WESTPAC WIRE – “Food and fire: Pauline Nguyen’s path for growth”

“Pauline Nguyen, her partner Mark and brother Luke were having a beer early one morning after another long night when it sank in: they were broken. It was the mid-2000s, a few years after opening Vietnamese eatery Red Lantern in Sydney’s Surry Hills in 2002, and while success had flowed, so had the toll on their health and lives. And the Nguyen siblings, who migrated to Australia in the late 1970s after fleeing Vietnam by boat, had experienced it all before. “We were working 80-90-100 hour weeks because we all knew how to work hard, it was literally beaten into us, we just didn’t know how to work hard and work smart,” Pauline says. “I remember finishing work one morning, it was 2 o-clock as usual and we sat down and it was like ‘look at us, we look like (crap)’…I actually developed alopecia. And I just had flashbacks of my parents working like dogs when we were growing up as well and it was like ‘this is history repeating itself’. “It was that night when it was like; ‘we’ve got to do things differently’…”