She will tell you it started with a phone call. But really, it started long before that — in a family kitchen, watching her mother move through a restaurant with the kind of grace that only comes from loving what you do and meaning every bit of it. Amélie Thuy Nguyen has been absorbing that lesson her entire life. What she has done with it is something else altogether.
THE FOUNDATION
Amélie did not arrive at the table through a traditional culinary path. She holds a Bachelor of Human Biological Sciences and a Master of Public Health, and spent years working across multiple countries in population health, equity, and diversity and inclusion — doing the kind of work that requires you to understand people at a fundamental level. That background never left her. It runs underneath everything she builds, every team she assembles, every story she chooses to tell.
When Anh and Chi opened in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant district in 2016, Amélie stepped in to support her mother and brother in their new venture. Her role evolved naturally — branding, marketing, communications — and with it came a clarity she had not expected. She was not just helping run a restaurant. She was becoming the bridge between her family’s deeply personal story and the story of a new generation of Canadians doing remarkable things. That realization changed everything.
BUILT ON HEIRLOOM RECIPES
Walk into Anh and Chi and the space does something to you before a single dish arrives. The greenhouse-style dining room spills over with lush greenery — leaves trailing from above, plants gathered at the edges, natural light pressing in through floor-to-ceiling glass. Warm teak tables, sleek black leather seating, and rich wood detailing that carries a clean, almost Scandinavian sensibility — and the quiet hum of a room that is genuinely happy to have you. Then, further inside, a curved banquette in black leather sits beneath a cascade of brass pendant lights, an arched mirror reflecting the garden beyond. It is refined without trying too hard, and that is entirely the point.
The restaurant reimagines the Vietnamese dining experience through an ever-changing menu of authentic food and inspired cocktails, prepared with fresh, local, and seasonally inspired ingredients — served in a space that feels considered at every turn. Four consecutive Michelin Bib Gourmand designations confirm what the neighbourhood already knew long before any international body weighed in.
The Reservation by Donation program tells you just as much. Over half a million dollars raised and donated alongside staff and patrons to support at-risk populations across British Columbia. A community that fills the room not because they have to, but because they genuinely want to be there.
GOOD THIEF NEXT DOOR
Step next door and the whole register shifts. Good Thief is Amélie’s brother’s passion project — a rebellious cocktail bar that wears its personality openly. Sage green curves meet warm terracotta leather and gold-framed bar stools. Coloured mosaic tile runs underfoot. Trailing vines hang from a darkened ceiling above a bar backlit in amber, every bottle glowing like something worth staying for. It is bold, it is playful, and it crackles with a creativity that feels entirely earned. Good Thief has just been recognized as number 44 on Canada’s Best Bars by 100 Best Canada — a designation that lands exactly as it should for a bar that has never needed to try to be cool. As Amélie puts it, the team there has work that “deserves to be seen and celebrated,” and Good Thief gives them every opportunity to do exactly that.
WHEN THE WORLD STOPPED
When the BC government announced restaurants had to close, Amélie’s brother called and asked her to be creative. Fifty people were depending on them. “We had our family, we had our people, and we had our sauces,” she has said. “We started bottling by hand. Every single staff member was retained.”
That is the sentence that stops people. Every single staff member. In one of the most destabilizing moments the hospitality industry has ever faced, the Nguyens found a way to keep their whole team whole. What came out of it — Me’s Marketplace by Anh and Chi — entered the consumer packaged goods market in 2022, one hundred percent women-led, and has been growing steadily ever since. The sauces are now carried in over fifty retailers across British Columbia, demand is growing across the country, and the Eastern market is next.
PROOF OF CONCEPT
The first real signal of what Me’s Marketplace could become came through a collaboration with Fresh Prep. Their ready-to-cook recipe boxes became the vehicle, and the results were swift — within eight weeks, the sauces reached twenty thousand homes. It became Fresh Prep’s highest grossing and best reviewed meal kit. “It confirmed two things I have never stopped believing,” Amélie has said: “our sauces are genuinely loved, and great things happen when great people work together.”
She carries that belief into every partnership, every new retailer, every conversation about what comes next.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF KEEPING WHAT YOU LOVE
Sit across from Amélie — that easy smile, that unhurried warmth, the way she talks about her work as though she genuinely cannot imagine doing anything else — and you understand immediately that she is not building to sell. “I do not believe in leaving behind what I love,” she has said. “Every venture I pour my heart into, I intend to keep.” Anh and Chi, Good Thief, Me’s Marketplace — each one is still standing, still growing, and still run with the same care that launched it.
Even The Colour Yellow, her creative company dedicated to amplifying feel-good stories through film and content, has simply been set aside rather than abandoned — paused while Me’s Marketplace gets what it needs right now. “I have learned that you can build many things,” she has reflected, “but it is better to make one truly great before pouring yourself into the next.” That kind of patience is rarer than talent, and she has both.
THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT MATTER
Her mother is her north star. Amélie speaks of her not with nostalgia but with active admiration — for her work ethic, her selflessness, the way she leads her team and her family without fanfare. “The measure of a successful person is not what they achieve in the spotlight,” Amélie has said. “It is how they conduct themselves in the ordinary moments when no one is watching.”
She has taken that deeply to heart. Her two daughters ski with her, bike with her, and eat their way around the world with her — because those moments, she is clear, are not negotiable. The businesses are doing well. The kids are doing well. Balance, as she acknowledges, is always a moving target. But the overall score, as she puts it, is good.
LEGACY IN MOTION
Her father’s passing brought into sharp focus something she had long carried but never fully articulated. Legacy stopped being abstract. “I dream of building something bigger than our family,” she has said, “something that stays on this earth well past me and my children, something that continues to bring people to the table long after we are gone.”
Me’s Marketplace is that dream in motion — heirloom recipes translated into bottles that travel beyond the family table, beyond the restaurant, and eventually beyond this country. Made in Canada. Built on love, time, and flavour that has been generations in the making.
Vancouver has always had great food. What Amélie Thuy Nguyen is doing is reminding us that the best of it carries a story worth knowing — and that the woman behind it is only just warming up.
Author Profile
- Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury and luxury lifestyle niches. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read business magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and is an EIC for Hire. Connect with her here: [email protected].
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