Miami’s Best New Chef is Making The Vietnamese Food of His Childhood

I started cooking when I first moved

to Miami 10 years ago,

just out of desperation for Vietnamese food.

The emphasis of Tam Tam is on drinking food,

the culture of quan nhau.

It's basically somewhere that Vietnamese go

to grab a bite and also party.

I work with my husband.

I am the head chef, he curates the wine list.

We really embodied quan nhau culture

that we wanna bring to Miami.

[gentle sunny music]

Good morning, everyone.

My name is Tam Pham,

I'm the chef owner here at Tam Tam in downtown Miami.

We have a lot to do today, so let's get to work.

Took us about a year to get everything decorated.

Just to show how old this spot is,

here's a photo of the courthouse in front of us being built,

and the courthouse was built in 1920,

and we are like right here,

so we've been here for about a hundred years.

It's now noon.

I have a lot to do.

The first thing I'm gonna do is a goat curry.

I like to be the first person here,

'cause I like the quietness,

having the whole space for myself.

I don't have to say behind or corner or sharp anywhere.

This is halal goat from Australia.

They come frozen and already cubed up.

We go through about 15 pounds a day.

Halal goat is a lot less gamey,

and also the animal is just treated way better.

Vietnamese curry is found in the south of Vietnam

where Indian immigrations came over in the '50s.

It comes with egg noodles,

one of my favorite way to eat curry.

Every batch of curry takes about like a pound of lemongrass.

I get this from my auntie.

You know how in Vietnamese we call everyone auntie?

She just is kind of my mom's age.

She has a Vietnamese produce shop,

and you know it's Vietnamese

when half of the store also sells nail supplies.

So fish sauce is basically fermented anchovies.

It adds a lot of umami flavors.

I have a lot of guests who taste our goat curry

and just do not believe that it's goat.

All right, first we're gonna have to sear the goat.

No, of course it's gonna happen right now.

So we're having some issues with our stove,

which is a kitchen nightmare.

This is Harry, this is my partner.

He's also the handyman of the kitchen.

Whenever I have problems, he usually the one

to fix it for me.

Oh, yay.

It turned back on.

[gentle groovy music]

When I moved here, there was maybe one

or two Vietnamese restaurant here,

and so I just started learning from the internet,

from YouTube, just so that I can start eating some

of the dishes that I really missed.

So Harry suggested

that we should also start hosting dinners

for our friends and family.

Tam Tam started out as a supper club right in our backyard,

and now it's a full blown restaurant

that's packed out every night.

If you look closely to the bottom,

you start seeing this beautiful fond

that we have in the bottom.

So we're gonna be building the curry right now.

We're gonna start with shaved shallots.

With the heat off, sweat the shallot,

create a steam so that the fond gets softened

and then eventually released into the gravy.

Goat itself in Vietnam is usually like a drinking protein.

You come in, you have, a lot of the time,

proteins that you usually don't find.

Just keep an open mind,

just know that the food is gonna be great,

and the drink is gonna be even better.

It's a party at the table.

Massaman paste is really similar to red curry paste.

It's only a tad sweeter with more chili

and also tamarind paste.

The best curry powders you can find in Vietnam

is Indian curry powder,

because curry powder was introduced

to Vietnamese food through Indian immigrants.

What I'm doing right now is pounding lemongrass,

which is actually a very essential step.

Pounding lemongrass helps to release all the essential oil.

This used to be a Cuban diner for about 20 years.

This is actually something that was left over

from the Cuban diner.

All right, now we're gonna go in with our lemongrass.

I make this dish specifically,

or ones we don't have an actual recipe for it.

All the recipe is right in here.

We are a very new restaurant.

The cuisine is quite unfamiliar to a lot of my staff.

I trust my staff to do certain things,

but when it comes to bigger dishes like the curry itself,

I like to make it myself.

Eventually, I will have to pass on the torch, right?

Our coconut, some fish sauce.

This is MSG.

Just like sugar is responsible for sweetness,

MSG is the purest form of umami, which is the fifth taste.

I like to add MSG to some of my dishes,

just so it can round out all the sharp edges of the flavors.

And put aluminum foils on top of it.

This way, it's gonna braise rather than roasting.

