In 1977, Luke Nguyen's family escaped Vietnam by boat to Thailand in search of a new life.

Luke's passion for food stemmed from his food-obsessed parents who owned the Pho Cay Du restaurant in Cabramatta for 15 years.

[2] According to an interview he gave to Lifestyle Asia's Cindie Chan in 2016, Nguyen said: "Because I’ve always known I wanted to open up a restaurant and I grew up in a restaurant, I know how hard it is in terms of how much work: you don’t have weekends, you work through holidays and Christmas, so as soon as I finished high school I went travelling for one year, just myself and my backpack.

The series is a food documentary in which Nguyen travels throughout Vietnam, cooking in the ad-hoc manner of the street vendors in the country, usually preparing the dish on the footpaths.

[7] His next series, the 10-episode Luke Nguyen's United Kingdom, first aired on 14 May 2015 with the London episode in which he toured the city's food markets with his brother, Lewis.

In 2015, Nguyen appeared on a season 7 episode of the SBS genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, in which he learned of his previously unknown Hakka Chinese ancestry through his maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Guangdong.

[11] In 2020, SBS aired Luke Nguyen’s Railway Vietnam, which was filmed in 10 locations over 35 days, often in challenging circumstances, and was in post-production for a further six months.

[16] Ngyuen was the youngest person inducted into the Sydney Morning Herald's Food Hall of Fame.