Latest news with #MissChu
New York Post
6 days ago
- Business
- New York Post
TikTok user shares how she gets free food on Uber Eats app
A woman claims to have 'cracked the code' to scoring free food when ordering Uber Eats, saying that all it takes is a little kindness. Taking to TikTok, content creator Emma Kate Boyd explained, 'All you have to do is write something really nice in the caption' when using the food delivery app. When ordering Vietnamese takeaway from Melbourne restaurant Miss Chu recently, she wrote 'I f**king love Miss Chu' in the order notes of the app. 'They gave me a free dessert,' she said proudly, holding up a container of chocolate pudding. 'It really is that simple – spread a little love, get a little love.' reached out to Uber Eats for comment, and while they couldn't quantify how often restaurants give out free items, it's understood that this does happen across the platform. Boyd's video quickly went viral, racking up over 40,000 views, as users shared their own experiences trying this. 'I wrote a cute note once and they refunded my whole order,' said one user. 'I did that and they just put hearts on my items,' wrote another. Meanwhile, some argued that she shouldn't have shared this information publicly, as now everyone will do it and restaurants will catch on. 3 Content creator Emma Kate Boyd told her followers how she got free food from Uber Eats. @emmakateboyd/TikTok 'Don't tell people this!' said one. However, others claimed it hasn't worked for them. 'I've done this for every order for five years and never got anything free,' they said. 'Most people just hate kindness, sadly'. 3 Boyd suggested that if people 'spread a little love' in their orders, the restaurant will add on free food. @emmakateboyd/TikTok It comes after a woman went viral last month for sharing a nifty way she got larger portions of takeaway food – and it came down to channelling your inner man. Emily Lemus claimed that using a man's name when ordering might lead to more generous portions – because workers assume they have bigger appetites. She seemingly 'proved' her theory by ordering identical meals from Chipotle, one with a man's name and one with a woman's, and then weighed them to see which one was larger. 3 Uber Eats told it could not comment on how often restaurants give out free food. Christopher Sadowski Every time she conducted the experiment, the man's order was slightly heavier. In the same month, a delivery driver also shared his tricks and tips for ordering from places like UberEats. 'You don't need to scam anyone or lie about your order,' he explained online. He said customers need to join restaurants' loyalty schemes that sometimes offer first-time customers free food. Additionally, he explained, 'Honestly, if you've got a birthday, you've got free food. Some people use this every year like clockwork'.
News.com.au
6 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
‘Genius': Aussie's Uber Eats hack to score free food goes viral
A woman claims to have 'cracked the code' to scoring free food when ordering Uber Eats, saying that all it takes is a little kindness. Taking to TikTok, content creator Emma Kate Boyd explained, 'All you have to do is write something really nice in the caption' when using the food delivery app. When ordering Vietnamese takeaway from Melbourne restaurant Miss Chu recently, she wrote 'I f**king love Miss Chu' in the order notes of the app. 'They gave me a free dessert,' she said proudly, holding up a container of chocolate pudding. 'It really is that simple – spread a little love, get a little love.' reached out to Uber Eats for comment, and while they couldn't quantify how often restaurants give out free items, it's understood that this does happen across the platform. Ms Boyd's video quickly went viral, racking up over 40,000 views, as users shared their own experiences trying this. 'I wrote a cute note once and they refunded my whole order,' said one user. 'I did that and they just put hearts on my items,' wrote another. Meanwhile, some argued that she shouldn't have shared this information publicly, as now everyone will do it and restaurants will catch on. 'Don't tell people this!' said one. However, others claimed it hasn't worked for them. 'I've done this for every order for five years and never got anything free,' they said. 'Most people just hate kindness, sadly'. It comes after a woman went viral last month for sharing a nifty way she got larger portions of takeaway food – and it came down to channelling your inner man. Emily Lemus claimed that using a man's name when ordering might lead to more generous portions – because workers assume they have bigger appetites. She seemingly 'proved' her theory by ordering identical meals from Chipotle, one with a man's name and one with a woman's, and then weighed them to see which one was larger. Every time she conducted the experiment, the man's order was slightly heavier. In the same month, a delivery driver also shared his tricks and tips for ordering from places like UberEats. 'You don't need to scam anyone or lie about your order,' he explained online. He said customers need to join restaurants' loyalty schemes that sometimes offer first-time customers free food. Additionally, he explained, 'Honestly, if you've got a birthday, you've got free food. Some people use this every year like clockwork'.
