Pho the love of food: Dubai-based Vietnamese chef’s journey from cooking classes to global franchise

Pho the love of food: Dubai-based Vietnamese chef’s journey from cooking classes to global franchise

She began with cooking classes in Istanbul for over six students in 2012. It’s 2023 and today, her brand Vietnamese Foodies has over five branches in Dubai. As 40-year-old Chef Lily Hoa Nguyen, a mother of two sons aged nine and seven, sips her strongly brewed Vietnamese tea in her restaurant, she recalls her journey to becoming a successful food entrepreneur. It has been punctuated by numerous difficulties, ups and downs, including a pandemic that almost shut down one of her outlets. Yet Nguyen steered through those rough waters. The love for food, along with a strong community has seen her through. Born in the north of Vietnam and raised in Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen grew up in the post-war Vietnam of the 1980s and 1990s, where everyone she knew was struggling to make ends meet. Her own father, a sailor was away at sea for most of the year, and her mother was taking up different jobs to support Nguyen and her three sisters. One of the jobs her mother was busy with, was being a supervisor at a war factory. “She was supervising machines when it was fixing clothes, jackets and sweaters. She would wake up early