Timer is on.

Three hours.

It's now 1:00.

We need to move on to our caramel fish sauce

for our fish sauce wings.

So we have six quarts of sugar in here.

We're gonna keep the heat on about medium low.

This sauce is actually a really popular sauce in Vietnam.

You can use this sauce to braise chicken,

you can use the sauce to braise fish.

Here, we have had the wings on the menu

for the very first supper club event that we ever did.

I don't think I'll ever be able to take it off,

'cause people will be very upset.

It's nice, crunchy, sweet, salty,

it's a little tangy from the lime juice.

The wings are marinated overnight

in a mixture of salt, fish sauce, garlic,

and a little bit of vodka.

I was really deep on the internet one night.

So when you add vodka to a frying dish,

the second it hits the oil, it will release a lot of steam,

which makes your crust very light and airy.

That's why we have two bottles of Skol vodka in the kitchen.

Obviously, we don't drink that.

You don't wanna drink that.

It is not a hard sauce to make,

but I like to make it myself,

just so we can keep the consistency.

Tam Tam was named after me.

In Vietnamese name, heart or soul.

When you put Tam Tam together,

that means two hearts or two souls,

and in a very, you know, cheesy ways,

it represent Harry and I,

the two people that came together to create Tam Tam.

The two things need to work hand in hand

to create a perfect quan nhau,

which is the concept that we're trying to be.

So now that the sugar has turned into caramel,

we're gonna move on to the kind of fun part,

but also very dangerous part of making this dish,

which is adding fish sauce into caramel.

It's gonna release a lot of steam.

It could really burn you.

This is where the fish sauce gets caramelized.

It also turn into this completely different sauce.

When I was little, I did think

at some point I might be a chef.

I think I looked down on the position a lot.

Also, my parents wanted me to be an engineer.

A classic Asian story, huh?

I have proved to them that this is a career worth pursuing,

and I can also make good money out of it.

Now we're gonna go in with our sambal,

which is fermented chili paste.

It's not too spicy, it has a nice tanginess to it.

A lot of Vietnamese food gets fermented,

because, one, people really enjoy that funkiness

that fermentation gives,

but also, I think preserving, for a country

that used to be poor like Vietnam,

having access to food year-round used to be an issue.

Now we're gonna go in with half

of the amount of garlic that I have.

We're gonna wait for the sauce to cool down completely

before we add the rest of the garlic,

so that when the sauce hits hot wings,

some of that raw garlicky flavor will come through

and it will be so aromatic.

Oops, it's 2:00.

I better get going with my betel leaf-wrapped lamb.

Let's go.

Thankfully we had a prep shift yesterday

where a lot of this mise en place ready prepped out.

When I have the whole kitchen staff coming in,

we all have to fight for counter space.

Being the chef, I get to call the longest one.

So these are betel leaves.

It has this licoricey flavor,

but when you start to give it a nice char,

it turns super sweet, very fragrant, smoky,

and it grows so well in South Florida

just because of the similarity in weathers.

So what I like to do is mixing the dry

and wet ingredient together first,

just so that we don't have any weird pockets

of dry ingredients in there.

This is the mixture of lemongrass and shallots.

Lamb by itself is quite lean,

so what I do is I also add a coarsely ground up beef mixture

that has about 30% fat,

ensuring that the final product is not gonna be dry.

So this lamb wrap dish comes with a lettuce wrap setup.

There's nothing that is more representative

of Vietnamese food and flavor profile.

On a busy night, I would have to roll out lambs in the back

as service happening in the front.

You would start with the bottom side up.

So because the bottom side is rougher,

it will hold on to the meat.

Spread it to the sides,

slowly but tightly wrap everything together.

Walking back from school, we would always pass

by this betel leaf stand on the side of the road,

and the aroma bring such memories to me,

so the second that my auntie told me,

Hey, I have betel leaves in my backyard.

Let me know if you ever need.

I was like, I definitely need to put that dish on the menu.

All right, I just rolled like a hundred of those.

My scallops just got here.

I'm gonna have to go cure some scallops.

These are U-10 scallop from New High Port,

just about an hour outside of Boston.

They are fresh, never frozen.

