In a Room is a conversation series where we ask our friends to share their favourite domestic spaces. For this edition we’re joined by food writer and podcaster Lee Tran Lam.
Lee Tran Lam is an Australian freelance journalist who writes on the subject of food and has been published in titles such as Good Food, Gourmet Traveller, SBS Food, and the Guardian. She is also the editor of the book New Voices On Food, part of Diversity In Food Media Australia, and founder of popular Sydney blog The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry. In addition to her many writing accomplishments, she is also a prolific podcaster and radio host, having presented Local Fidelity on FBi radio and more recently, Should You Really Eat That? for SBS and the Culinary Archive Podcast for Powerhouse. There is also a sandwich named after her. Today Lee Tran is taking a break from exploring the culinary world and turning her attention to home, where she manages her busy schedule of writing, recording, and of course, reading.
Lee Tran Lam
Which room are you in today?
I’m in what’s officially the living room in my Sydney/Eora home, but has unofficially become my office/study, depending on which corner I take over! Sometimes I turn part of the neighbouring kitchen bench into a ‘standing desk’ by stacking some cookbooks and balancing my laptop on top of those hardcover volumes. Sometimes if I’m tired, I’ll sit on the couch — OK, I’ll lie on the couch — and rest my laptop on my knees. I’m not sure if a physio would approve of this, but it’s a good way of coping when your brain is fried from deadlines!
Which room is the most active in your house?
Definitely the living room, as I do most of my work here. Also, it’s where my partner and I have dinner, often in front of a TV show or movie. Also, most of my books are here, so it’s good to have them in reach when I’m researching everything from Australian food history to which edition of Oishinbo featured honey ants. For those who might be interested, it’s issue 37, from 1993 — and I was surprised to discover that one of the most popular Japanese comics of all time was celebrating Indigenous ingredients from the Northern Territory many decades before some of the top Australian restaurants were doing so!
Which room gets the least amount of use?
Definitely the attic – I’ve never been up there as I’m too lazy and possibly a tiny bit afraid of crawling up the rickety ladder to get into that space!
Which is your work-from-home room of choice?
The living room, because of all the nearby bookshelves – the near-constant beam of sun rays through from the windows and skylight is a nice bonus. It’s hard to be in a cranky mood when everything is so bright! Technically, I have a study area in the bedroom, but it’s more like a nook — and a very messy nook at the moment, to be honest! and the living room is great for sprawling, especially when looking up things on the laptop or nearby books. Plus, always parked nearby is my iPad: I currently subscribe to over 1000 podcasts, so often there’s a podcast on, and I’ve just launched the new season of the Culinary Archive podcast for the Powerhouse Museum, as well as the second season of Should You Really That? for SBS, – both researched, written and recorded here in this very room, sometimes in between loud trains rumbling nearby, or sometimes in the aforementioned messy bedroom ‘study’.
Bookshelves in the home of Lee Tran Lam
What defines a great room?
I think character and personality go a long way – it’s nice when you get a sense of who the space belongs to. I write a lot about restaurants and I love how these places can convey so much – well beyond their menu. Tida Persian Food is run by Parya Zaghand, who has been importing saffron and other Iranian ingredients from her homeland for over a decade. Her Sydney restaurant is as bright and warm as “sunshine spice” (aka saffron) and as a friend from her birthplace said, “it’s not really safe for us to go back … let’s just bring home here” – and Parya’s really done that in a friendly and thoughtful way at her restaurant. It feels like you’re stepping into the living room of a welcoming Iranian family when you go there! When I interviewed Juan Carlos Negrete Lopez from Sydney’s Maiz restaurant for the chocolate episode of Should You Really Eat That?, we recorded the interview over video and I loved getting a glimpse of the many thriving plants in his apartment. It seemed apt, given he’s a chef that works with so many interesting ingredients from the botanical world.
Tida Persian Food, North Willoughby
What is your favourite type of room?
For 12 years, I lived in a tiny 30sqm studio apartment, and there were towering stacks of books because there wasn’t room to put them anywhere else. I remember interviewing a baker, Benjamin Lai, over the phone about his Home Croissanterie business and I wanted to check something that was in the Noma 2.0 book — where he interned in 2018 — and made some joke about how I couldn’t find my copy. “Because I live in such a small space, everything's stacked. So that means I have to move like 20 books to get to that book,” I said. And he made a really profound, off-the-cuff comment that has really stayed with me. “A small room with a lot of books is not a small room,” he said. I think that’s so true! Even in the tiniest spaces, a stack of books can inspire so much curiosity. So any kind of room that has an accumulation of books – whether it’s a study or living room or kitchen corner piled with cookbooks – always feels inviting.
What is your all time favourite room?
My friend Grace Lee is an illustrator based in Tokyo. We used to work together at Inside Out magazine and she drew the logo for my food blog and first podcast, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry, and actually drew all the ingredients for both seasons of Should You Really Eat That? She’s lived in two apartments in Japan since she moved there more than a decade ago, and I love how they both showcase how much you can do in a compact space – and they’re also a colourful platform for her work and her visual inspiration. I think one of them had pinboard walls, so you could just stick a variety of pictures or clippings, to great collage-style effect. You could see the evolution of her work as well as cards and cut-outs and messages that had caught her eye. It was a great imagination-sparking place to be in – and as someone who loves to hoard postcards, zines and various bits of stationery, it felt like a nice cross between a bookstore and gallery. And it really conveyed the brightness, joy and intricacy of her illustrations, too!