News.com.au
21-05-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
‘Rather go to jail': Potts Point restaurateur's explosive feud with council rangers
An Eastern Suburbs' restaurant owner's feud with Sydney City Council has come to a head in an expletive-laden rant over the position of the venue's plants. Nahji Chu runs popular Vietnamese eatery, Lady Chu, on Potts Point's Roslyn Street. The hospitality veteran — who was born in Laos and moved to Australia in 1975 — previously operated the thriving Miss Chu Vietnamese tuckshop chain – which had eight locations across Sydney, Melbourne and London before it was placed into administration in 2014. Since opening Lady Chu in late 2021, Ms Chu's colourful nature – and no-nonsense attitude – has made her something of a local icon. The venue, Ms Chu has said, transformed 'what once was a tired, overlooked stretch' into 'a vibrant artery of culture and community – and I fought for that transformation tooth and nail'. That fight continued on Saturday night, when Sydney City Council rangers rocked up to Lady Chu — in the middle of dinner service, 'freaking me and my customers out' — to address neighbours' complaints that the restaurant's plants were impeding pedestrian access to the footpath. In the above video, provided to by Ms Chu, she confronts the two male rangers, telling them: 'I'm trying to activate a dead city and you're trying to f***ing shut it down.' 'I'm not a f***ing naughty school kid, so don't speak to me like that,' Ms Chu continued. 'I'm simply trying to speak to you —' one of the rangers began, before Ms Chu interjected. 'I need respect. And respect what I do, please,' she said. 'I'm paying f***ing taxes and I'm paying your wages, so f*** off. I'm trying to activate this f***ing dead city, so don't shut it down.' In a statement to a City of Sydney spokesperson said its staff advised Ms Chu 'which items were placed outside its approved areas and respectfully asked they be removed as soon as possible, with no expectation dinner service would be interrupted to resolve the issue'. 'Despite this respectful approach, the City staff received a torrent of abuse,' the spokesperson said. Since March, City of Sydney has approved two outdoor dining applications that expanded the restaurant's existing outdoor dining area to a total of 53m2 — without impeding the walkway — along Roslyn Street. 'However, the City has received ongoing complaints about additional furniture, umbrellas and planters beyond the business' approved outdoor trading area, obstructing the footpath in one section of Roslyn Street, and causing difficulties for pedestrians,' the spokesperson said. 'We always work collaboratively with the businesses to balance desire for additional items and the needs of the community to access this public footpath. 'The City of Sydney has had several meetings with the business owner to explain the issues and encourage it to remain in its already extensive free outdoor dining area. 'These proactive attempts to resolve the issue took place outside restaurant rush periods.' Ms Chu, however, remained 'really upset' over the interaction 'about the f***ing plants' — accusing City of Sydney of 'being really pedantic and petty' and standing by the robust language she unleashed upon them. Though she acknowledged 'the plants aren't supposed to be there, they're only outside of where they're supposed to be by one metre'. 'And (council) won't approve it where I would like to place them — which makes more sense to me — and they keep going on about the two-metre clearance thing,' Ms Chu told 'It just makes more sense that they're right up against the kerb because it creates a barrier, and then the cars can see that that's where the kerb finishes and starts. 'And also, two people (walking) hand-in-hand can still get past. They can get past if the plants were further in. But if the plants were further out, it's actually still exactly the same amount of space. 'They're being really pedantic and petty.' She disputed City of Sydney's claim it had only attempted to resolve the issue outside busy periods at the restaurant, and said she had asked the rangers to make an appointment with staff to discuss the matter at another time. When Ms Chu was told the discussion wouldn't take long, 'I basically blew up', she said. 'Like, do not speak to me like that, I'm sorry. I'm not a naughty schoolgirl. Don't gesticulate with your little finger, coming in here,' Ms Chu said. '(City of Sydney) need to respect me and what I've done for this community. I'm the one paying taxes and their wages, if you don't mind. So do not speak to me like (I'm) a naughty schoolgirl. (I told them to) please make an appointment to see me and come back when it's not so busy.' 