Yia Vang spent five years trying to open Vinai, his first full-service Hmong American restaurant in Minneapolis. The delays, the chef has come to believe, were for the best. Time brought clarity to his mission.
He repeatedly reminded himself that his efforts — disrupted by the pandemic, the unrest over the murder of George Floyd, a leg infection and seven banks who turned him down for loans — were nothing compared to the struggles of his father, Nhia Lor Vang, and mother, Pang Her Vang, who both lost their first spouses fleeing genocide in Laos after the fall of Saigon. They started a family together at Ban Vinai, the refugee camp in Thailand where Mr. Vang was born, which would give his restaurant its name.
“I just want to show the world what a bunch of broken people can do,” Mr. Vang said in 2022, following one of several disappointing setbacks for Vinai. “My people never had a place.”
Now they have two.
Vinai finally opened last summer, a few months after Diane’s Place, the first restaurant from Diane Moua, an accomplished Hmong American chef also raised in the Upper Midwest. Hmong are a stateless indigenous group originally from China that has been persecuted for centuries, including after fighting for the United States in the Vietnam War.
The two restaurants showcasing Hmong food represent an extremely rare occurrence in American culinary arts: the emergence of a cuisine virtually unknown outside its own immigrant community, stewarded by chefs trained in Western-style restaurant kitchens.
Ms. Moua and Mr. Vang are part of a generation of Hmong Americans — prominently including the gold medal-winning Olympian Sunisa Lee, from St. Paul — whose attention-grabbing talents have raised the profile of the Hmong community in the Twin Cities, home of the largest Hmong population in the U.S.
Both are also veterans of one of the country’s most dynamic restaurant scenes, one whose quality is bolstered by its diversity. That food community has provided a positive counternarrative to a rough half decade in Minnesota, beginning when Mr. Floyd’s murder revealed the state to be neither as equal nor as harmonious as its reputation for conviviality and progressive politics suggests.
Mr. Vang and Ms. Moua were both in Chicago earlier this month as nominees for prestigious James Beard Awards, on the same weekend that Minnesota’s House Democratic leader and her husband were murdered, and a state senator was wounded, in acts of targeted political violence.
Hmong who settled in Minnesota and elsewhere in the 1970s and ’80s faced adversity, including racism. But the community’s evolving story, embodied by the warm reception of Vinai and Diane’s Place, is a potent example of assimilation and acceptance, said Lee Pao Xiong, the founding director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University, in St. Paul.
There were only 2,000 Hmong living in Minnesota when Mr. Xiong’s family arrived in 1979, he said, the same year the state’s governor returned from a visit to Ban Vinai having witnessed what he called “suffering beyond belief.” The number of Hmong living here has grown to some 100,000 today, he said, because state politicians of both parties, working with churches and other charities, deliberately welcomed refugees who were allies in a time of war.
“The Hmong didn’t choose Minnesota,” Mr. Xiong said. “Minnesota chose the Hmong.”
There are similarities between Hmong cuisine and the food of Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, all countries where Hmong lived, usually in mountainous regions, after leaving China in large numbers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Those familiar elements helped pave the way for Union Hmong Kitchen, the business Mr. Vang started as a pop-up restaurant in the late 2010s.
Now food stalls under the same name attract lines at local professional sports stadiums and the Minnesota State Fair, for dishes like banh mi “brats,” purple sticky rice and galabaos, the Hmong variation on steamed buns. Their popularity is juiced by the celebrity Mr. Vang achieved as a media personality, including as the host of two television series in which he probes the intersection of Hmong and American culture with a smile that rarely rests.
There had never been a Hmong restaurant scene primarily because Hmong people lived nomadically for centuries before arriving here, and “there are no restaurants in the frickin’ mountains of Laos,” as Mr. Vang put it.
Ms. Moua said a Hmong elder was recently bewildered to find traditional Hmong pulled pork with sour bamboo on her menu. “I can’t believe this is in a restaurant,” she recalled him saying.
Ms. Moua, 42, and Mr. Vang, 41, both grew up in central Wisconsin, in families that include soldiers recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight against the North Vietnamese in the so-called “Secret War” in Laos.
The chefs built their restaurant careers in the Twin Cities and opened their own restaurants in Northeast Minneapolis, within walking distance of each other as well as celebrated restaurants from the Mexican American chef Gustavo Romero (Oro by Nixta), the Korean American chef Ann Kim (Young Joni) and the Vietnamese American chef Cristina Nguyen (Hai Hai).
The two Hmong American chefs’ shared experience is evident in their food. They both serve beef laab carpaccio, Hmong sausage made in collaboration with local butchers and homemade hot sauces that incinerate stereotypes about timid Midwestern palates. Yet Vinai and Diane’s Place are remarkably different.
Vinai is a boisterous, dinner-only place oriented around an open kitchen. Guests are encouraged to order at least one large protein dish — a double-cut, tamarind-glazed pork chop, say, or grilled chicken dressed with what Mr. Vang calls Southeast Asian sofrito — cooked on the live fire grill. It isn’t uncommon for guests to request a selfie with Mr. Vang.
