Food stylist Thu Buser talks about how her Vietnamese heritage influenced her work, how she got started, and how she warmed to the idea of being an artist.
Can you tell us a bit about growing up in Ho Chi Minh City and how it has influenced your current life and creative practice?
I think my styling career actually started with my mother. We had a restaurant next to our house in Saigon, so I grew up there. So I always found a way to have a say in cooking, even though my parents tried to shut me out. I found the energy of cooking so fascinating. My mother had a natural sense of how to choose the right ingredients that look beautiful on a plate, or how to cut cheese into beautiful shapes for parties and guests, and that stayed with me through the years. Her father was a poet and a writer, and my mother painted, cooked, sewed and embroidered. So I guess in a way it runs in the family.
Then I got a job in marketing because my mother never wanted me to be in the kitchen. She said, “It's hard work, it's a lot of effort,” and she didn't want to see her daughter go back to the kitchen. So she tried to send me to school and then get an office job. Then, when I was working in marketing, I realized that all I wanted was to cook as a job, and actually cook the food myself. So I went to Le Cordon Bleu in Madrid, where I learned all the traditional cooking techniques. It was tough, but I think it gave me the training I needed to create my own style of Vietnamese cuisine.
So you went from being a marketing professional to Cordon Bleu, where did you go from there?
I moved from Spain to New York and started copying the work of famous stylists. I was amazed that someone could make a living doing this and not get punished for it.
I didn't just want to cook food, I wanted it to look beautiful too – I took photos for my blog, I laid out spices on a map of Vietnam, so I've always had an artistic sensibility in me, even before I knew what styling was.
So I started looking through a lot of magazines, because in Vietnam, we don't have a lot of that. There are no cooking magazines in Vietnam. There are no recipes, because everyone's just like, “Okay, just add a cup of soy sauce and a little bit of something.”
So I started looking at different magazines and I would see beautiful dishes in Bon Appétit or The New York Times and I thought, “Oh my gosh, who are these people making those dishes?” And underneath it in the credits it said, “Food styling is…” And I thought, “What is food styling?” So I looked into food styling and it opened up a whole new world for me and I've never looked back.
There aren't many stylists, and the industry is small enough that everyone knows everyone. There are a lot of things that intimidate people: long hours on site, fickle clients, countless hours on the business side, sourcing ingredients out of season, etc. You're doing it all by yourself: sourcing, cooking, and communicating with clients, photographers, prop stylists, recipe developers, art directors, brand directors.
When you first started out, you were reaching out to these stylists and observing them, how did you get in touch with them?
I literally got active on LinkedIn and reached out and sent out hundreds of messages. And I literally sent out hundreds of emails every day to everyone. I searched for every food photographer, food stylists, prop stylists in New York and reached out to many of them. People that I work with now have probably received the emails that I sent them back then.
I just said, “Hey, I really want to do this, and if there's an opportunity, I'd love to help out, have a chat over coffee, and learn more about this industry, and how to get into this industry,” and I think I got about one response out of every 50 emails.
Thank you to the few who responded and accepted me, I am forever grateful to them.
You seem to dabble in a lot of different things – food styling, photography, art direction, cooking, etc. I recently saw that you made dolls out of vegetables. What brings you the most joy? Where is your passion? And do you ever feel like you're getting burnt out?
I do anything that involves food because that's what gives me the most joy. Whether it's food dolls, dinner parties or just giving food to people on the street, anything that involves food and feeding people and making them full and happy and seeing the joy on their faces is what gives me the most joy. Do you feel burnt out? Not yet. For me, the harder I work, the more exciting it is.
I try to take breaks between each project, but it feels so boring. One day I was like, “Okay, what's next? What's next? I'm dying.” So, I don't know. I think it depends on your personality, and it's different for each person, but I don't think I'd be here if I wasn't completely sane. There were a lot of times when it was like 3am and I still had like 10 other things to do. For example, the gelatin art I was making for dinner was a little cloudy, so I asked my husband and my friend, “Is this okay to serve?” and they were all like, “Yeah, of course it's okay. Just finish it, because we have to do other things. The most important thing is to finish it.”
And I asked myself, “Would I be proud of this if I put it out?” And I said “No,” so I put it back in the pot and started over at 3 a.m. There were many tears along the way, but starting over was necessary for me. I mean, I think a lot of times you get to that moment where things are good enough, but not good enough to be proud of. Is there any insanity in starting over? For me, the most important thing is not to finish it, but to finish it right.