'It's kind of like a war zone' Ms Chu said the ongoing complaints against her business — and her behaviour — are 'just water off a duck's back for me now'. 'That's what happens when you become high-profile and successful,' she added. 'If I was a dead, quiet, little, tiny cafe, there'd be no problem. But unfortunately, people love to target me because I'm successful, I suppose, and I'm a Vietnamese woman — and there are some white people in this area who just don't like that. 'I think the people who are making these complaints are old men, or just old people in general. They're born and bred Potts Point and there's a Vietnamese refugee doing well in the area and they don't want a bar of it.' Ms Chu is no stranger to receiving foul-mouthed abuse herself — albeit from 'people who are drug dealers and wayward types who just don't want gentrification'. 'They walk past and they go, 'You're a f***ing idiot', 'What's the white tablecloths, you c***t?',' she said. 'It happens to me every day. They go, 'My rent went up because of you, you f***ing c***'. And I just go, 'Oh, just so you know, I'm actually the one paying taxes so that you can be on the dole' … This area is littered with crazies.' Her only option, Ms Chu said, has been to fight fire with fire. 'Kings Cross is just littered with (people who use) profanities — and so I become that woman (who uses) profanities, too,' she said. 'Now I'm just swearing all the time like they are, and it just becomes a normal, everyday language … And the council comes out, then I go, 'Get f***ed'. It's kind of like a war zone.' It's a state of mind Ms Chu said she's also employed in her dealings with council. 'I don't care if I get into trouble,' she said of speaking out about Saturday night's run-in. 'I've made you look bad because you made me look bad. Game on. If (council's) going to pick on me, I'll on you back. Like, you don't poke a bear and expect it remain calm. 'And then the council's going, 'Well, our staff have remained calm whilst you blew up and explicitly told them to get f***ed'. I said, 'Yes, I did actually, because you dropped a bomb on me and then you asked me to remain calm'. No, f*** off.' The City of Sydney spokesperson said: 'We commend our staff for remaining calm and professional throughout the process and we request the community act respectfully when interacting with all City of Sydney staff.' Since November 2020 — when the council first waived outdoor dining fees — nearly 1000 outdoor dining applications have been approved, the spokesperson said, benefiting over 800 businesses. 'The total value of support we have given businesses by waiving footpath and on-street outdoor dining fees since November 2020 is around $20 million, and its real value to our city is immeasurable,' they said. 'We will continue to work with this business to ensure it can enjoy the free use of city footpaths while understanding its obligation to maintain sufficient space for others, including those pushing prams or for wheelchairs.' A defiant Ms Chu said she has no intention of moving the plants from their current position. 'I would rather go to jail than remove the plants,' she said. 'So (council can) give me the fine and I'll either pay it or, preferably, I will dispute it in court so that I can change this draconian law once and for all.'
The Age
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Real straight-shooter': Lady Chu's founder is famously brusque. She has her reasons
The first time I meet Vietnamese food dynamo Nahji Chu, I mention, apologetically, that I'm in a bit of a hurry as I have theatre tickets. She's unmoved. 'If you don't have time, then don't come here,' she says, airily, snatching the menu back off her restaurant table. 'This isn't a fast-food outlet.' A lot of people in hospitality would probably love to serve up similar home truths to their demanding customers. The difference with Chu is that she actually does. As the head of the MissChu empire that once included a catering business and a series of nine restaurant-tuckshops in Sydney, Melbourne and London, the 'rice-paper-roll queen' could afford to be direct. But even now, after that company crashed spectacularly, and she was forced to start again from scratch, she is no less blunt. Along the way, the diminutive figure with the over-sized personality has become loathed by some but, in truth, loved by many more. And even those who don't admire her style adore her food. With her Lady Chu restaurant expanding rapidly to colonise most of a Potts Point side street at Sydney's Kings Cross, it's hard to deny her entrepreneurial flair and culinary genius. But at the same time, she's also extremely skilled at making enemies. Very recently, when City of Sydney rangers demanded, mid-service, that she move some restaurant planters they said were obstructing the footpath, she let fly a foul-mouthed rant against both them and the anonymous complainants who had brought them to the scene. 