained still and moved slowly as if to style out of something I did wrong. As if I had committed the act myself and walked slowly towards the staff at the check out, looking at powdered soup on the way, waited my turn in queue and informed the staff, feeling the fact that I am just the same as him by letting him get away with it.
I often face the fear of catching someone in a criminal act in my dreams. Often, I witness murders by strangers killing other strangers. It is painful, bloody and terrifying. I do not know either parties and throughout the hours of the night the drama of me being seen by the murderer and trying to escape from the murderer torments me as I toss and turn, cry and scream, sometimes waking in a terror of panic and agitation for I had been perpetually running and hiding for what seemed like a very long time.
The fore coming day is greeted with anxiety and apprehension. Often, I catch myself being in a terrible mood with someone (who may have been involved in the dream) as if they had done wrong by me as the dream was so vivid and lifelike.
But what with the thief and the murderer? Is the thief the murderer? The murderer is always a thief and everything below the food chain of badness. The thief didn’t do something so bad as kill someone but he made me face the same dilemmas as the murderer in my dreams. To face something I don’t like to face. He did something that wasn’t right and I had a choice to stop him or run away. To fight or to flee.
Why do I dream of murders so very frequently? What are my dreams trying to tell me? I figured it out. (For myself).
What if in dreams, my subconscious is saying something to me, especially if it is recurring. Who is being murdered and who is murdering? I don’t think there are actual murderers out there who are after me. Not even murderers, but anyone! No one is after me. I came to realise that there are many people in my subconscious, like the child me, the mother me, the father me, the friend me, the enemy me, the creative me and so on and one of them is murdering the other and the me that I recognise is really afraid or she turns a blind eye.
I often have extreme self doubt despite me appearing sometimes like I don’t. I know I cook a really good roast chicken with all the trimmings and I will blatantly put my hands up and say its the best so people will think I am confident. But cooking a perfect roast isn’t like having any self worth in creativity or within myself and I can often murder days and weeks and months and years of my life not doing something I love because of the fear of something like failure or the anxiety of perhaps being caught out. That I am actually not that good at anything.
The perfect example of this was clarified to me when I put two and two together. Today.
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| Film Still: Christmas Dinner |
Last month, one thing lead to another and I was invited to participate in Kevin Macdonald (Director, Last King Of Scotland, One Day In September, Touching The Void) & Ridley Scott’s (Thelma & Louise, Alien, Blade Runner) project, Christmas In A Day. They had previously created the brilliant and utterly beautiful film, Life In A Day where people from all over the world had sent in footage of their life on a certain day and the film makers edited thousand of hours of film together to create a view of the world in a day in 90 minutes or so. It was moving, thrilling and beautiful in aesthetics and emotions.
Christmas In A Day is going to be the same thing, except, Christmas in Britain in a day. Anyone can submit footage, you, me, the next door neighbour, the accountant and so forth and it may or may not be included.
I was honoured to be invited to submit something and that somehow, my wish to make films again to the universe was heard by my spiritual Santa Claus. Here’s your chance he said and I took the chance and I filmed intensively over 5 days over Christmas. I had planned my themes: my Christmas alone, my family’s and dogs’ Christmas, and the most important thing, my mother’s Christmas.
I rarely spend time with my mother over Christmas as she spends it with a group of her friends. They get together on special occasions for over thirty years. It is because we don’t have our families in this country, they said, but we have created a new family, us, all twelve of now women in their sixties.
For the first time in about 20 years, I went to see what my mother gets up to at Christmas with her friends, with a camera and an eye for Kevin Macdonald & Ridley Scott.
It was incredible. One of the most emotionally intensive days I have had in a long time. They cooked together, ate together, sang and danced together and they told me stories of war and escape from Communist Vietnam. They cried in front of camera as I cried behind the camera, trying to pull focus at the same time when a friend of my mother told me the story of our first Christmas in London. It is a young memory I have which I thought everyone had forgotten but they remembered it and we felt like we had survived a hell of a lot back then. We were very poor. We had nothing and it was very moving.
All this was somehow deleted from my hard drive yesterday.
By my own murderous hands.
It had been over three weeks since I had shot the film but I had made myself busy with my cook book or I would make up any excuse not to look at my rushes because it was so intense. The film reflected so many hidden wounds and bared my memories and it saw my mother at her roots, her bare roots which are also mine. The Christmas was beautiful and joyous but also very painful. Most of all, I had so much fear of looking at it because I was so afraid that what I did isn’t/ wasn’t good enough. I had already had so many words with myself (the killing of time and self confidence), why didn’t you shoot it like this, why not like that, why did you do it this way, why didn’t you go the extra mile… and so on.
Finally I was ready to face the thief in the eye and decided to look through the rushes (before I hand it over to Scott Free) and it had vanished. Completely. There was just one copy and it was gone. I had unintentionally deleted one of the most important projects from my hard drive and from my life. It was my baby and I killed it.
The massive feeling of falling down a hole, loss, losing, death and pure OMG and disbelief that I had at my desk as I was looking at my Finder without the folder, Christmas In A Day, was immense. Search. Search again. Gone. It was as if I had just lost a life. It was as if I had just murdered someone. Me.
I wept and my body started to shake and I had no where to hide, no way to retrieve the loss. It was all gone. I called my closest friend and he assured me that it could be retrieved so I called Scott Free and told them what had happened and if there was something they could do and they said they have the software to get it all back.
And now I sit here, in a cafe, awaiting the diagnostics, loving the nerds and perhaps to be lucky enough to hopefully just wake up from a really bad dream.
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| Film Still: My mother preparing rice paper for summer rolls |
UPDATE: Most of my rushes are rescued. Now lets hope its used in the film. 😀