The San Francisco Chronicle's 2003 Rising Star Chef

THE CHRONICLE'S 2003 RISING STARS
Monday, February 2, 2003
-- Michael Bauer, San Francisco Chronicle

Every year for the past decade The Chronicle's Food staff has selected a crop of young chefs who we think will soon be stars on the national stage.…

ROBERT LAM
Restaurant: butterfly
Age: 31
Style: Pan-Asian

Robert Lam, Vietnam-born model student-turned-chef, is proud that he once got kicked out of a class at the Culinary Institute of America - a class on Asian cooking, at that.

"They did Asian cuisine in seven days; two days for China, one for Japan, one for Vietnam, and so on," taught by an old-school chef who believed chop suey was a authentic dish, Lam recalls. He couldn't stomach the insultingly simplistic approach and vocally pushed the boundaries, to the point that he was excused from the class.

Now, about half a dozen years after graduation, his 100-seat Butterfly and his New Asian-style cooking are getting attention.
Today the restaurant has a young, almost cult, following. Butterfly can barely keep up with the calls for reservations.
Lam's cooking stays as close to his roots as possible. His take on fusion is not a melting-pot style, where everything is equal and doesn't stay true to anything.

He calls what he does "Asian within Asian," pulling from Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean traditions. He traces his devotion to true flavors to his mother, who opened a Vietnamese restaurant, Vien Dong, in Garden Grove outside Los Angeles when the family landed in Southern California after the fall of Saigon. He was only 4 at the time, but the restaurant figured hugely in his childhood. It drew Vietnamese expats and funded Lam's, and his five siblings', education. His parents, professionals in their homeland, had to create life from scratch, without English, with six children and an extended family. But although the whole Lam family was involved in the restaurant, his parents did not envision, or even want, any of their children to continue the business.

Lam's father became the first Vietnamese to hold office in the United States when he won a seat on the city council of Westminster (Orange County). His brothers and sisters became "dentists, marine biologist, engineers - and me, I went into the restaurant business, not exactly what was expected," he says, chuckling.

He wanted to cook, but his parents said no. So Lam was sent to the University of San Francisco, where he majored in American history. "I tried to flunk out so I could go to culinary school," he reports, but his parents cut him a deal: If he would finish college, they would send him to culinary school.
Finishing college, he now admits, was the right thing to do. But he headed straight for New York and the Culinary Institute of America as soon as he could.

Moving back to the West Coast after graduation, he cooked to high praise at Brannan's Grill in Calistoga. When Butterfly came up for sale, Lam decided to "swim in the big pond," and bought it. The dream that was stoked in his mother's kitchen, the skills he learned there, its hibernation while he was in college, the hunger he found at culinary school and the streak of rebellion that informed it all have found wings at Butterfly.

Yet everything still harks back to his upbringing. "Someday," he says, "I'm going to reopen my mother's restaurant here."
- O.W.