'I'm just trying to make Australia a better place for everyone,' she told Good Weekend. 'I think we've lost our way with ridiculous laws in hospitality and, if I have to go to jail to fight them, I will.' It's that brusque manner that sees her regularly branded an Australian Basil Fawlty or our version of Seinfeld 's outrageous Soup Nazi – impatient, dismissive and belligerent. 'She's been called so many names over the years,' says Warren Fahey, musician, cultural historian and former chair of the Potts Point Business Group. 'The Dragon Lady, Nazi Nahji … but, really, she's extraordinarily generous and can be very welcoming. She's a force to be reckoned with. Instead of knocking politely on doors, she knocks them down and rides straight through the red tape.' Vietnamese-Laotian Chu, 55, who was given asylum in Australia in 1978, knows she has a reputation for being pushy and terse to the point of rudeness to some of her customers, but she's unapologetic. Sometimes, she thinks, people deliberately wind her up just to see her in full flight. 'I'm not like that all the time, but because I have that reputation, people coerce it out of me. They want that. It's a little bit like when someone is grinding metal and the sparks are flying, you're meant to look away and put some protective sunglasses on. But with me, people go, 'Let's grind the metal and all watch.' ' Roslyn Street is a backwater off the main Kings Cross drag of Darlinghurst Road, or it used to be before Chu took over a lease of one empty shopfront in 2020 during COVID-19, and then another, and another, until she, these days, has five shops in a row. Now, from Wednesday to Sunday each week, the pavement is transformed into an alfresco 90-seat restaurant with white-clothed tables, sofas, parasols, candles and huge pot plants festooned with fairy lights. Locals have dubbed it Rue de Chu. Chu thinks of it like Monopoly, with her own Mayfair being the Gaudi-inspired building on the end that once housed fine-diners Gastro Park and Metisse, where she can now operate her commercial kitchen. Her get-out-of-jail card, she says, is the tens of thousands of dollars she says she's paid the City of Sydney in fees and fines for putting tables – and pot plants – where she's not allowed. 'She's a real straight-shooter,' says film producer Rebel Penfold-Russell, who first met Chu when she catered a charity event. 'But I wouldn't like to stand in front of her! She works so hard, though, and is incredibly generous and great fun.' Every working day, Chu's there on the frontline, as executive chef, restaurant manager and maître d', taking bookings, seating people (or not), writing down orders, supervising the kitchen, doing the accounts and the marketing. 'I'm doing at least three jobs at once,' she says, as the orders flood in for her signature tiger prawn and green mango rice paper rolls, her roast suckling pig banh mi, her Peking duck pancakes and rich and spicy beef and pork soup, bún bò Hue. 'What comes out of that is my efficiency, which comes off as being quite abrupt. Loading 'But when did you ever see Kylie Kwong seating people? When was the last time you got seated by Justin Hemmes? When you come to Lady Chu, I'm the one who's there, doing it all. And that comes with me yelling sometimes. But it comes more from a place of efficiency than anything else.' In 1975, after the Laotian civil war was won by the Communist Pathet Lao, Chu's mother and four of her siblings vanished overnight. A few months later, her father took her and her remaining brother on a stealthy nighttime crossing of the Mekong river to Thailand, daubing them in mud so they wouldn't be seen. Just as they reached the Thai side, however, they were caught and thrown into a Thai jail cell with 40 other prisoners. They stayed there for three months, Chu suffering a bout of TB, until her father was able to bribe the guards to free them using hidden silver bars from Laos' heroin trade. When they reached a Thai refugee camp, they were met by a miracle. 'On the first day, standing in the distance, was my mother!' Chu says. 'So I was reunited with her and my other brothers and sisters and aunty, and from then on, we always stayed together as a family.' After three years being shuffled around camps and eking out a living growing vegetables and selling Vietnamese pho, in March 1978, they were flown to Australia and arrived at the migrant hostel in Villawood, in Sydney's south-west. Chu was thrilled. 'There was a tap for water, and I had my own bed,' she says. 