Smoky Eggplant with Spicy Tomato (Baingan Bharta)

About Andrea Nguyen

Vietnamese-American cookbook author and expert on Vietnamese home cooking

Andrea Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American food writer and cookbook author based in Northern California, widely credited with introducing Vietnamese home cooking to a broad American audience. She is the author of books including Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, The Pho Cookbook, The Banh Mi Handbook, and Vietnamese Food Any Day, and writes at Viet World Kitchen. Her work has earned multiple James Beard Award honors.

Her recipes are built around the balance central to Vietnamese cooking, the interplay of fish sauce, lime, chili, herbs, and sugar, applied with precision rather than guesswork. She is known for demystifying techniques like pho broth-making and fresh rice noodle rolling for home cooks, and for adapting recipes to use ingredients available in ordinary American supermarkets without losing their character. Later books lean toward quicker, weeknight-friendly versions of dishes that in earlier work were presented in more traditional, involved forms.

20 recipes on Mello, imported from vietworldkitchen.com, mostly Vietnamese and Japanese.