Mooncake's Lunch Pop-up

This spring, you can taste Tessa’s innovative Vietnamese cooking at the Mooncake Lunch Pop-up. Expect translucent tapioca dumplings with shrimp or mung beans, mackerel in tamarind broth, and banana leaf ice cream.

Food runs like a thread through Tessa’s life. Her whole family cooks; both her parents are very good at it, and her father has his own vegetable garden where he grows and ferments ingredients from Vietnamese cuisine, such as rau răm (Vietnamese coriander), lá tía tô (Vietnamese perilla), and khổ qua (bitter melon). A meal at home is always complete: a soup, something savoury, something sour, and something sweet, in balance.

A table full of food

Tessa’s earliest culinary memories are of tables filled with Vietnamese dishes during family celebrations: sticky rice, deep-fried shrimp snacks, salads, and more. Everyone brought a dish, and people cooked with whatever was available at the time, at Asian supermarkets in the Netherlands in the early 2000s. These shared meals became the first gateway into her parents’ Vietnamese culture, and at the age of seven, she visited the country for the first time.

By now, Tessa has been to Vietnam more often than her parents. After earning several university degrees, she left her job in PR and travelled to Vietnam for a few months. There, she realised how deeply cooking is part of who she is. She was taken on in a restaurant kitchen, where she learned about French food culture and cooking techniques. At the same time, she founded Saigon Kiss, a collective and creative studio that celebrates Vietnamese culture through different disciplines such as food, fashion, and art.

Tessa’s cooking is quite different from her parents’. Some dishes are traditional, but she also creates her own recipes, shaped by what she has seen and experienced in Vietnam, the Netherlands, and Paris, where a large Vietnamese diaspora lives and where she often finds inspiration.

Ask someone in the Netherlands about Vietnamese food, and chances are they will mention the 'Vietnamese spring roll': that golden, deep-fried roll you’ll find at many markets, but not in Vietnam. This spring roll originates from the Chinese-Indonesian culinary tradition and was embraced by Vietnamese vendors as an accessible way to sell snacks.

Tessa’s parents arrived in the Netherlands in the 1980s and watched the Vietnamese food scene here slowly change. Where people once had to make do with whatever was available in Asian supermarkets, more and more ingredients are now imported directly from Vietnam, from specific types of noodles to fresh herbs. The number of restaurants is also growing, although their menus often still revolve around a fixed selection of classics such as bánh xèo, bánh mì, and gỏi cuốn.

At the same time, a new generation has been emerging in recent years, one that takes more risks and looks beyond that familiar repertoire. Chefs and makers who build on what is already there, while also creating space to innovate and tell their own stories. Tessa is at the forefront of that movement.

Mooncake.nl is the platform of food journalist and writer Jonneke de Zeeuw. She celebrates the flavours of the street, the city and the world – and shines a light on food cultures and the stories behind them through videos, TV segments, books, essays and articles. Her work reveals just how rich, surprising and super-diverse the culinary landscape of the Netherlands has become.