Peter Le: Cooking to Remember the Taste of Home

He is entirely self-taught, learned most of what he knows by calling his grandmother for recipes, and has carried his cooking from England to Melbourne, where he is now building a new audience for this food channel.

Peter is candid that his cooking started with eating. Long before he picked up a pan with any seriousness, he loved food, and as a kid he was a committed eater who would beg his mum to take him to dim sum.

His order never really changed. He would work through several portions of prawn cheung fun, the steamed rice noodle rolls, and then ask to go home, because that was the only thing he had come for. That early, uncomplicated devotion to a single dish says a lot about how he still cooks today: he gravitates toward food that is simple, satisfying, and tied to memory.

The real turning point came when Peter moved out of home. Away working in London and missing his grandmother's cooking, he started calling her to ask how she made the dishes he grew up on. To hold onto what she told him, he began filming his own videos, and the habit stuck in a way he did not expect.

"When I forget about a recipe, I just look at my old videos and I think, oh, that's how I did it," he says.

What began as a way to document family recipes became the foundation of everything he now makes. The camera was never about an audience at first. It was about not forgetting.

Peter has no formal culinary training. Everything he knows came from his grandmother, from eating, and from his own trial and error in the kitchen. By the time he started posting publicly, though, he was not starting cold. He had spent at least a couple of years knowing he wanted to do something with food, so when he finally began creating, he arrived with a backlog of ideas and the energy to act on them.

Left to his own preferences, Peter cooks slow. He loves long, patient dishes, the kind that reward time rather than speed: the slow-simmered Vietnamese noodle soups that take days to build, along with the stews and braises he most enjoys making at home.

Social media, he has learned, often pulls in the opposite direction. The content that performs tends to be the quick version of things, the half-hour shortcut, the fast take. So he works in the gap between the two, balancing the slow food he loves to cook with the faster recipes his audience likes to watch. He has also noticed that whenever he cooks Vietnamese or other Asian food, it tends to land best.

Peter's relationship with food is shaped by movement. His family is Vietnamese, but he has never lived in Vietnam. He was born in London, raised in Newcastle in the north of England, and grew up in an area where, as he remembers it, the food scene was thin and the options were limited. It was only when he moved back to London at 21 that he was exposed to a wider world of cuisines and ways of eating.

Now based in Melbourne, he has developed a sharp eye for what different cities offer. London, he notes, is diverse but not always deep. You can find Vietnamese food there, but mostly the familiar dishes. Melbourne, by contrast, has the depth he values, with regional Vietnamese cooking and dishes he would not otherwise come across.

Peter's recipes usually begin with eating. A good dish at a restaurant becomes something he wants to replicate or put his own spin on. One of his miso salmon recipes, for instance, grew out of the miso cod he had at Nobu. Travel feeds him new ideas, and his grandmother's cooking remains a constant well to draw from.

Writing the recipe down is messier. It is mostly trial and error, and he is the first to admit it does not always work; sometimes a dish is best the first time and then refuses to come together on the second attempt. The failures come most often, he has found, when he strays from what he knows.

"It always goes wrong when you try to do something different to what you normally do," he says, recalling private chefing jobs where the pressure to elevate a dish for a client was exactly what tripped him up.

For Peter, the hardest part of creating online is not the cooking. It is the comparison.

"When you're online, you're comparing yourself with every other food creator in the world," he says.

In a normal job, he points out, you only measure yourself against the colleagues in the room. Online, the room is the entire world, and that can lead to unrealistic expectations and a sense of competition that is not really there. He has come to see that everyone has space to do their own thing. What keeps him steady is straightforward: he loves the work itself, and he reminds himself that most of the pressure he feels lives in his own head rather than in anything real.

Ask Peter what sets him apart on a platform crowded with talented creators, and he does not dodge the question.

"You just have to tell your own story, because no one has the exact same story as you," he says.

Chasing trends, he argues, is easy and endlessly replicable. Staying true to himself is not. The other half of his answer is focus. By sticking to Vietnamese and Asian food rather than trying to do everything, he has become known for something specific, and that, he believes, is what makes him stand out.

Peter is clear that he has goals. Having established himself in London, he is now rebuilding his personal food brand in Melbourne, a new market that means starting the audience-building work over again. Further down the line, he wants products of his own, whether a cookbook or a condiment range, something tangible with his name on it.

When it came time to offer a message to other cooks and readers, Peter kept it characteristically low-pressure.

"If you enjoy cooking, you don't need to put the extra pressure on yourself to go online," he says.

Too many people, he feels, turn a thing they love into an obligation to build an audience or chase achievements. His advice is to let the enjoyment lead, and if cooking is where you find calm, that is enough on its own. Sometimes, he suggests, the kitchen can simply be your safe place.

Peter Le's cooking is the sum of where he has been: a Vietnamese kitchen remembered from afar, a grandmother on the other end of the phone, and cities from Newcastle to Melbourne that shaped his palate along the way. What holds it all together is a refusal to cook anything but his own story.

Follow Peter on Instagram at @pelecooks, where he shares Vietnamese and Asian recipes, reviews, and vlogs rooted in the food he grew up on. Chefadora is proud to spotlight creators like Peter who are bridging cultures through food and keeping the dishes of home alive, one recipe at a time.

Updated on 02 Jul 2026