Meet the Brisbane Grocer Supplying Produce for the City’s Best Restaurants

Michael Nguyen remembers his grandfather’s house in Darra, in Brisbane’s southwest. It was a two-storey brick house on a hectare block, with a backyard stuffed full of lettuces, Asian greens and herbs. Nguyen would stop by in the afternoon and help pick produce in his school uniform before his grandfather cooked dinner on a home-built woodfired oven, also in the backyard.

“He never used the kitchen in the house,” Nguyen tells Broadsheet one steamy late-February afternoon, laughing. “We’d get phone calls or the fire brigade coming over occasionally, because he’d just smoke the place out.”

Ask Nguyen where his love for fresh produce comes from and this is the story he tells, dwelling over the memories. It’s a love that he carried into adulthood, into a career in criminal law and out the other side again as he walked away from his white-collar job and went into partnership with wife Kimberley Tedi and brother-in-law Nick Mah, then a pharmacist, to take over Thai Hoa Grocer, the Nguyen family’s Inala-based business.

That was seven years ago. Now Thai Hoa Grocer does a roaring retail trade, with Inala, Darra and Richlands locals working their way through baskets of rambutans, custard apples and dragon fruit, and great piles of water spinach, Vietnamese mint and mustard greens. But Nguyen has also become something of a grocer to the stars, supplying specialist produce to some of Brisbane’s very best restaurants.

Eaten tangy shishito peppers at Agnes recently, or luscious figs on Otto ’s dessert menu, or spicy radishes and rich, ripe tomatoes at Gerard’s Bistro? Because Nguyen probably had a hand in sourcing them. Mustard greens and corn at Joy. Cai lang and pineapple at Stanley. Green mangoes and green peppercorns at Melrose. Banana blossom at Same Same. Davidson plum and heirloom tomatoes at Yoko. Broadleaf rocket at Bianca. Nguyen likely sourced all that too.

But Nguyen is more than just a supplier. He’s worked over years to develop deep relationships with specialist growers such as Neighbourhood Farm, Loop Growers and Boon Luck Farm, but also even smaller operations often run by migrant families, first in Pallara and Richlands, and more recently in Lowood, west of Brisbane.

“When we took over it was mainly dry goods,” Nguyen says. “Then I just slowly went around to all the farms to see what they were growing – because I knew there were a lot of growers in this area – and there was some amazing produce. Most of them were micro growers for weekend markets [but] over time I slowly got them on board.”

On the restaurant side, Nguyen started locally with Thai eateries in and around Chelmer and Graceville. Chefs soon began to request specific Asian produce and he would in turn approach the farmers, offering to cover start-up costs for specialised crops.

“From there the relationship grew and grew,” he says.

Nguyen reckons it was Tyron Simon, then co-owner of Longtime, who was the first inner-city restaurateur to properly discover Thai Hoa Grocer on the edge of Inala Civic Centre’s buzzing, community-focused outdoor plaza.

“Ty came out from the city. I remember him with his dog in tow,” Nguyen says. “Longtime at that time was at the peak of its powers. He saw with his own eyes the local produce and what I was doing, and he put faith in me and I said, ‘Yeah, I can source you produce.’”

From there it grew by word-of-mouth among Brisbane chefs and restaurateurs. Simon would end up closing Longtime but opened more restaurants – Honto, Same Same, Agnes and then Bianca – with star chef and now business partner Ben Williamson developing his own relationship with Nguyen. After that it was Joy’s Sarah Baldwin and then-business-partner Tim Scott, Howard Smith Wharves and Stanley’s Patrick Friesen and Louis Tikaram, Gerard’s Bistro’s Adam Wolfers, Otto’s Will Cowper, Yoko’s Oscar Solomon and Melrose’s Arte Assavakavinvong.

“There’s specialty stuff we grow for restaurants that we don’t sell retail,” Nguyen says. “The shishito peppers for Agnes, there’s not enough for retail because that’s a commitment I made with Ben Williamson, where he’ll take just about all of my shishitos. That gives him security for menu development. You don’t want to promise something and it be gone two weeks later, so we work to keep something going for a minimum of four weeks to give chefs longevity and stability on their menus.”

Adam Wolfers was introduced to Nguyen shortly after he moved to Brisbane from Sydney to take over the kitchen at Gerard’s. He remembers being impressed by this “awesome fruit and vege shop in Inala” and one day decided to tap Nguyen for some produce.

“He’s one of the hardest working guys I’ve come across,” Wolfers says. “He works seven days a week, drives to all the farms direct. He just goes out of his way and really makes my job a lot easier. He’s awesome.

“He introduced me to Neighbourhood Farm, Russell & Brady and Loop Growers … [and] all the little Asian growers that you wouldn’t know about, because they just serve their own area. He showed me all these cool Asian vegetables that I’d never seen. He opened my eyes to different produce and what kind of produce Queensland had to offer.”

These relationships developed against a background of diners beginning to care more about the provenance of the food on their plates, and chefs have responded with hyper-seasonal menus that better reflect a sense of time and place. Nguyen estimates that 80 per cent of the produce he sells is locally grown, and he wants to keep it that way.

“It’s not mass produced, we’re not growing for supermarkets. And chefs find that the flavour is much better,” he says. “The carrots and tomatoes I can source are much better because they’re grown sustainably. But with that comes limits on how much we can do. You have a 200-seater restaurant? There’s only so much broadleaf rocket I can grow.”

Indeed, Thai Hoa is more or less operating at capacity on the wholesale side. But that still only accounts for 30 per cent of his business. The other 70 per cent is the migrant families who visit the shop multiple times a week to stock up on hard-to-find produce, or to browse the Asian dry goods imported by Nguyen’s sister, Tammy Nguyen. Or maybe just to buy bunches of bananas and bags of oranges and apples – the everyday produce that Mah sources from the markets in Rocklea, like any other grocer.

“I love it,” Nguyen says. “I grew up around this community. And you see the same faces every day, everyone from all walks of life. So you see Koreans, you see Sudanese people, it’s a real mix. Come here on a Saturday and it’s a different world, so many sights and sounds and colours. There’s nothing else like it in Brisbane.”

The coda to this story is that the weekend after Broadsheet first interviewed Nguyen, Brisbane and its surrounds experienced an enormous rain event, leading to widespread flooding not seen in the city since 2011. Many of Thai Hoa’s supplier growers and farmers were all but wiped out by the disaster, including Loop Growers and Neighbourhood Farm.

Talking on the phone this week, Nguyen says the past four weeks have been “tricky” as he’s visited farms around the region, inspecting the damage.

“It’s always in the back of your mind that there are going to be natural disasters,” he says. “But when it actually happens you feel like a bystander. All you feel is this inertia, with the floodwaters rising and ripping everything out, and then coming down and just leaving you with the devastation.

“All we can really do is support them so at the other end, when the crop is ready, we’re ready as well. It’s all about putting that commitment to them and giving them some light at the end of the tunnel, so they have confidence replanting.”

Still, he’s heartened by the support that he and growers have received, both from restaurants and their diners – Gerard’s Bistro hosted an enormously successful charity dinner last week, raising close to $60,000 – and the local Inala community, which continues to descend upon the grocer every day.

“That’s been great. It’s a very Asian-driven community and a very coloured community,” Nguyen says. “They eat every day and they come out to shop every day. They’ll even know the farmers who grew the produce – we’re talking about second- and third-generation farmers. It’s a strong community out here, there’s nothing else like it. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Thai Hoa Grocer
Shop A, Inala Civic Centre, 8 Corsair Avenue
(07) 3879 8882

instagram.com/thaihoa_grocer