JAKE SILVERSTEIN: Some people know you and your food from watching Top Chef , some people from eating at Uchi or Uchiko. For people who don’t know you, how do you describe your food?

PAUL QUI: I’m still trying to define what my food is. There’s definitely some bold flavors. I use a lot of aromatic herbs from Southeast Asia. I like a little bit of heat. I like a lot of acid. One thing that I’ve definitely focused on is finding flavors that cross cultures. I worked at Uchi, and people are like, “Oh, that’s a Japanese fusion restaurant or whatever.” But I’m trying to push past fusion. I don’t want my food to be defined as a fusion of cuisines, because I mean, like, for example, if you were eating a taco in Japan, and they didn’t have a lemon or a lime they would probably use a yuzu or a sudachi, you know? Those relationships are what I try to explore.

JS: What are some examples of flavors that cross cultures?

PQ: There are certain building blocks, you know, salty or sweet or sour. I think the reason I like to explore food in this manner is that I’m from the Philippines.

JS: You lived there until you were ten, right?

PQ: Yeah. So in the Philippines, it’s basically three hundred years of Spanish rule plus you have the Chinese, the Americans, and now the Koreans. But the end result is it’s an interesting mixture. So Filipino food has a lot of Spanish dishes. We have paella, we have arroz con pollo, we have adobo. If I told you the ingredients in the adobo that my grandmother used to make, you’d say, that’s not an Asian dish. It has bay leaf, garlic, vinegar. That’s really interesting to me, how things can work in both cultures. We have a style of pico de gallo, but our pico will have shrimp paste and Sriracha.

JS: And now you’re in Texas, where Mexican flavors are so predominant.

PQ: Yeah, totally. And I didn’t really know anything about Mexican food for a big part of my life. My first Mexican experience was at a restaurant called Chi-Chi’s, which is a chain on the East Coast. You know, I got a cheese enchilada, and my mom had a margarita. I still don’t know that much about it, actually. But Southeast Asian food has the same line on the equator for the most part as the Latin or South American cuisine. And there’s the same notes, there’s the same hits of acid, the same hits of fresh flavors, like fresh herbs. The food is very bright. 

JS: Let’s go back to Uchi, where you worked for eight years. We’ve been talking about a lot of different types of cuisine, but you came up in a sushi context. What’s the greatest lesson you took from the Japanese tradition?

PQ: To me it’s creating the perfect bite. I actually didn’t realize what that meant until last year when I went to Japan and ate at sushi bars where you don’t dip your sushi in soy sauce or wasabi because they give it to you and it’s already prepared. That’s what I had been trying to do at Uchiko, but I didn’t have a reference point. In Japan the sushi is already dressed for you. It has different sauces, different toppings, the right amount of wasabi. Most Japanese restaurants in America can’t ever hit that level of perfection, because they’re serving one hundred people, two hundred people. Jiro [Ono, proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo, and the subject of the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi ] serves ten. So for me, that was the biggest lesson—mastering all the subtle details that make that bite special. The thing with sushi is you can’t hide anything. If your rice is bad, it’s going to suck. If your vinegar is bad, it’s going to suck. If your fish is bad, it’s going to suck. You can’t hide it with sauce.

JS: What about the intimate relationship between the chef and the diner?

PQ: I liked that interaction a lot. I had waited tables in Houston at a sushi restaurant, and I really dug what the sushi chefs were doing and that’s part of the reason I went into Japanese food. Another part of it was they had cool knives.

JS: I know Uchi isn’t a traditional place, but did you ever chafe against those limitations of preparing sushi? You seem like a guy who's always got new ideas.

PQ: Well, yeah, but we always did new things at Uchi. Tyson was putting salt on fish, and they don’t do salt on fish in Japan. I can’t ever see myself adhering to certain rules, you know? I know there are certain scientific properties that you have to do with food that you probably can’t change, but as far as exploring flavors and combinations, I think it’s important to not limit yourself.

JS: After six years there you launched East Side King, which is now a collection of three food trailers and a brick-and-mortar location too. What drove you to leave the nice Uchi kitchen and start doing food trucks?

PQ: Um, I thought it was going to be a fun idea. I mean, we did it at a bar we were hanging out at. The owner had kicked out his old food truck and he knew that we were chefs so he asked if we wanted to do a food truck. A few weeks later, Moto [Utsunomiya, Qui’s partner in East Side King] calls me and tells me he has a food truck.

JS: The actual truck itself?

PQ: Yeah, and he found it on 11 ^th and Comal, maybe, you know. So we were like, all right, let’s do it.

JS: And now you have the most well-known food trucks in the city that’s famous for food trucks. What’s the secret to success with food trucks?

PQ: You got