Chef Anh Luu Dishes on Her Dramatic ‘Queer Eye’ Experience

The final scene of chef Anh Luu’s Season 8 Queer Eye episode isn’t your typical Netflix send-off. As the closing credits roll, she’s hot off hosting a 40-person dinner of scallion- and peanut-topped baked oysters, sour mustard green soup, and ginger caramelized chicken at New Orleans’s Bywater Brew Pub, where she’s served as executive chef for almost three years. At her day job, Luu cooks Viet-Cajun pub fare; her big seller is her braised beef and herb-stuffed phorrito. But this dinner is different: It’s her chance to recreate the Vietnamese dishes that her mother, who passed away in 2017, cooked throughout her childhood.

Fast forward to the present day — almost two years later — and life looks different for Luu. Not long after the show was filmed, she left her job at the Bywater and embarked on a career as a freelance chef. She runs her Vietnamese street food pop-up, Xanh, around the city; does restaurant consulting; teaches cooking classes to local high schoolers; and leads private in-home dinners. After so many years in the restaurant industry — before moving back to her hometown of New Orleans in 2019, she owned Portland restaurant Tapalaya, where she earned a 2016 Eater Young Gun semifinalist nod — the change has helped her find a better work-life balance.

Cooking for Xanh has also, in many ways, been a sort of culmination to the Queer Eye episode’s emotional arc, which saw Luu reckon with her unresolved grief and attempt to heal her rocky relationship with her father, who remarried shortly after her mother’s death without telling her. As part of her Queer Eye transformation, Luu gets a house redo from Bobby, bangs from Jonathan, a sharp new chef’s coat from Tan, and help with recipe development from Antoni. In her segment with Karamo, the emotional high point of the episode, she confronts her father over FaceTime.

Luu is one of three characters from New Orleans’s food world to be featured on Queer Eye: legendary jazz clarinetist Doreen Ketchens, owner of Miss Doreen’s Sweet Shop, and Dan Stein of Stein’s Deli also star in recent seasons. Here, she tells Eater New Orleans about the ways that her Queer Eye experience — including a dramatic deleted scene — has impacted her family relationships, her career, and her connection with her own cooking.

Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix

Eater: I know that when your Queer Eye episode ended, you were still executive chef of the Bywater Brew Pub. But these days you’re a freelance chef, running your pop-up Xanh all over New Orleans. What made you decide to take that leap?

Anh Luu: I’ve been a bit burnt out on the restaurant industry for a while. I started the job at the Brew Pub pretty burnt out, because I had sold Tapalaya in Portland in September 2019. My experience on the show definitely nudged me to go with my gut feeling that I simply can’t work in a restaurant day-to-day anymore. It was causing me stress and anxiety — not being able to control my emotions was a big thing I was battling at the time. There was a day after the show was filmed where it was really busy, during Mardi Gras, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is not how I imagined this happy, busy time in my life.” It wasn’t serving me to be there anymore. Like with any job, things get repetitive and mind-numbing.

I wanted to be cooking food that mattered to me. If you look at my pop-up on Instagram, all my menus are different — I hardly ever repeat items. And it’s not for them; it’s for me. I want to have a different connection with food than I did when I was working in industry. The show made me rediscover that, because it was a lot about cooking the food that my mom cooked. The dinner at the end of the show — that was the first time that I got to do a dinner like that. I’ve always talked about it, because my mom passed away in 2017, so it’s been about six years now. It was an eye-opener to have the show facilitate something like that for me. They came in and paid for all the decorations; they redecorated the restaurant. It was really, really cool.

That closeness you felt with your mom in hosting the pop-up dinner — has that carried over into the work that you’re doing now?

Oh, definitely. I mean, I call my company a Vietnamese street food company, but it’s really based on my experience as a Vietnamese person in New Orleans. I add a lot of Cajun and Creole flair to my Vietnamese dishes, and I don’t like to make anything too traditional. I don’t want to cook anything that anybody else is cooking. I think about my mom every single time I’m cooking, because it’s based on my flavor memories.

As a freelance chef, you’ve been running Xanh. What else?

I’m a part-time culinary instructor at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. They have a culinary program for their high school students. I like talking to the kids and seeing what they’re up to, seeing what the kids are like now, and if I can interest them in cooking Vietnamese food. I also do some light restaurant consulting. This Mardi Gras krewe called the Krewe of Red Beans has a headquarters community center in the Bywater that’s just starting to get going. I’m helping the young lady who’s starting a restaurant there; I’m in the Krewe of Mung Beans, which is a sub krewe of all Asian community members. Last summer I was traveling and did some restaurant consulting out there. I’ve done some private, in-home cooking classes, which are super fun. I want to start pushing myself in that direction because it brings me the most joy to have one-on-one time, and teach people how to cook the food they want to cook.

I mean, Queer Eye should just hire you to replace Antoni.

He didn’t do a thing for me — let me tell you [laughs]. He was not my sous chef, that was a TV lie. He did not lift a finger to help me do any prep. I had to work in the middle of this lifestyle makeover and it was my choice, but he did not come after-hours to help. His culinary assistant, Rhonda, who is local — she’s amazing, I still talk to her — she came, and we recruited my talent coordinator Jessie. He came and chopped things for four hours. Somebody who was on Tan’s team, their husband was a chef and was visiting, and he was like, “I’ll help!” This dinner was made by me and some random people, not Antoni.

Was he supposed to help you?

I don’t know! It wasn’t like “Oh, Antoni’s gonna help you” — he just said he wanted to be my sous chef on camera. I didn’t really have any interaction with them off-camera.

Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix

When I was watching the show, I was like, “How is Anh pulling off this whole dinner while she’s actively being filmed and also hosting the Fab Five in her kitchen?”

I prepped for like five hours the night before the dinner. It was all a very fast whirlwind. I was staying at the Windsor Court and my partner Sam was staying at different hotel because they didn’t want us to see each other. It was a strange time. That day happened so fast because they also filmed me seeing my house for the first time, and then we went straight to the dinner. There was also this tropical storm happening outside. Sam’s car flooded, all this crazy stuff. So I was like, “I look relatively calm,” [laughs]. But it was pretty wild. I was surprised that they asked me to work — they came up with the dinner as my reveal party. It wasn’t like I got to decide everything.

Was there anything about the experience of being on Queer Eye that was unexpected for you?

They cut out the whole scene that I had with Bobby. He didn’t do what he normally does with everybody. He actually scheduled a reading with a medium for me to connect with my mother’s ghost. That was really intense. He brought me to the Fab Five house, and he was like, “So, I’ve scheduled a reading with a medium, are you okay with that?” I was like, “Huh?” We sat down and she came in and they filmed it in one scene. It was very emotional. You know how mediums do the thing where they guess the dead person’s initials, and they say stuff about them that’s true? All of that was happening. The producers told me they only told her my first name and that I had lost someone, they didn’t specify who. If she really only knew that much information about me, she was pretty good.

Wow.

Yeah, she knew my mom’s initials. My mom doesn’t have the same last name as me, because Vietnamese women don’t take the same last name as their husband. Nobody knew my mom’s real last name because when she immigrated to America, the immigration people just assumed that she had my father’s last name. And she didn’t speak any English; it was right after the Vietnam War. All my life, my mom had my dad’s last name printed on all of her documents and driver’s licenses and everything. It was pretty much impossible for this medium to research to find that out. Most of it was pretty chilling, and she knew a lot of stuff that nobody outside of my family would know about my mom.

Afterwards, the showrunner of the whole show — who was somebody that I wasn’t supposed to meet, apparently — she came out and shook my hand and was like, “I really believe your mother was here. We were all in the back watching from the laptops and this door flung open.” There was no weather happening outside — it was a nice day. And this door flew open from the courtyard into the room that they were all sitting in at the height of the reading. I was quite surprised that they cut the whole thing, but I was bawling my eyes out, so I was like, okay, good.

Ilana Panich-Linsman/Netflix

It surprised me that they arranged that phone call with your dad without confirming with you beforehand. Was that…okay? Like, are you glad that it happened on the show, was it hard?

Yeah, it was hard. Me and my father’s relationship isn’t fixed, or anything. He ended up moving to Vietnam that same year, and so it became harder for us to communicate regularly. I still message with him on Facebook, and I’ll FaceTime him sometimes. But [the phone call] was really hard because I didn’t know how much they were gonna edit out. They totally edited out all the parts where me and him were arguing in English and Vietnamese. Karamo had to be like, “Excuse me, sir, excuse me sir, we’re not doing that today.” I can’t believe they cut that part out [laughs]. I can’t believe my dad was being so casual about Karamo being there.

That surprised me a little bit too.

Yeah. I’ve gotten some incredible messages from people, a lot of Asians, being like, “Oh my gosh, me too with my dad.” I’ve [gotten] messages from all over the world from people that have experienced what I experienced. So it’s been really touching and kind of healing to connect with others whothat share my pain.

Were there any of the Fab Five that you felt like you connected with most?

Bobby was the one that went out of his way to connect with me, because his husband is also Vietnamese. So, him being married to a Vietnamese man, he knew a lot of the cultural things about me already, which was really nice. He came to the restaurant and ate a couple times outside of the show. Jonathan has been the only one that has reached out to me personally since the show aired. So I feel like Bobby and Jonathan in hindsight are my two faves, my two that I feel are the most genuine. But Jonathan was also very late to everything when we were filming and so the crew was very unhappy with him at times [laughs]. And he did seem kind of self-involved in the moment, but I think he does care. He’s just kinda stretched himself thin, if that makes sense.

Anything else about the show that we haven’t covered?

I mean, I gotta say, even with all the drama that happened with the show, I felt like it was a good thing in my life, and it made a really big impact on the way I view myself and my trajectory, I guess. Being able to envision possibilities is easy with them and the show. Re-watching it now, and peering into who I was two years ago, like — I definitely needed that. I’m like, look at me [laughs]. I’m not that person anymore, and I’m grateful for that experience.

Any exciting plans you’re cooking up at the moment? I read somewhere that you’re working on a crawfish bread for Jazz Fest.

I am! I’m trying to fill the spot that the crawfish bread people left last year because they’re no longer at the festival. I also think that there should definitely be some Viet-Cajun representation at something like Jazz Fest, because it’s been happening in the city for so long now, and I feel like it’s part of the fiber of our city. My crawfish bread is more of a baked bao style. The original crawfish bread is like a crawfish and cheese loaf, it’s very flat. Mine looks like a baked pork bao or something, but it’s crawfish. It’s got lemongrass, lime juice, fish sauce, and shrimp paste in it. And also cheese — because who doesn’t love cheese? I’m a big cheese eater, I love cheesy things. But yeah, I’m gonna make a five-spice spinach version too, which makes it taste like Pernod or Herbsaint or something. It’s really yummy. I’ve done some test batches and sold them at a couple of my pop-ups that I did at the Brew Pub last month and it was a big hit.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

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