Recipe For Hope From The Streets Of Hanoi

The Age

Tuesday April 5, 2005

BRIAN COURTIS

TELEVISION PREVIEW: JIMMY'S KITCHEN (8pm, ABC)

THE best you can wish for Jimmy Pham is that it never gets too hot in the kitchen. When Jamie Oliver launched his restaurant, Fifteen, as a way to train unemployed street kids in London, the temperature and language of the celebrity chef never seemed to go off the boil.

As the raw apprentices moved in, the mood of the lovely-jubbly media saint simmered and turned sour.

Absenteeism, incompetence and a sheer lack of understanding by some potential disciples bubbled into acerbic spats as the cameras followed Oliver from fridge to first course.

Jimmy Pham is a different kettle of cultures. Born in Saigon in 1972, he came to Australia as a two-year-old. Pham returned to Vietnam in 1996 as a tour guide/entrepreneur and was stirred by the plight of some of Hanoi's 20,000 street kids and orphans. It was a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moment for the Australian.

Vowing to make a difference, Pham talked to friends and relatives about how he thought he could help. The result, outlined tonight in James Robertson's short but inspirational documentary, Jimmy's Kitchen, was his KOTO restaurant and training school.

KOTO (an acronym for Know One, Teach One) was a practical venture in which the apparently shy Pham personally checked out the fate of young hustlers battling for a living on the streets, selling postcards, shoe shines or souvenirs to the tourists.

Some, like Pham Van Long, had drifted in from impoverished families among the hill tribes; others had simply been abandoned.

They would become both pupils and, eventually, an extended family. When they first saw him, we hear, the kids saw him as yet another "fat foreign turkey".

Although Robertson's film stays strictly with the uncritically positive, you sense the visitor was tricked every now and then and that, like Oliver's experience, it wasn't quite as smooth as he had hoped.

But Pham offered the kids education, skills, and a sense of family and values to replace the "law of the jungle".

The restaurant-school now has 130 graduates, many employed in Vietnam's top hotels and restaurants, while also acting as mentors to their younger brothers and sisters.

KOTO is a project that seems to be working, and Pham wants it to expand. He has every reason to hope.

© 2005 The Age

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