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Cleo Hồ Trần Phương Nga — the entrepreneur planting green health
Eating vegan is becoming a feature of modern life. By current estimates there are some 900 million vegetarians and vegans worldwide, around 10 million of them in Vietnam. People come to it for their health, out of compassion for animals, or as a spiritual practice in pursuit of a calmer, more peaceful life. Whatever the reason, the direction of travel is the same: towards living well.
Cleo Hồ Trần Phương Nga, CEO of AHT Group, founded the Chay 365 restaurant brand, now a favourite of the vegan community in Ho Chi Minh City and of foreign visitors alike. “For me, the simpler something is, and the more it comes from the heart, the more easily it reaches another heart,” she says of her own character and of how she runs a business.
Capital alone does not keep anyone in the vegan food business; without conviction behind it, the venture does not last. That was especially true after the pandemic, with the economy struggling and rents in the city centre high — opening a vegan restaurant there was a real gamble. Several friends opened restaurants at the same time she did, she says. Of those, only Chay 365 is still trading.
When her family heard she meant to open a vegan restaurant in the middle of the pandemic, many of them tried to talk her out of it. She was sure enough of the direction to go ahead anyway. As she puts it: “The move towards eating vegan is happening powerfully across the world, and here in Vietnam as well — so what is there to hesitate about?”
Vegan food, in her own assessment, has “a promising future”, and the market is an open one. Eating for health is a permanent public concern, and that is what allows a niche like vegan cooking to keep growing — in ten years' time, and in twenty.
Busy as the work of a CEO keeps her, she still sits down with her staff to go through every incoming ingredient, and takes the trouble — painstaking trouble — to build recipes that are nutritionally balanced, in the food and in the drinks alike.
“What occupies me is how to get clean food, made from sound ingredients, in front of my customers. That is the only way they come to trust Chay 365 and to feel something for it,” she says.
Vegan diners pay far more attention to the quality of a dish than to its price. So she does not let the cost of ingredients drive her decisions, and concentrates instead on knowing exactly where each one comes from and what is in it, so that all of it is unquestionably safe.
A vegan restaurant clearly answers a real demand for healthier living, but as the saying goes, one swallow does not make a spring: spreading the value of eating clean and living green takes a great many people pulling together. She says she actively encourages other young entrepreneurs to open vegan restaurants as she did, and is glad to share what she has learned as candidly as she can, so that between them they can build a healthy plant-food supply chain for the market.
“Aren't you afraid of the competition?” I asked. “No. Every restaurant has its own strengths and every owner has their own strategy. Diners go where the food suits their taste. And they need a change now and then — nobody eats at the same restaurant forever. So once you have made a good impression through consistent quality, competition stops being much of a problem,” she answers, plainly.
What began as a wish to spread the value of vegan eating and improve Vietnamese health is what led her to become a restaurateur. Two consecutive years of the pandemic then interrupted the plan to open three Chay 365 branches at once. When the “new normal” arrived it brought a shortage of staff with it, so she set the original plan aside and put everything into the first branch.
“If you are going to live, live fully; if you are going to do something, put the effort in.” Through every difficulty, the young CEO kept putting her affection for vegan cooking into each dish. Not long after opening, plenty of people were calling Chay 365 the restaurant with the best vegan banh mi in the city.
That affection from diners worked on her like a vaccine for the spirit, and it keeps her and the Chay 365 team pushing on with building the brand.
Born into a family with a tradition of eating vegan, Phương Nga was nourished on vegan food before she was born. By primary school she could work in the kitchen, cooking the vegan dishes for the family's ancestral death anniversaries from recipes her mother left out. Her parents were both busy, so on those days she would be down in the kitchen alone, cooking, then laying the offering tray out herself and waiting for her parents to come home for the ceremony.
“Growing up the way I did trained me to cook vegan food instinctively. I read the flavour of a vegan dish very quickly — one look and I know what seasoning and what ingredients it needs to come out right,” she says, with some pride.
She also wants to shift the fixed idea of vegan food that diners arrive with. To her it is not a matter of greens and bean curd; it is eating plants. Which means a vegan meal needs its portions thought through, so that it carries enough energy for a full day, by combining vegetables, grains, mushrooms and properly robust seasonings, with plenty of plant protein in each dish.
She wants diners to stop feeling that they are being made to eat vegan, and to choose it instead. Eating vegan is still eating, she says — the point is the same, a body with enough in it to get through a long day — with the one difference that there is no meat. So she has built dishes that keep the depth of traditional flavour while engaging all the senses, and whose names alone place them squarely as Vietnamese: banh mi, hot-and-sour mixed phở, dry hủ tiếu.
“I do not want people coming here to eat vegan only because it happens to be the fifteenth of the lunar month, or because their religion requires it that day. I want them eating vegan to look after their health and clear their system — and, through that, to learn to care for themselves,” she says.
There is no straining after grand dishes with poetic names; everything at Chay 365 is unfussy and generous. It also works as an easy-going place to meet for young couples who care about living green, and as a café in its own right, with drinks that are good, clean and well made.
Getting to the point where customers value the place as they do took the founder and her staff — whom she calls her colleagues, never her employees — carrying each other, shouldering the load and giving up their own interests to keep the restaurant running through the pandemic. “Without these colleagues the restaurant would certainly not have lasted,” she says, with feeling.
Running a food and beverage business usually takes an owner years of trial and error to find a direction that fits both them and the company. Phương Nga found hers through what she had drawn from her own life and through the support of wholehearted colleagues. And behind the success of any entrepreneur there is invariably a family holding them up.
“I feel extraordinarily lucky that my family has stayed close and supported me. Their help is what gave me the chance to do what I wanted to do,” she says, happily.
Thoughtful, decisive, strong, attentive — these are the pieces that make up the Cleo Hồ Trần Phương Nga of today. After the first branch, Chay 365 was set to open another in District 7 following the Lunar New Year of 2023, alongside a European-style bistro brand in District 12. Through these restaurants she means to carry on the work of spreading the value of green health to the diners who love Chay 365, and to a far wider public, in an entirely different register.
By Nguyễn Bảo and Hoàng Miên, Ho Chi Minh City Tourism Magazine, Q1 2023. Translated from the Vietnamese.
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