LOCAL Houston | The City Guide August 2016 | Page 40

Chef Nicole Routhier

PERFECT TASTE
By Tim Moloney | Photography by Julie Soefer

On June 4, 1986, New York Times Food Critic Craig Claiborne wrote an article about
the state of Vietnamese restaurants in the United States and the lack of first-rate dishes.
That was all ambitious, New York City culinary student Nicole Routhier needed to read. Routhier, born
in Vietnam to a French father and Vietnamese mother, and raised all over the world, from Laos to
Belgium, knew she could impress him if she just had the chance to cook for him. So, egged on by her
husband, she wrote him a letter. Two days later, he called and took her up on her offer.
Two weeks later, she was cooking for him at his house on Long Island. “When you’re a kid in your 20s,
you just do these dumb, adventurous things without thinking,” she laughs. “But if you never risk anything,
you never win anything.”

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