26-06-2025
What Is Great Hmong Food? These Twin City Chefs Have the Answer.
Yia Vang spent five years trying to open Vinai, his first full-service Hmong American restaurant. 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. Yang 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.
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