Do we like them?

Do we like Luke Nguyen?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent, low-drama career with a youth-training charity and no harmful words or acts found, but not much public record on the big social issues.

Luke Nguyen's story starts with a boat. His parents fled Vietnam after the Communist takeover, and he was born in Thailand in 1978 while the family was in a refugee camp. He says his father “actually built his own boat with army buddies”. The family ended up in Sydney's Cabramatta.

Growing up, the family restaurant was the whole world. His parents opened a phở restaurant in Cabramatta, and he says he was working at five and was expected to get good grades too. That's the engine behind a career that later took him from Sydney kitchens to TV hosting and cookbooks.

Now the scandal section, which is blissfully short. Searches for court rulings, lawsuits, fines, accusations and staff complaints turned up nothing about him, and the results that did come back were about other chefs. That's an absence in what we could find, not a guarantee, but it's a clean slate as far as the reporting goes.

On the harm check, there's nothing to report: no remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the planet, and no pattern of working with people who push harm. His public life is food, travel and hospitality. His new menu even offers vegan and vegetarian options alongside the seafood. The honest caveat is that he doesn't talk politics much, so there's less to go on than for someone with a big public platform.

The recent news is a big one. In March 2026 he opened Lua, which means “fire” in Vietnamese, at the new Sydney Fish Market. It cooks over an open hearth and charcoal fire pit, and he says travelling down the Mekong “really brought all those flavours to the Lua menu”.

The real good stuff is the Little Lantern Foundation, which he co-founded in Hoi An in 2009 to give hospitality training to disadvantaged young people. That's a refugee kid who made good, building a way up for other kids back in the country his family fled. We couldn't confirm how it's going today.