The two instantly connected over having a Southeast Asian ethnic background but growing up in Europe. Lam would invite Pham to his family home in Northampton where his father would cook for them.
“We bonded through food, eating and our common ground of how we were brought up,” says Lam, who was born in the UK to Hong Kong Chinese parents. “It was a very familial connection and a sense of community.”
After graduation, both Pham and Lam worked as fashion photographers, just as they had dreamed. However, they both felt something was missing.
For years, Pham sought a sense of ownership over her commercial work to no avail, while Lam admits he felt lost despite being published internationally.
Then, Covid happened. Racial prejudice against Asian faces started to rise in the West. It was a turning point for Pham to “look inward and ask myself who we are as people in the landscape of Europe”.
Growing up, her family ran takeaway shops near Berlin, but because Vietnamese food was not yet widely accepted in the West in the 1990s, they instead served Thai, Chinese and Japanese cuisine instead.
“My parents had to disguise as whatever identity accepted by the white audience in order to make a living to raise their children,” she says. “It was a lot to reflect on. What is my identity? Why do we hide? Why do we have to say ‘we don’t cook with MSG’?”
Lam, on the other hand, went back to Hong Kong during the pandemic and pursued personal projects where he could explore his identity and heritage through talking, writing and photography.
His first project was titled “Lychee Pickers” and featured the everyday activities of villagers in Shan Pui Tsuen, a village in Yuen Long district, where his father is from.
Over time, this deeply personal work began to gain traction with magazines and even restaurants.
“I felt these stories had so much soul and power,” he says. “Food became something that felt a bit more organic than when I did fashion photography.”
In the meantime, Pham co-founded Dashi, an Asian diner in Berlin, with childhood friend Westphal, who was also born in Vietnam and grew up in Germany as a child of takeaway owners. Opened in January 2022, Dashi is inspired by European-influenced food in Asia, such as Vietnam’s banh mi and Hong Kong’s macaroni soup.
Pham says Dashi is an attempt to reclaim “what our parents weren’t able to do as they had to adapt their food for the Western white audience”.
Lam is no stranger to Pham’s sentiment. Similar to Pham and Westphal, he came from a restaurant family. His father immigrated from Hong Kong to England more than 40 years ago and worked at restaurants in London’s Chinatown, before moving on to the kitchens of Michelin-starred establishments, where he learned to cook roast duck and pork.
After Lam was born, his family moved to the town of Northampton, about 70 miles (110km) from London, where his parents opened a restaurant of their own.
“There was a lot of British-Chinese food, but whenever we had staff or family meals, we would have classic, home-cooked Chinese food, which [my father] taught me to prepare from a young age,” Lam says.
After years of working behind the lens, Lam, who is currently based between London, Hong Kong and Berlin, decided to expand his scope and join Pham and Westphal in Berlin to tell stories through Rice Service, which soft opened in February.
He says the Cantonese restaurant’s menu borrows from his father’s recipes.
“There’s a lot of my dad’s teachings involved in Rice Service. I think that’s how food travels from generation to generation, through passing down recipes.
“Siu mei is an iconic dish that my dad’s [generation] learned to make over decades. A lot of older-generation Chinese cooking is very traditional and taught in a certain way, which is what we wanted to mimic. At the same time, Chinese cooking is quite intuitive.”
Pham adds that roast meat is easily accessible in many parts of Asia, but “a good quality roast duck that you can just come and eat as a solo diner” was something the co-founders felt was missing in Berlin.
In the German city, most people would normally have to order a whole roast duck to share at a Chinese restaurant; at Rice Service, smaller servings come in lunchboxes.
“People that work next door at the Chinese Visa Application Service Centre or someone who goes to pick up their passport can just sit and enjoy the duck without it being too formal,” Pham says.
Because of Berlin’s large vegan and vegetarian population, Rice Service also offers a roast tofu option. That is one of the reasons why the co-founders “shy away from the words ‘authentic’ or ‘fusion’”, Pham says, as they wish to have the freedom to “offer certain dishes down to our own interpretation”.
“[The three of us] grew up waiting tables, taking orders and chopping vegetables, which are really engraved in our DNA,” she adds. “That’s how we connected, but we also have this interest in being creative and telling stories. That’s how Rice Service came about.”
Rice Service, Invalidenstrasse 112, 10115 Berlin, Germany. Currently in the soft opening period, Monday to Saturday, 12pm-2.30pm.
