Delicious Vietnamese recipes with a serving of inspiration – the KOTO cookbook
- KOTO is the name of a hospitality academy for street kids founded by half-Vietnamese, Australia-raised Jimmy Pham – it stands for Know One, Teach One
- The recipes are divided into five regions, from Hanoi in the north to the Mekong Delta, and include dishes such as pho bo, lobster curry and braised oxtail
When Australian chef Tracey Lister and her husband, Andreas Pohl, took a two-year sabbatical to live in Hanoi, Vietnam, helping to open a cooking school for disadvantaged youth was not on their agenda.
By chance, Lister met Jimmy Pham, who had founded KOTO – an acronym for “Know One, Teach One” – a business to help street children, which had outgrown its original space and was moving to larger premises. Born in Ho Chi Minh City to a Vietnamese mother and a Korean father, Pham migrated to Australia with his mother and siblings in 1980. Nineteen years later, armed with a degree in tourism, he moved back to Vietnam.
In the introduction to KOTO (2008), the authors write: “As a tour guide, Jimmy befriended a group of street kids. He felt that he himself might have ended up on the streets, had his family not left Vietnam […] The street kids Jimmy met came from families too poor to make ends meet: families who had to rely on their children to help out.
“These young people, who the Vietnamese call ‘bui doi’ (literally ‘dust of life’) often ended up working as street vendors, or as cheap labour in restaurants and on building sites. Many travel from the countryside to the big cities, where they live without official permits. Jimmy bought the kids food and organised showers. But after a while, he felt that this was just a quick fix, not a long-term solution.
