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Chloe Loung

Even after winning a Michelin star for his restaurant, Upstairs Tasting Room in Ho Chi Minh City, the biggest source of chef Hiep Truong’s inspiration remains the same: his mother and the family table.
The dish closest to his heart – the one that reminds him most of home – is the vit hon, a traditional Central Vietnamese dish where duck meat is braised with lemongrass, turmeric, coconut water and fermented shrimp paste.
At his intimate tasting room in the Vietnamese city, the duck is dry-aged for 21 days, grilled over charcoal and served with peanuts, house-made duck sausage and wild fig.
The rest of Truong’s menu holds the same familial warmth, drawing on childhood favourites and shaping them into 13 fine-dining courses. His current favourite is hen xuc banh da – stir-fried clams with laksa leaf, served on a rice cracker as a tartlet.
Other crowd favourites include so nuong mo hanh (scallop and cockles) and ca nau me (fish with fermented rice), as well as a Wagyu beef salad with pickled young aubergines, egg yolk and spring herbs.
“Upstairs is how I share the food I grew up with,” he says.
Falling in love with cooking
Truong came from a farming family and was raised near Chua Chan Mountain in Dong Nai province, roughly 100 kilometres (62 miles) east of Ho Chi Minh City. Corn, pepper, tobacco, cashews – the seasons constantly shifted what they grew throughout the year.
With his parents busy with the crops, cooking at home often fell to Truong – a chore that would eventually become his life’s passion.
He went straight into a two-year culinary programme after graduating high school. His routine consisted of class in the mornings, shifts at a nearby bistro from the afternoons until late at night, alongside ongoing internships.
“When you do something you like, in your passion, it will never make you tired,” he says.

After working at Villa Song Saigon and a few smaller restaurants, Truong landed at Quince Saigon, where he stayed for five and a half years, eventually becoming sous-chef under chef Julien Perraudin, his globally trained mentor.
“I learned so many things,” he says. “I learned everything. With the wok, with fire, yes, and also flavours. [Chef Julien] was married to a Thai woman, so he cooked Vietnamese cuisine with Thai [techniques] mixed with French and Japanese.”
After Quince, Truong moved to Little Bear, a gastro wine bar on the ground floor of a building that also housed an empty, unfinished unit above it. That bare space would eventually become Upstairs.
The restaurant earned its first Michelin star within 18 months of opening in late 2024, a rapid rise for a chef who had never run his own kitchen before.
An advocate for his home city
Over the years, Truong has developed some firm opinions and observations about what defines his homeland’s food.
Originally from Hue, his family settled among a community of central Vietnamese migrants after relocating. He is quick to note that both his accent and his cooking still carry the city he was born in – and he is especially proud of it.
Contrasting the two regional Vietnamese cooking styles, he explains that he prefers the “salty, spicy and very herbal” Hue style over the “lighter and more sour” cooking in the north.

The contrast is more than culinary: it speaks to how deeply his Hue roots have shaped his palate. It is regional, seasonal, personal.
Take shrimp paste, for instance. He refuses to use the northern variety, which he bluntly says “smells funky”. Instead, he reaches for the darker, more mellow version from central Vietnam – the kind made in the Hue style, brown rather than purple and far less pungent.
He may experiment with variations and adjust his flavour palates, but one thing never changes, no matter the region he is drawing from: fish sauce.
“For me, Vietnamese cuisine without mam – fish sauce, fermented things – and fresh herbs, is not Vietnamese cuisine,” he says with a laugh.
Reinventing traditional dishes
Then there is the dish that divides his diners: kho quet, which centres on an intensely savoury, sweet and thick Vietnamese dipping sauce made by simmering fish sauce, sugar, crispy pork fat and dried shrimp in a clay pot. Boiled or fresh vegetables are used to dip into the sauce.
Traditionally, it is a humble home-cooked dish. At Upstairs, Truong reinvents it, making the sauce creamier and richer, and serving it surrounded by vegetables. The result is polarising. “Vietnamese people don’t like it because they say it’s not kho quet,” he says. “But foreigners really love it.”
He has noticed this pattern again and again: a dish that Vietnamese diners dismiss often becomes the one foreigners cannot get enough of. When asked why, he offers a simple theory: outsiders arrive with fewer expectations.
He admits he has high expectations and harsh opinions, too.
“When it’s a new cuisine, it’s easy,” he says. “But you, me, we already have a lot of these things every day for a very long time.”
Upstairs, 36 Nguyen Ba Huan, An Khanh Ward (Thao Dien), Ho Chi Minh City


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Food & Drink

Inspired by his roots, Hiep Truong is elevating traditional Vietnamese cuisine at his Upstairs Tasting Room in Ho Chi Minh City


Inspired by his roots, Hiep Truong is elevating traditional Vietnamese cuisine at his Upstairs Tasting Room in Ho Chi Minh City.


Vietnam

Asian Cuisine

How a Vietnamese chef is turning family favourites into Michelin-starred feasts

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Inspired by his roots, Hiep Truong is elevating traditional Vietnamese cuisine at his Upstairs Tasting Room in Ho Chi Minh City

Inspired by his roots, Hiep Truong is elevating traditional Vietnamese cuisine at his Upstairs Tasting Room in Ho Chi Minh City