Although he had a successful job in the financial industry, chef Vi Nguyen felt that his career was missing something. He was a baby when his family emigrated in the 1970s from Vietnam to Leesburg, Virginia. His mother, Xuan, did not have a lot of formal education, he says, but she knew how to cook.
“I gravitated towards the kitchen because I saw my mom and the passion and the happiness that she got from serving other people, a genuine happiness of making someone happy through food,” he continues. After working multiple jobs in order to put Nguyen and his four siblings through college—alongside owning several cafes of her own—Xuan opened her final eatery in 2004. Xuan Saigon was the first Vietnamese restaurant in Leesburg, a mid-size town in the suburbs of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia (dmv).
Morning beverage? I live and die by Nespresso. Every day I go through about four Nespresso pods.
Favorite Sunday morning meal? I make pho on a weekly basis, and Sunday morning, we usually have a family meal. My entire family are all great cooks in their own right. It’s not fun sometimes, when we’re doing a family meal, because we challenge each other. But, food will always bring family together.
Dream person to cook for? It would be Anthony Bourdain, who made me become a chef. After reading Kitchen Confidential, the way that he writes and his journey…. He actually signed my book and I met him! But he’s not the only person I would want to cook for, my grandmother saw me through culinary school. She saw me graduate, but she passed away before I could do this five-course meal that I wanted to do for her.
As a young boy, he says that in lieu of daycare, he would help to wash dishes and make coffee. That time in the kitchen, even as a child, “was a good opportunity for her to teach me. She knew I was passionate about being closer in the kitchen, and it was an opportunity for me to stay closer.”
Inspired by his mother, Nguyen decided it was time to leave the mortgage and finance world to achieve not just his goals, but his passions that have stayed with him since his youth. At age 30, he decided to pivot to enroll at L’Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Maryland.
During and throughout culinary school, Nguyen returned to his hometown to assist his mom in streamlining Xuan Saigon by facilitating its marketing, organizing the kitchen, and honing the skills of its staff. In 2014, the family restaurant was sold, and Nguyen happily reports that his mom is now retired.
Once he graduated, he went through the fine-dining stage circuit, working for heavily decorated chefs such as an internship with the James Beard Award-winning and now Michelin Star-adorned Fabio Trabocchi at the Ritz-Carlton restaurant Maestro.
Soon, Nguyen was sought out by Edward Berg, who at the time was serving as Chipotle’s director of operations. “He taught me so much about throughput and [that] you want to capture the sales fast,” he says of Berg, whom Nguyen notes is still a mentor of his. “And then, your labor and your food costs will take care of itself if you have the right systems in place.”
“As a chef, you want to learn as much as you can,” Nguyen continues. After his years in fast casual, he returned to fine dining for another stint, serving as the executive chef at Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg until 2017, a position that he would return to in 2022.
Between his work at Lansdowne, Nguyen decided to open up his own fast-casual spot, called KOVI Asian Street Food Kitchen. “We basically became the number one food truck in the DMV,” he says, which led to two brick-and-mortar locations, the second of which opened only six weeks before the COVID pandemic shut everything down.
Always on the hunt for new inspiration and emerging techniques, Nguyen again made a jump to the business side of the restaurant industry. As a part of the Florida-based Asian street food group Hawkers, Nguyen was on the front lines, assisting in opening restaurants around the East Coast. His next move was to the Northeast-based Mecha Noodle Bar, which won Restauranteur of the Year from the Connecticut Restaurant Association in 2023.
In June 2023, Nguyen made his move to Thompson Hospitality Group, where he currently serves as culinary director. “Thompson has been the best culinary decision of my career,” he says. Though, he notes that he was not even looking to switch jobs at the time. During a phone call with the company’s vice president of retail operations, Mark Copanzzi, Nguyen was convinced that he had to join the team. “When I talked to him, I’m getting goosebumps thinking about it, it was an amazing conversation.” Nguyen says a face-to-face meeting with Copanzzi and founder Warren Thompson was enough to seal the deal.
The company has been open since 1992 and is the “largest minority-owned food and facilities management company” in the U.S. today, according to its website. Thompson Hospitality Group owns 14 restaurant brands with over 70 restaurant locations in total, including Social House Kitchen and Tap, Velocity Wings, and Milk and Honey Southern Inspired Kitchen, among others.
Thompson Restaurant Group is not only successful with its leaders and growth, but it also promotes entrepreneurship, says Nguyen. “The culture is second to none. I absolutely love what we are doing at Thompson, because there is no ceiling,” he continues. “It’s a perfect fit—it’s like a glove.”
Thompson, also serving as president and chairman of the restaurant group, has also been an encouraging force, Nguyen attests, saying that “Thompson wants us to be our own owner and our own manager.”
With the company’s large portfolio of restaurants, juggling the range of flavors offered by each individual brand may seem daunting, but Nguyen assures that he is up to the task. “It’s about using those French classic techniques and batch cooking to save that integrity for the fast casuals and all those other things that we do when we are doing catering and batch events,” he says. “So, in my experience in fast casual and fine dining has really gotten me to a point where I can help train on how to execute higher-end and higher-volume types of businesses.”
For the future of the Thompson Hospitality Group, Nguyen believes that the only way is up, and says “I think that in five years, we are going to maybe triple in size.” This is not just a pipe dream; FSR recently wrote that the group’s restaurant division alone is expected to get more than $200 million in revenue in 2025.
Additionally, Nguyen and his team try to give their brands some autonomy to create specials and features that will inspire their chefs to create but also motivate them toward innovation and taking on new challenges. “I have to make sure that we are successful with what we are putting out there and with our buying power through Sysco and the other groups that we use for our procurement, it just has to make sense financially for us to be really creative and innovative with our menus,” he says.
Nguyen continues, “Obviously, with Southern fare, we are not tied to anything, but we can be really creative with cross-building. Like some of the things that we are doing with our collard greens, adding a little bit of kimchi in there for the bite. These little tricks and nuances are something that I want to teach our team.”
While his current role is to ensure that his team is supported and up to all standards, being a part of a larger group also has allowed Nguyen to excel in his own journey of melding culinary education with hospitality. “It just means so much more to me that I can touch many more lives with the way that I teach, the way that I give,” he says. “My passion is people, it is not food. Obviously, I love food, but my passion is, ‘What can I leave our last conversation with? What are you going to take away from this with my culinary team?’”
Given Nguyen’s history and quest for culinary exploration and knowledge, it truly seems so. “I get to teach, I get to travel, I’m learning every day,” he says. “If I’m not continuously learning, how can I grow and how can I facilitate my team to grow?”
