People: Yume Tran

Local restauranteur follows passion for food, creates cookbook, television program

By Joe Nguyen, AsiaXpress.com

Dec. 6, 2007

Yume Tran loves food.

It's a passion that grew inside of her for years, to the point that she left her cushy corporate job to open a restaurant.

The vivacious and verbose owner of Indochine – the Thai-Vietnamese restaurant located on 10920 S. Parker Road in Parker – absolutely adores the culinary arts. So much so that she's coming out with a 24-recipe cookbook later this month and just taped a TV show, both titled, “Asian Cooking Made Simple.”

“I want to do this first book to say to the Indochine customers ... that I want to deliver a product that they can take away,” she said.

The fully colored book is a collection of recipes from her restaurant, from when she was growing up in Vietnam and a number of brand-new concoctions. She said each recipe has a story behind it that she shares with the reader.

“It's not about the money, it's about the people who come and eat here,” she said. “They know enough about our story, but don't know all. They don't know the story about my sister. They don't know about why I do certain things. They just know they love it.”

The journey
While she was working on the book, she thought of her older sister, a boat person who disappeared during the journey out of Vietnam, she said. Tran remembered the impoverished conditions her family endured after the fall of Saigon and the creative recipes her sister would create with cheap ingredients such as tomatoes, ground pork and river crabs.

“She had such an envious task as a 14-year-old to go grocery shopping with such a meager budget and feed the whole family of eight,” Tran said.

Tran was also a boat person, venturing out of Vietnam alone as a teenager in 1979 because her family didn't have the means to send her other siblings. After a short stay at a refugee camp, she was sent to a foster family.

“(The Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota) heard about all these different kids who left the country on their own so they started campaigning and going to churches to see if they want to foster the kids,” she said. “I was the first one. I was probably the only girl at the time.”

With the family, she got the name that has stuck with her to this day. Born Phuong Dung, she said her foster family told her to change her name.

“They said, 'Honey, before you go to school, look in the the dictionary,'” she said. “'Look up d-u-n-g in English and look at the translation in Vietnamese. ... So honey, that's why we need to change your name.'”

Initially she went with Yoom, because it was phonetically close to “Dung.” But because it looked awkward on paper, she changed it to Yume.

“My foster sisters were like Shelly and Amy, so all my sisters started calling me 'Yu-me,'” she said. “So it stuck with me forever.”

Finding a love
Tran discovered her love of food while working as a waitress to support herself through college at Metro State.

“That's how you train your palate,” she said. “As a waitress, you don't go home and cook – you go out and eat.”

It was during this time when she was introduced to Thai food by her roommate. She called the cuisine her “love affair” for 20-plus years, joking that it's stronger than her marriage. But when she first saw how simple it was to prepare, reservations popped into her head.

“When I first stayed with her I thought, God, this girl doesn't know how to cook,” Tran laughed.

She said it was reminiscent of the cuisine from central Vietnam, the area in which she was born.

“Thai food is very similar. It's a very full-bodied flavor,” she said. “The north (Vietnamese cuisine) is always so salty and blah – except for pho. That's the only thing. And the south is quite a bit sweet.”

When Tran graduated with a degree in computer management systems, she entered the field of technology – it would be nearly two decades before her culinary passion would come bubbling to the surface.

Following a dream
In 2003 Tran and her husband, Jeff Nghiem, opened Indochine. The success of the restaurant spurred her to quit her job two years later to open Sapa, a grandiose Thai and Vietnamese restaurant in the Denver Tech Center.

Unfortunately fallout between the couple and their business partners caused Sapa to close a year later. But the setback didn't slow Tran down. She enrolled into cooking classes and picked the brains of her chefs. Before long, she was creating her own series of classes called “Asian Meals In Minutes.”

“You're constantly challenging yourself to go, 'how can you make it better?'” she said. “You can only do that if you know how to cook.”

Her enthusiasm caught the attention of Sam Arnold, a food historian and famed owner of The Fort. She said he wanted to do a cooking show with her with an “East meets West” theme, but he died before the idea came to fruition.

“I was lost,” she said.

Tran decided to continue with the plan, finding a production company to help her produce a show. This past October, she finished taping 13 episodes of her first season in New York.

“It's not my plan to be on TV or write a cookbook,” she said. “It just happened.”

These endeavors are only the beginning, she said. She plans on releasing bottles of sauce from her restaurant in March, and intends on create more cookbooks in the future.

“When you come from the corporate world, you come from a different background – it's a little bit more of a scientific background,” she said. “You approach things differently.

“There's a lot more vision than 'I own a restaurant, I'm going to cook here all day.'”

For more information about Indochine, visit its website at http://www.indochine-cuisine.com.

Joe Nguyen is the editor in chief of AsiaXpress.com. Joe can be reached via e-mail at joe (at) asiaxpress.com.