Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tony Luu. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Tony, appreciate you joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

Growing up I knew working a normal 9-5 was not my true calling in life. My mother side of the family are all mainly entrepreneurs with a lot of us owning nail salons. I vividly remember spending weekends at the salon and talking to so many customers that have been going there for years. Something about watching my mother run her business always peeked my interested whether it came to buying supplies or even building genuine connections.

Being first-generation Asian American. There is a lot of added pressure to be successful and live up to high expectations. During college, I got a job as a quality inspector checking various parts for BMW’s vehicles. I worked my way up to quality supervisor and managing 15-30 night shift inspectors. I credit that job in making me understand what true hard work really was since I was working 50-60 hour weeks on top of being a full-time college student.

I moved on to being a production supervisor for a tier-one supplier for BMW. In that role I was in charge of the assembly line for the instrument panel along with managing 60-75 people. That job made me really understand that the corporate lifestyle was not what my true calling was.

With Potluck first starting, I took a calculated risk and left that role to really dive in the culinary scene. You can imagine the conversation I had with my parents when I told them I left a very well paying job to give entrepreneurship a shot. For them to risk their lives leaving Vietnam to seek a better life for me. It just didn’t make sense to them why I would work so hard to start over from scratch. As our dinner events kept getting more attention, being featured in local news press, and selling out within hours of tickets being live. They started to understand the vision behind Potluck.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Tony Luu and I’m a first generation Asian-American from Greenville, South Carolina. Growing up I always love how through all the highs and lows in life; food was something I found to help provide comfort. Being a chef was something I would’ve thought of making a career since I started my professional career path by holding various supervision roles in manufacturing after graduating from college.

Before starting Potluck, I never had any actual experience in the culinary scene besides learning how to cook at home. My cousin had messaged me during the summer of 2023 asking if I would be interested in doing an event with some friends he had known that also cooked. We all arranged a time to meet to talk over ideas we had and ended up landing on using my house to host 15 of friends for a 5-course Japanese theme dinner in October 2023. Once we released the menu & flyer for this event. I saw the opportunity to potentially expand it in a larger scale from just the amount of buzz we gained from the first event. After a few more events, our third dinner event is when we decided to take it more serious and bring our vison to the public.

The concept of Potluck is bringing a unique dining experience by hosting private 5-course theme dinners but each dinner event is a different theme! I believe that is what helps sets us apart from others that do private dinner events as we are always testing ourselves and constantly learning by paying respects to that countries traditions along with adding our twist on it.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One thing I have learned from entrepreneurship is that it waits for no one and success only comes in the work you put in when no one is looking. I work two jobs to supplement my income along with prioritizing Potluck as brand. Whether it is about our dinner events or catering side of business, I have to make time to always be working on growing the company even on my “off day”. One core memory that will always stick in my head to show my dedication is one of the dishes I decided to make for a food & wine festival held in Greenville, South Carolina is scallion pancakes. On paper, it sounded perfect beacause you’re able to make it ahead, freeze it, then fry it as it holds well if it is kept out for a period of time. We had to feed over a thousand guest so I made over 500 scallion pancakes by myself. There were days were I would get off work at 10 pm just to come home and start a new production run of pancakes. Most nights, the production run wouldn’t end until 3 or 4 am in the morning especially if i had to work that same day.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Remembering faces and names has helped us maintain if not grow our following. We’ve come to find out that people pride on getting their moneys worth when purchasing our dinner events. When we make time to come out to greet the guest, ask their names, how their day was, remember small details from the past. That’s when they understand we truly do care for every single one of them. Without our support structure, their would never be Potluck.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.potluckgvl.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/potluckgvl/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Pot-Luck/pfbid0Yfhzu5D5y9RUy8KNhT92gCAfNrghUKY59iDh5eM2z63gShZwkFGuzCd9DEAR7fyEl/

Image Credits

Cameron Smith
Joanne Nguyen