How do you come up with the concepts for your dinners?
I always start with the menu. Vietnamese food is so diverse that I think, “Oh my gosh, there are so many dishes from north to south, that you could eat three meals a day, every day for three months, and you'd never repeat the same dish.” I think, “There are so many dishes, and all people know is pho and banh mi and spring rolls. These are really good and amazing, but let's do something else.”
I actually start with a region. What is the cuisine, the delicacy of that region, that province? Then I think about the concept. What is special about it? Last time, we took people to the highlands of Vietnam. There are 54 ethnic groups, but the only ones people know are Vietnamese. Vietnamese are my ethnic group. There are many other ethnic groups, each with their own cuisine and cooking style, but people don't know that. So I wanted to put the spotlight on those ethnic groups and let people know about the history and cuisine of Vietnam as well.
And this last concept is coastal cuisine. Vietnam has a long coastline that stretches all over the country, from New York to Colombia.
How did you find your team? Did people contact you or was it just you and your husband at first and then the team grew?
We are a group of friends. We've been together for about two years, but we've really grown closer during the pandemic. In Vietnamese culture, cooking is an expression of love, so I always invite Vietnamese people over and cook a feast for everyone. I just love feeding people.
And we were all saying, “Let's do a pop-up, because people don't know what we're making at home.” Or we'd have a craving for a local dish from some region in Vietnam, and we'd try making it here, and then we'd be like, “We can make it here, so let's do a pop-up and scale it up and see what happens.”
Everyone on my team is non-professional in some sense. They're not kitchen people, but they all come from different backgrounds. I have a designer, a programmer, a photographer, an architect, a stylist, and my husband is a consultant.
We all believe in the mission and we all want to come together and promote Vietnamese food to the world. What's interesting is that we all come from different backgrounds so we each bring different aspects and expertise to the table. I think that's one of the reasons for our success.
That's great. And what I'm hearing from you also feels like you learn a lot by building skills and learning. It makes the next project that much more fun because you have new knowledge. It's like, “Now I know what I'm doing so much better,” and the possibilities become much clearer as you gain skills and stuff.
I think technique is important, but what I've realized and learned is that the most important thing is the message. What do you want to say to the world? I always start with the message. At the time, I was so concerned about technique, technique, composition, and all the art stuff that people told me before I started this career and this journey, like, “If you want to be an artist, you don't need to go to art school, but to be considered a real artist, you need to be into art and stuff like that.”
And to be honest, I never thought of myself as an artist until recently. I started picking beautiful pieces of my culture and history and using food as a canvas to communicate the message I wanted to share with the world. So, to be honest, if there's one thing I wish someone had told me before I started this journey, it's that anything can be a canvas and anything can be a medium to communicate a message. If you have a strong message you want to communicate and you can find a canvas to express it on and a medium to communicate your message, that's art. And artists do that every day.
I feel like the world conspires to make things naturally beautiful. You just need to have the eyes to see it somehow. And there's so much potential art everywhere that comes to life with the right framing and color. You don't have to painstakingly create everything from scratch. You can use a lot of what's already there. So in my mind, I give everything a certain personality. For example, if I find a lettuce, right? I look for lettuce that has attitude or grace, or a curved one, not a perfect one, because I know that they'll give me the personality I need to get the message across.
Yeah, that's cool. A lot of people think of food as a practical thing, but there's an art to creating food. We think about music, or painting, things that you can see or hear, but with food it's the smell and the taste. There's also an ephemeral quality to food. The experience of eating food and smelling it lasts forever. The smell and the taste can remind you of your childhood.
Yes, absolutely. I think food triggers something deep within us more than a lot of other things, and that's why I'm obsessed with food.
Finally, here's one more fun question: if you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?
Oh, I think it'll be durian.
why?
Because my appearance and my inner self are completely different. When people first meet me, they say I have a stern face and feel scared or intimidated. And when I'm working, concentrating on something, making art, I have a stern, uncaring face.
But at heart, I'm very playful and I want everything to be exciting and fun and interesting and unexpected. So a lot of my work feels like if you keep peeling it, there are lots of layers that you can keep exploring. I think it's like durian.
Thu Buser recommends:
Coffee mixed with Coca-Cola for busy mornings (double the power!!)
Spring in Tbilisi, Georgia
Try every cuisine on earth at least once
On Earth We Are Beautiful for Only a Moment by Ocean Vuong
Farmers Market