'But the food was terrible. Tip Top bread and butter that you ate with sugar on, and cereal out of cardboard boxes. We'd never seen anything like it. And school was brutal. The Australian children used to taunt us and bully us, there was so much racism.' Five months on, the family was sent to the NSW Hunter Valley to work on a chicken farm in Cessnock. After the mandatory year, the family piled into their old Ford Falcon 500 station wagon to drive to Melbourne, where Chu's aunt was running a black-market noodle shop in her home. They moved into a house in Richmond, where neighbours were amazed they kept and killed their own chickens. Chu's family were similarly alarmed at and disgusted by frozen chickens in supermarkets. Quitting university early, Chu worked in fashion, where she helped dress Kylie Minogue in her famous leather jacket for the movie The Delinquents. Later, she studied marketing and journalism, then worked for small-bar entrepreneur Vernon Chalker, becoming his catering manager, and later James Orloff in his business BITE, modelled on the UK's Pret A Manger. Burnt out by hospitality at 34, she found a job in banking and was promoted to a post in Sydney in 2004. There, she was surprised to find long lunchtime queues at takeaways but no Vietnamese food on offer. The next step was obvious: she had learnt to cook from her grandmother, who once rattled pans for the king of Laos, and she knew about catering. She quit her job, sold some art to raise cash, and in 2007, MissChu was born in a Darlinghurst back street. Loading The MissChu fax machine was instantly jammed with orders, so Chu started using email and organised a team of e-bike riders to deliver her rice paper rolls, dumplings and Peking duck pancakes. 'It was way before Uber Eats started,' says Chu, who used her photo on her refugee visa as her logo. 'I was the first person in Australia to do something like that. I knew this business was my calling. I could be fast and supply good, healthy food. It was an instant success.' Expansion was rapid, with five outlets in Sydney, two in Melbourne, and one in London, a total staff of 280 and an annual turnover of $25 million. By 2014, she was planning more outlets and having talks with a franchise company which had worked with restaurateur Bill Granger to globalise her business, incorporating streetwear and a TV show. She became the poster child for refugee chic and a champion of Vietnamese culture. She 'owned' racist taunts with her motto, 'You ling, we bling', she delivered a spirited TEDx Talk on rights for refugees and, during a memorable appearance on ABC TV's Q&A, berated the other guests for refugee detention policies and 'bombed' the show with a poster decrying: Fruitless Debate. But then, on her first-ever holiday, in the south of France, she received a call saying MissChu was in debt and trading while insolvent. It was a complete shock. 'We expanded so fast that the plane was flying mid-air and didn't even have time to refuel,' she says. 'It was too fast and too popular and there were too many staff and too many cooks, and it all got beyond me.' She's adamant that the business was sound, but that she wasn't able to keep track of where the money was going or being taken. She filed for voluntary administration that year. Three Melbourne outlets are still going, now operated by her former business partner, Gabi Machado. She withdrew, depressed and suffering insomnia, but then returned again in Sydney with her new company Cocochine Catering and then with Lady Chu, funded by her COVID super withdrawals and loans from Justin Hemmes and her aunt in Melbourne, who runs the successful Box Hill restaurant, Indochine. Her logo this time is the outline of the same photo on her visa but with the eyes hidden by a red bar, and dressed in Joan of Arc-style armour. 'Lady Chu is such a friendly, warm, convivial, stylish place, and she's made it that way in her image,' says regular customer, barrister Bret Walker. 'But at no stage are you ever confused who's in charge. She could teach a sergeant-major his job.' Expansion is still on the cards, including a range of sauces, dog treats for customers' pets and various art projects. She's still busy, busy, busy. 'Look, I know I should be outsourcing all of this, but the thing is, when I was MissChu, everyone said, 'Delegate, delegate, delegate!' ' she says, her pet staffy, Archie, at her feet. 'I delegated the f--- out of everything and then look what happened. I'm also sick and tired of being in the background and all my people being quiet and that's why I'm loud, sometimes rude and obnoxious because I have to make up for the silence that I see in my community, which is just our culture. 'I have way more trauma and depression than anyone I've ever met, but I still work, pay taxes and provide a community service at a very affordable price. So when you guys come to me with a sense of entitlement, it kind of rubs me up the wrong way.'
Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Real straight-shooter': Lady Chu's founder is famously brusque. She has her reasons
The first time I meet Vietnamese food dynamo Nahji Chu, I mention, apologetically, that I'm in a bit of a hurry as I have theatre tickets. She's unmoved. 'If you don't have time, then don't come here,' she says, airily, snatching the menu back off her restaurant table. 'This isn't a fast-food outlet.' A lot of people in hospitality would probably love to serve up similar home truths to their demanding customers. The difference with Chu is that she actually does. As the head of the MissChu empire that once included a catering business and a series of nine restaurant-tuckshops in Sydney, Melbourne and London, the 'rice-paper-roll queen' could afford to be direct. But even now, after that company crashed spectacularly, and she was forced to start again from scratch, she is no less blunt. Along the way, the diminutive figure with the over-sized personality has become loathed by some but, in truth, loved by many more. And even those who don't admire her style adore her food. With her Lady Chu restaurant expanding rapidly to colonise most of a Potts Point side street at Sydney's Kings Cross, it's hard to deny her entrepreneurial flair and culinary genius. But at the same time, she's also extremely skilled at making enemies. Very recently, when City of Sydney rangers demanded, mid-service, that she move some restaurant planters they said were obstructing the footpath, she let fly a foul-mouthed rant against both them and the anonymous complainants who had brought them to the scene. 'I'm just trying to make Australia a better place for everyone,' she told Good Weekend. 'I think we've lost our way with ridiculous laws in hospitality and, if I have to go to jail to fight them, I will.' It's that brusque manner that sees her regularly branded an Australian Basil Fawlty or our version of Seinfeld 's outrageous Soup Nazi – impatient, dismissive and belligerent. 'She's been called so many names over the years,' says Warren Fahey, musician, cultural historian and former chair of the Potts Point Business Group. 'The Dragon Lady, Nazi Nahji … but, really, she's extraordinarily generous and can be very welcoming. She's a force to be reckoned with. Instead of knocking politely on doors, she knocks them down and rides straight through the red tape.' Vietnamese-Laotian Chu, 55, who was given asylum in Australia in 1978, knows she has a reputation for being pushy and terse to the point of rudeness to some of her customers, but she's unapologetic. Sometimes, she thinks, people deliberately wind her up just to see her in full flight. 'I'm not like that all the time, but because I have that reputation, people coerce it out of me. They want that. It's a little bit like when someone is grinding metal and the sparks are flying, you're meant to look away and put some protective sunglasses on. But with me, people go, 'Let's grind the metal and all watch.' ' Roslyn Street is a backwater off the main Kings Cross drag of Darlinghurst Road, or it used to be before Chu took over a lease of one empty shopfront in 2020 during COVID-19, and then another, and another, until she, these days, has five shops in a row. Now, from Wednesday to Sunday each week, the pavement is transformed into an alfresco 90-seat restaurant with white-clothed tables, sofas, parasols, candles and huge pot plants festooned with fairy lights. Locals have dubbed it Rue de Chu. Chu thinks of it like Monopoly, with her own Mayfair being the Gaudi-inspired building on the end that once housed fine-diners Gastro Park and Metisse, where she can now operate her commercial kitchen. Her get-out-of-jail card, she says, is the tens of thousands of dollars she says she's paid the City of Sydney in fees and fines for putting tables – and pot plants – where she's not allowed. 'She's a real straight-shooter,' says film producer Rebel Penfold-Russell, who first met Chu when she catered a charity event. 'But I wouldn't like to stand in front of her! She works so hard, though, and is incredibly generous and great fun.' Every working day, Chu's there on the frontline, as executive chef, restaurant manager and maître d', taking bookings, seating people (or not), writing down orders, supervising the kitchen, doing the accounts and the marketing. 'I'm doing at least three jobs at once,' she says, as the orders flood in for her signature tiger prawn and green mango rice paper rolls, her roast suckling pig banh mi, her Peking duck pancakes and rich and spicy beef and pork soup, bún bò Hue. 'What comes out of that is my efficiency, which comes off as being quite abrupt. Loading 'But when did you ever see Kylie Kwong seating people? When was the last time you got seated by Justin Hemmes? When you come to Lady Chu, I'm the one who's there, doing it all. And that comes with me yelling sometimes. But it comes more from a place of efficiency than anything else.' In 1975, after the Laotian civil war was won by the Communist Pathet Lao, Chu's mother and four of her siblings vanished overnight. A few months later, her father took her and her remaining brother on a stealthy nighttime crossing of the Mekong river to Thailand, daubing them in mud so they wouldn't be seen. Just as they reached the Thai side, however, they were caught and thrown into a Thai jail cell with 40 other prisoners. They stayed there for three months, Chu suffering a bout of TB, until her father was able to bribe the guards to free them using hidden silver bars from Laos' heroin trade. When they reached a Thai refugee camp, they were met by a miracle. 