A TASTE FOR THE MOUNTAINS

What is great Hmong food? These chefs have the answer

- BRETT ANDERSON

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 that turned him down for loans — were nothing compared with 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 Yia 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," Vang said in 2022, after 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.

Moua and Vang are part of a generation of Hmong-Americans — prominently including 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 United States.