Diane’s Place began serving only breakfast and lunch, adding dinner late last year, to give Ms. Moua time to train staff. She was a prominent pastry chef before becoming a restaurateur; diners often order a first course of baked goods, like the coconut pandan croissant, even at lunch and dinner. Savory menu highlights include papaya noodle salad and lightly caramelized bamboo and cabbage in coconut curry broth.
Ms. Moua attributes the different food at the two Hmong restaurants to the gender roles the chefs were raised to fill by their tradition-minded families.
“Guys are chopping meat and doing things that are fun outdoors, like hunting and grilling,” she said. “When Hmong back then gave birth to a girl, they say, ‘Let’s train her. She’s going to be a housewife.’”
Ms. Moua, the first child in her family born in the U.S., married at 16. She decided to go to culinary school in Minneapolis after seeing the cakes on display at Lunds & Byerlys, an upscale local grocery store, where her then mother-in-law worked at the sushi kiosk.
She spent 12 years working for Tim McKee, a chef instrumental in raising the bar for quality at Twin Cities restaurants in the 2000s. Ms. Moua’s responsibilities as a wife, mother and breadwinner prevented her from taking unpaid internships or arriving to work early to set up her station — both traditional paths for advancement in restaurant kitchens.
“I had kids,” she said. “When my husband came home — my ex-husband — he expected a meal to be on the table.”
Gavin Kaysen hired Ms. Moua in 2014 when he returned home to Minneapolis to open Spoon and Stable after working as a top chef for Daniel Boulud in New York City. She expanded her skill set to include viennoiserie as she helped expand Mr. Kaysen’s empire.
Ms. Moua said she found the courage to open her own restaurant, and cook with her own voice, with Mr. Kaysen’s encouragement.
“I knew she had this other trick up her sleeve with the Hmong flavor and style,” Mr. Kaysen said.
While Ms. Moua has spent her entire life in the U.S. and her career in European-style restaurants, she was reared in a Hmong culture that has remained stubbornly impervious to Western influences.
Sitting in Diane’s Place’s private dining room last month, she recalled being treated for a long “spiritual illness” as a teenager by her shaman grandfather, during which her Hmong name was changed five times. And for years she resisted getting a divorce, knowing her father, who is prominent in her community, believed it would bring shame on her family.
“When Hmong married people have fights, they still go to the clan leader” to settle the disputes, she explained. “It would always be the female’s fault, not the man’s.”
Ms. Moua nonetheless displays her traditional Hmong wedding dress in the dining room, in part as a tribute to Hmong women.
“Our elders didn’t realize it, but we were taught to be independent,” she said. “We don’t have a country, but I’ve learned here that we’re really rich.”
Mr. Vang learned that same lesson in public.
He caught the attention of local media in the late 2010s with the Union Hmong Kitchen pop-ups. At ease on camera and infectiously curious, a gifted communicator was born. “Relish” debuted on local public television in 2019, with Mr. Vang as host, exploring the international roots of Minnesota cuisine. (The program won a Beard Award in Chicago.)
But Mr. Vang never stopped cooking. Tri-tip steak with tiger bite sauce, a dish of Mr. Vang’s that appeared on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine in 2020, was an early example of his knack for making Hmong food accessible to a broader audience.
Union Hmong Kitchen’s evolving menus forced Mr. Vang to learn more about his family’s past. So did his television career. Asked to cook iguana for his other show, “Feral,” which premiered on the Outdoor Channel in 2022, he was delighted to discover that his father knew how.
“Hmong people are survivalists,” Mr. Vang said, using an expletive for emphasis.
Photos of Mr. Vang’s family’s early life are displayed at Vinai on a wall streaked with lines meant to evoke the corrugated metal of their home at Ban Vinai. The restaurant is joyous, but it’s difficult to visit without considering the harrowing circumstances that brought the Hmong people to Minnesota.
Last fall, before Vinai received a flood of accolades, including being named one of the World’s Greatest Places by Time magazine, Mr. Vang’s parents picked Hmong cucumbers and chiles at their farm near their home in Hugo, about 20 miles north of St. Paul. Their son, who uses the ingredients at Vinai and served as an interpreter, said that his parents still struggle to understand his success, even though they are essential to it.
The chef recalled a fund-raiser he held to benefit Hmong children. His parents and other family members pitched in to help.
“Tickets were maybe $150, and my mom was like, ‘People will pay that? This food isn’t even fancy,’” said Mr. Vang, his face backlit by the sunbaked field.
“‘It’s not just about the food,’” he told his parents. “‘It’s about you guys.’”
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Brett Anderson joined the Food desk as a contributor in July 2019. He was restaurant critic and features writer at The Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, from 2000 to 2019. He has won three James Beard awards, including the Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award, and was named Eater’s Reporter of the Year in 2017 for his reporting on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry.
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