Video: Justin Yu Talks Vietnamese Influence, Copenhagen Hype

Earlier this year, we held the third annual Food Republic Interview Lounge at the W Austin during the Austin Food & Wine Festival. Ever since, we've been featuring video excerpts of the sessions with host Richard Martin. Next up is Justin Yu of Oxheart in Houston, Texas. 

Justin Yu of Houston's Oxheart from Food Republic on Vimeo.

Yu had more really intelligent stuff to say during our chat, so here is an edited, condensed transcript of the entire interview with the chef, which includes further insights into his young career, his inventive cooking and his love of fantasy football.

You were recently named one of the best new chefs from Food and Wine magazine for 2014.  So tell me a little bit about that. 

It was a huge surprise. It's just one of those things that you never think that you're actually gonna get. But when you get the phone call, you're shell-shocked. They fly you to New York, and it's just this whole whirlwind tour of meeting with the other chefs, going through all of the photo shoots, and having the big party at the end of the night. It was a lot of fun to meet everybody and talk with people who you've been seeing from afar for years and years.

And I would think it's a real honor for you because at this stage in your career, you're pretty young. You're in your 20s?

Yeah, I'm still 29. I'm almost there.

Are you from Houston?

I'm originally from Houston, I was born and raised here. I learned how to cook in Houston, to start. But then I just left for about four or five years, just to get a little outside education form the world, really.

And you didn't just leave, you went to Europe.

Yeah, I went to Chicago, Napa and then Europe. Europe was amazing. I would suggest it to anybody, but I would suggest a lot of young cooks to use it as a finishing school rather than a learning style.

So you were on stages in restaurants there. And one of the restaurants was In De Wulf. It's a hugely acclaimed restaurant that's in the middle of nowhere in Belgium, right?

It's in the countryside. And generally on stages, they don't put you up. But here they put you up because they have to. There is literally nothing around you. When they pick you up from the little train station, they actually drive a road that keeps on passing back and forth between France and Belgium. And every time you go into France, it welcomes you to France. And you get a text message. And so you get about six text messages on your way down into In De Wolf. There's not really anything like it in the US. The restaurant is really about the place where it's at.

And did that inspire you at all in terms of knowing – like in Houston you have this huge audience to draw off of? But it's also gotta be challenging because it's so spread out, right?

A lot of people would think that it's a challenge, but Houstonians are really happy to drive, especially for good food. Houston is an eating city. It's really based on a lot of cuisines and cultures and people who base their life around coming together and eating. And so we were really lucky in the fact that a lot of people were willing to seek us out.

And you talked a little bit about drawing on the culture there. You're in a place that has an incredible mix of different ethnicities, food cultures, and that's really what Oxheart's about. The menu is educational to read. There's so much going on.|

For a lot of people it might be a little challenging to read it. I try to be as obscure as possible, not to intimidate people, but mostly to not set an expectation that we can't necessarily meet. And I think more so than anything, the cultures around us, especially the Vietnamese culture, affects more so my palate in the way that we design food. I love Vietnamese food. It's my favorite cuisine. And Houston has the best Vietnamese food in the U.S., for sure. Probably some of the best outside of Vietnam. Reading the menu, and then kind of looking at the dishes, it's not immediately obvious if you didn't know I was Asian, the style of food, the way that the food is constructed. I value a lot of acidity, I love umami, and a lot of herbaceousness. That's a really Vietnamese kind of palate. And I love using hard spices, and that's definitely from me visiting down on Hillcroft where a lot of Pakistani and Indian restaurants are. And so it's a less obvious way of putting food on a plate that's really affected by the cultures around us.

You talk a lot about being ingredient-driven. How much do ingredients drive you?

[In] California, you can get everything at its peak of ripeness nearly year-round. What's great about Houston is that it has its own standard of growing regions and timing, whereas everybody's winter – that's what we are during summer. So we have to take spring and fall crops and ferment them so we can use local products all throughout the summer as opposed to the other way around. Which sets off a completely different sort of palate to your food because a lot of times, people are taking summer crops and then saving them for winter. Whereas we're doing the exact opposite. And I think it really sets Houston apart. I think it's great too because there's a lot of times where someone like a cook from California will come down to Houston and be like – well the produce isn't very good, it's not super ripe. But to me, you should look at it in terms of flavor. We don't have the best strawberries in the world. They're slightly sour. But sour is a flavor. And we work with it to utilize what's best about that strawberry that's grown in Texas that a lot of people would consider a flaw. And you shouldn't consider it a flaw, you should just consider it a part of what's great about Texas.