'On the first day, standing in the distance, was my mother!' Chu says. 'So I was reunited with her and my other brothers and sisters and aunty, and from then on, we always stayed together as a family.' After three years being shuffled around camps and eking out a living growing vegetables and selling Vietnamese pho, in March 1978, they were flown to Australia and arrived at the migrant hostel in Villawood, in Sydney's south-west. Chu was thrilled. 'There was a tap for water, and I had my own bed,' she says. 'But the food was terrible. Tip Top bread and butter that you ate with sugar on, and cereal out of cardboard boxes. We'd never seen anything like it. And school was brutal. The Australian children used to taunt us and bully us, there was so much racism.' Five months on, the family was sent to the NSW Hunter Valley to work on a chicken farm in Cessnock. After the mandatory year, the family piled into their old Ford Falcon 500 station wagon to drive to Melbourne, where Chu's aunt was running a black-market noodle shop in her home. They moved into a house in Richmond, where neighbours were amazed they kept and killed their own chickens. Chu's family were similarly alarmed at and disgusted by frozen chickens in supermarkets. Quitting university early, Chu worked in fashion, where she helped dress Kylie Minogue in her famous leather jacket for the movie The Delinquents. Later, she studied marketing and journalism, then worked for small-bar entrepreneur Vernon Chalker, becoming his catering manager, and later James Orloff in his business BITE, modelled on the UK's Pret A Manger. Burnt out by hospitality at 34, she found a job in banking and was promoted to a post in Sydney in 2004. There, she was surprised to find long lunchtime queues at takeaways but no Vietnamese food on offer. The next step was obvious: she had learnt to cook from her grandmother, who once rattled pans for the king of Laos, and she knew about catering. She quit her job, sold some art to raise cash, and in 2007, MissChu was born in a Darlinghurst back street. Loading The MissChu fax machine was instantly jammed with orders, so Chu started using email and organised a team of e-bike riders to deliver her rice paper rolls, dumplings and Peking duck pancakes. 'It was way before Uber Eats started,' says Chu, who used her photo on her refugee visa as her logo. 'I was the first person in Australia to do something like that. I knew this business was my calling. I could be fast and supply good, healthy food. It was an instant success.' Expansion was rapid, with five outlets in Sydney, two in Melbourne, and one in London, a total staff of 280 and an annual turnover of $25 million. By 2014, she was planning more outlets and having talks with a franchise company which had worked with restaurateur Bill Granger to globalise her business, incorporating streetwear and a TV show. She became the poster child for refugee chic and a champion of Vietnamese culture. She 'owned' racist taunts with her motto, 'You ling, we bling', she delivered a spirited TEDx Talk on rights for refugees and, during a memorable appearance on ABC TV's Q&A, berated the other guests for refugee detention policies and 'bombed' the show with a poster decrying: Fruitless Debate. But then, on her first-ever holiday, in the south of France, she received a call saying MissChu was in debt and trading while insolvent. It was a complete shock. 'We expanded so fast that the plane was flying mid-air and didn't even have time to refuel,' she says. 'It was too fast and too popular and there were too many staff and too many cooks, and it all got beyond me.' She's adamant that the business was sound, but that she wasn't able to keep track of where the money was going or being taken. She filed for voluntary administration that year. Three Melbourne outlets are still going, now operated by her former business partner, Gabi Machado. She withdrew, depressed and suffering insomnia, but then returned again in Sydney with her new company Cocochine Catering and then with Lady Chu, funded by her COVID super withdrawals and loans from Justin Hemmes and her aunt in Melbourne, who runs the successful Box Hill restaurant, Indochine. Her logo this time is the outline of the same photo on her visa but with the eyes hidden by a red bar, and dressed in Joan of Arc-style armour. 'Lady Chu is such a friendly, warm, convivial, stylish place, and she's made it that way in her image,' says regular customer, barrister Bret Walker. 'But at no stage are you ever confused who's in charge. She could teach a sergeant-major his job.' Expansion is still on the cards, including a range of sauces, dog treats for customers' pets and various art projects. She's still busy, busy, busy. 'Look, I know I should be outsourcing all of this, but the thing is, when I was MissChu, everyone said, 'Delegate, delegate, delegate!' ' she says, her pet staffy, Archie, at her feet. 'I delegated the f--- out of everything and then look what happened. I'm also sick and tired of being in the background and all my people being quiet and that's why I'm loud, sometimes rude and obnoxious because I have to make up for the silence that I see in my community, which is just our culture. 'I have way more trauma and depression than anyone I've ever met, but I still work, pay taxes and provide a community service at a very affordable price. So when you guys come to me with a sense of entitlement, it kind of rubs me up the wrong way.'
