Homage or heist?: London’s Vietnamese restaurant trading off Anthony Bourdain’s legacy
When it comes to the intersection of travel and food, there’s nobody in recent years who has achieved anything as monumental as Anthony Bourdain, the American chef-turned-author-and-documentarian who has left a unique legacy that’ll live on for generations.
Bourdain travelled the world and fell in love with many places, cherishing disparate places from Iran and Spain to adoring Japan, but it’s arguably Vietnam that he loved most, claiming that the country “grabs you and doesn’t let you go”.
It’s already been seven years since his passing, but No Reservations, The Layover, Parts Unknown and the rest of his catalogue still resonate, marking Bourdain’s success as not just in the food he tasted but in his authenticity that shone through and the human stories that he told on the way.
With authenticity and humanity being integral to his legacy, it makes London’s latest Vietnamese restaurant Cô Thành feel even more vulgar and grotesque, which allegedly pays homage to Nguyễn Thi Thành, otherwise known as The Lunch Lady. Bourdain visited her stall in season five of No Reservations, which aired in 2009, wherein the stall in Ho Chi Minh City, the capital of Vietnam, blew him away.
Every day Thi Thành served one meal, a rotating cast of Vietnamese soups that changed daily, and lasted until they ran out. Already in business for over a decade before Bourdain arrived, she had earned a reputation with locals as a great lunch spot. Describing his meal as being “like discovering new neighbourhoods every few mouthfuls”, the restaurant soon saw an influx of global visitors, with travellers to HCMC desperate to try this revelatory cuisine.
It was actually Bourdain who nicknamed her ‘The Lunch Lady’ on the episode, an endearing nomenclature which has stuck through to the present day. Sadly, she passed away in May 2025, but she’d seen the positives of the Bourdain co-sign, and her food had become loved by thousands of visitors.
That brings us to Cô Thành, a restaurant that has her image as its logo and features both her story and the visit of Bourdain on their website, as The Standard announced its opening by describing it as the “legendary Lunch Lady restaurant, made famous by Anthony Bourdain”, except she never had any affiliation with this restaurant and it was never visited by the man. Moreover, it doesn’t even honour what the stall was most famous for, which serves one item until it sells out, and rather, the menu is full of different soups, pho and bánh mì, alongside a host of sides and plenty of desserts.
The story starts in 2017 when American-born Brian Woo spent three years in Vietnam, where he visited the stall made famous by Thi Thành and Bourdain and allegedly struck up a friendship with her, who taught him her recipes, after which he then opened the original Cô Thành in Hong Kong.
Even if we take that story as gospel, it doesn’t stop this ‘homage’ feeling greasy and dirty. There’s a jarring juxtaposition at play when the restaurant is being marketed as a relative of a street stall in HCMC, when it’s bankrolled by big money, allowing it to be situated in the hugely expensive Covent Garden. Its location, opposite the polished shine of an Apple store, underlines this, while the restaurant, with its exposed brickwork and small multi-coloured plastic chairs, much like those seen on the streets of Vietnam, lacks authenticity.
The Lunch Lady served excellent, yet humble, food, and the Bún bò Huế she served Bourdain in No Reservations was for one and all. It was cheap, comforting and accessible, using local ingredients, which is why Vietnamese food is so vibrant and fresh, and imitating that at £20 a pop in one of the most expensive areas in central London doesn’t feel right.
Paying homage to something you love is admirable, but at what point does it turn from a tribute to a cash grab? Everything about Cô Thành lacks honesty, the very thing that made Bourdain so vital, such that The Lunch Lady’s smile beams out from their logo and her name is plastered everywhere as their story, but it isn’t their story.
Sadly, neither of those who feature heavily in Cô Thành’s marketing materials is around to comment upon it, for it would be fascinating to know what Bourdain would make of his name and The Lunch Lady’s story being used in this way. Cô Thành is everything wrong with the modern food landscape, standing as a hollow, soulless restaurant cosplaying as something more wholesome, a pale imitation that lacks any of the humanity or authenticity of the original.
