Pizza 4P’s in Vietnam, pizza from farm to table

By Mike Ives, New York Times

DON DUONG, Vietnam — The cheesemaking hub of Universal Food Creation, a narrow orange building, looks no different from the other structures lining the main street in this dusty farming village in southern Vietnam.

Yosuke Masuko, a Japanese entrepreneur, opened Pizza 4P’s in May 2011 in the Vietnamese city of Saigon. Vietnam is a rice-loving country, but Mr. Masuko says the restaurant now serves around 350 diners every night, about two-thirds of them Vietnamese. Photo by Aaron Joel Santos for The New York Times.

But on a recent Wednesday morning, about a dozen workers made mozzarella and burrata cheeses in metal bowls with milk from 25 neighborhood cows. The fresh batches, produced with Danish rennet, would ship that evening to upscale hotels and restaurants across Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Yosuke Masuko, the company’s chief executive and a former financial strategist from Tokyo, opened the modest factory in 2012 to complement his popular restaurant, Pizza 4P’s, in Saigon, about 200 miles south.

In addition to fresh cheeses, his toppings include vegetables grown on five farms not far from the factory. The farms, which have contracts with the company, are scattered across the southern portion of the country’s Central Highlands, a hilly region with a temperate climate.

Mr. Masuko’s holistic approach to pizza is reminiscent of farm-to-table enterprises in Europe and the United States, but is a rarity in Vietnam. The key to his success appears to lie in a technical precision honed during his previous career in finance, coupled with a quixotic instinct to engineer the perfect pizza experience.

The overall goal is “delivering wow and happiness,” Mr. Masuko, 35, said at the 860-square-foot factory as two Vietnamese employees weighed balls of burrata on a digital scale and sealed them in plastic bags. But to create those effects, he added, “The important thing is detail, detail, detail, detail, detail.”

Pizza 4P’s serves around 350 diners every night, about two-thirds of them Vietnamese, and on average turns away another 50, he said, even though the restaurant has doubled in size since it opened without any formal marketing in May 2011. It does not deliver, and seasoned customers typically reserve tables in advance.

This in a country that has a rice-based cuisine and an annual per capita income that is the equivalent of around $1,800.

While Mr. Masuko began making cheese to serve his pizza restaurant, he now also has a separate cheese export business that sells 10 varieties, including camembert and mimolette, to upscale hotels and restaurants in Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore and Japan. It accounts for 15 percent of his total revenue.

Geoffrey Bouillet, operations manager for four restaurants in Vietnam owned by Didier Corlou, a French chef, says that Mr. Masuko’s camembert works nicely in a salad with arugula and artichoke. And at 55,000 dong, or $2.59, for a 5.3-ounce portion, it costs roughly half as much as the imported French version.

Read the full article by Mike Ives from New York Times.