Honestly one of the best scallops

I've ever had in my life, too.

We have five pounds of scallops here.

I usually do 5% lamb zest, 5% MSG and 5% salt.

So the scallop dish is raw scallop, it's scallop crudo dish.

Curing the scallop firm up the texture.

It's served with coconut nuoc cham,

which is a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce,

paddy herb oil, Thai basil and fried garlic.

To me, Vietnamese food is also really bright and acidic.

The lime zest adds a nice citrusy note

without me having to add a lot of lime juice.

Vietnamese people don't really like to eat raw seafood.

Time goes on, and as I have gained more confidence

as a chef, I feel a lot more free

to kind of just put on things that I believe is very good,

and we can, you know, continue to push the envelope.

It's gonna go back into the fridge for 30 minutes to cure,

and after that, give it an ice bath.

It will firm up the texture of the scallops a lot more.

My sous chef is working

on a really special R&D dish right now.

If it's ready, I'm gonna have to take some photo for it.

[upbeat sunny music]

This is Adrian Ochoa, my very talented sous chef.

He's been with Tam Tam since our popup time,

and he's currently working on a new special for us

for our spring menu.

I spoke to our meat guy, Brandon,

and what he suggested was, and he said he hated the name,

but the Thor's Hammer,

which is basically like an ossobuco hind shank,

and what we settled on was marinate it

and leave it alone for two days,

sous vide-ing it for about 16 hours,

then we finish it off in the oven for service.

This is my second time seeing this.

We ran it last weekend just to see people's reactions,

so we have already made some changes.

We lined the plate with banana leaves.

We wanted to give it a more impressive presentations.

Adrian also adjusted the cooking temperature and time.

Looking at it right now, I think he nailed it.

It's gonna be a little 151 up top.

Gonna light it on fire as we take it to the table.

The overall goals for me when I taste a new dish is that,

one, it has to taste Vietnamese uncompromisingly.

It has to taste good, it has to be fun to eat.

We also like to have different side dishes

to go with the dish.

It's amazing.

The shrimp paste really come through.

It could probably use a tad more salt.

Yeah. But the sauce is rich,

but also really bright at the same time.

Every time I'm reheating it,

the bone marrow inside actually renders out,

and then I'm creating kind of a vinaigrette

with tamarind, white pepper, Szechuan pepper.

My favorite way to eat this is

with the firecracker eggplant,

teeny tiny little eggplants that you pickle.

I think it's very much ready to be on the menu.

Adrian is like one of my best friends.

If I don't like it, I will,

it's very easy for me to say that sucks.

The general wisdom is, food cost should be about 20

to 30% of the price on the menu.

For a dish that has a really high food cost,

like this one already, we're not gonna do 20 or 30%,

we're probably gonna cut some loss to that,

but at the same time, it satisfy our needs

to do fun things, to push the boundaries of the cuisine.

The next step before this can be on the menu is

I have to take some photos

for our Instagram and social media.

Let's plate up another one so I can take the photo of this.

My dad got me my first camera when I was 16,

and when it was time for us to open a business,

you know, I just started learning how

to do food photography.

My style of food photography was inspired

by Bon Appetit magazine.

I really like that high flash.

Definitely being a owner operating a business,

I will have to wear different hats, right?

It allows me to do things that I love,

which is cooking and taking photos.

Okay, I like that.

Good photography definitely has helped a lot

with our popularity.

So the trick to make something look appetizing is,

the color temperature of my food photography

is usually lean on the warm side.

We also add a lot of herbs, and also red components helps

to make something looks appetizing.

You like that? Yeah, I like that.

All right, well let's just, then let's light it up.

It's gonna, like, give a little bit of a flame off the top.

Surprisingly, I always like, with like meats

and things like that, I like to do sparkling.

So I do have the wonderful, like, Cremant du Jura

that's gonna be rose, it's gonna have some body to it,

and then the sparkling is kind of gonna cut

through that real meatiness of it,

so it's all about balance.

I think I got the shots.

Thank you for joining me today.

I really have to get back to service.

Door's about to open.

Usually my day ends when the last tables are sat down,

so that's about 10:00,

but right now you really have to go, so goodbye.

[gentle music] [camera shutter clicks]