After a lifetime of operating famed restaurants, Viet-Kieu master chef Huynh Lap passed on his philosophy to his children, who are also famed chefs, that focusing makes for perfection and guarantees success.

Lap and his son, Alain Huynh Trung Tan, who have run high-class restaurants for several decades, both ended up narrowing their focus to fast food restaurants.

Lap ran the famous Olympia restaurant in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) prior to 1975 before launching the high-end Au Chambertin in California, which was voted as one of the World’s Outstanding Restaurants by Travel & Holiday magazine from 1981 to 1985.

During this time, he tried his hand in opening a fast food restaurant called Poulet De France (French grilled chicken). The restaurant was later praised by leading culinary commentator Elmer Dills from KABC-TV as one of the US’s most inviting cuisine destinations..

In October 1983, Lap was recognized as one of Los Angeles’ great chefs by the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, Lap’s son, Alain Tan, has also achieved remarkable success with his popular Vietnam House, Le Mekong, Beaujolais and Blue Ginger restaurants.

He also successfully launched the Pho 2000 chain, the first of its kind in Vietnam, where former US President Bill Clinton had lunch during his diplomatic visit to Vietnam in 2000.

Last year, before Lap passed away at the age of 85, he made clear his last wish to his children that they expand his current Poulet de France restaurant into a fast food chain.

This month, his children, including Alain Tan, began to realize their father’s last wish by standardizing and opening several more Poulet de France eateries in HCMC.

The master of chicken and sauces

Lap was exceptionally knowledgeable about cuisine, and his know-how of chicken was unrivaled.

He always made a point to distinctly distinguish the names of ingredients, such as the different uses of the French words poule, poulet, poussin, and poularde, which all denote chicken, depending on their age, meat quality and the dishes they are best for.

The late master chef is particularly famous for his exceptional skills in processing chicken. He always made sure that his finished chicken was ‘fruity inside, crispy outside’.

To do so, Lap and his chefs grilled chicken at a high temperature, which gives it a crispy texture on the outside. The secret lies in the chef’s good timing when he turns over the chicken, making it a tender, juicy and aromatic delicacy from the inside.

As chicken is a neutral, light-scented ingredient, Lap then turned it into a canvas on which he added a wide array of sauces.

His first French grilled chicken shop opened in Vietnam in 1999 and offered Vietnamese an exotic taste of various Western sauces which were unfamiliar to them then.

Contracting to expand

After going that far in cuisine, Lap finally decided that he needed to focus on chicken if his business was to expand and thrive.

“It all comes down to the word ‘focus’, as like in other areas, apart from the restaurants offering a wide variety of dishes, we also need those offering only one delicacy which they are famous for,” the seasoned chef said several years ago.

“We easily get distracted if we do many dishes at the same time. Only when we focus on one or a few specialties of our own can we reach the pinnacle,” Lap elaborated.

A good dish takes not only a chef’s exceptional skills but also a chain of specialized, standardized ingredient suppliers, the late chef affirmed.

With this principle in mind, Lap and his children have launched specialized fast food shops since the 1990s.

Alain Tan’s Pho 2000 chain is an example.

In addition to the wide assortment of pho, the chain’s delectable specialty, Tan added to his specialized menu the ‘renewed’ rice served on dishes in 2003, 50 years after this way of eating was created and became popular among HCMC residents.