Peter Cuong Franklin

Coming Up

Peter Cuong Franklin’s training moved across institutions before it moved into kitchens: Fairfield College Preparatory School, Yale University, and Le Cordon Bleu (2008). That sequence matters less as polish than as evidence of a long route toward the trade, one that did not begin in a culinary setting and therefore had to be made deliberately. Before cooking became the focus, he worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley (until 2008), a role that sits far from the immediacy of the pass but clarifies the pivot he made. Heat, texture, and timing replaced finance, and the shift gave him a different kind of discipline. The kitchen credentials came through chef trainee posts at Nahm in Bangkok, Caprice in Hong Kong, Next in Chicago, and Alinea in Chicago. Those rooms represent different tempos and different ideas of precision, and Franklin’s path through them suggests a sensibility formed by exposure rather than fixation. Chôm Chôm (since 2011) and Ănăn Saigon (since 2017) are the outcome of that accumulation: one founder role after another, with the work moving from apprenticeship into authorship.

Where They Are Now

Vietnam remains the reference point in Franklin’s current work, but not as a static source. The streets still function as an active field of observation, where pace, repetition, and small variations in daily eating shape the way he cooks. His approach sits between the familiar and the refined, letting each sharpen the other instead of treating them as separate categories. That is where his version of current Vietnamese cooking lands: contemporary, but still accountable to the rhythms that produced it. Ănăn Saigon gives Cuisine Mới a concrete form. Franklin’s practice there reads as ongoing dialogue with the place that shaped him, with identity treated as structure rather than decoration. Vietnamese food is not presented as a concept to be explained, but as an inheritance that can be worked, adjusted, and refined through technique and repetition.

Signature

Le Petite Bánh Mì, Bún Chả Bourdain, Hà Nội Turmeric Fish, Bánh Xèo Taco, and Đà Lạt Street Style Pizza show how Franklin works by translation as much as by reference. The names stay legible, but each one is reframed, so the point is not imitation and not rupture either. The method is to keep the memory of street food intact while changing the register in which it appears. Franklin’s signature is less a single dish than a pattern of thinking: Vietnamese forms made present-tense without losing their source material.

In Their Words “I think what we do at Anan is inspired by what we see on the streets of Vietnam.” “Vietnamese food is in my blood. It’s a fundamental part of who I am as a person.”