Once Dubbed ‘Cheap Food,’ Asian Cuisine Is Finally Getting the Accolades It Deserves
Chef Christina Nguyen began her restaurant career in 2011 when she and her husband Birk Grudem opened Hola Arepa, a food truck serving Venezuelan street food platters. Three years later, the couple opened their brick-and-mortar restaurant in south Minneapolis, and in 2018, added Southeast Asian restaurant Hai Hai to their resume.
Hai Hai marks Nguyen’s first foray into Asian cuisine. The daughter of immigrants who fled Saigon during the Vietnam War, Nguyen is a self-taught chef who grew up eating many of the dishes she shares with local diners today. There’s water fern cakes (Bánh bèo), steamed rice cakes topped with mung beans, shrimp threads, and fried shallots, served with nước chấm, a fish sauce-based dipping sauce. There’s Mì Quảng, a turmeric rice noodle soup topped with chili jam, herbs, banana blossom, peanuts, and sesame shrimp chips. And there’s the Vietnamese crepe (Bánh xèo), a childhood favorite of Nguyen’s that features a crispy base of rice flour with turmeric and coconut milk, stuffed with either pork belly and shrimp or shiitake mushrooms and spring pea puree.
These are just a few of the many dishes Nguyen has enjoyed at family parties, in Vietnamese Sunday school basements and on trips to her home country. But at Hai Hai, Nguyen doesn’t just serve Vietnamese food. Diners can also sample flavors from Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Laos. Nguyen describes Hai Hai as her “playground” where she invites Minnesotans to enjoy lesser-known regional dishes from Southeast Asia as well as the traditional dishes Nguyen loves.
Six years after opening her business, Nguyen was named “Best Chef Midwest” at the 2024 James Beard Awards in Chicago. In her acceptance speech, Nguyen thanked her parents, who she said “taught me that anything is possible, to not be afraid.” She also thanked the James Beard Foundation for recognizing “the value of immigrant food.”
“When we opened our restaurants, the most a Southeast Asian restaurant could hope for was to offer the best food at low prices. And I feel like we’ve come a long way,” Nguyen said. “So it’s an honor. Thank you.”
Asian cuisine has certainly evolved a lot. The history of these dishes in America varies from country to country, but they all have their roots in immigrant communities who came to the United States in hopes of finding prosperity.
Compared to many Asian dishes, Chinese cuisine has long been the most popular and well-known in the United States. Chinese cuisine was introduced to the United States after the First Opium War, when many Chinese laborers left an economically depleted China in hopes of making their fortunes amid the California Gold Rush. Widespread discrimination and limited job opportunities prompted many immigrants to open Chinese-style restaurants, which became a new source of income and community. In 1882, growing anti-Chinese sentiment swept through California, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. While the act restricted immigration to the United States, it still allowed Chinese business owners to obtain “merchant status,” which allowed them to sponsor relatives who immigrated from China. This eventually led to the opening of more Chinese restaurants, particularly on the West Coast.
As PA Food, a family-owned Asian food manufacturer, explains, Chinese restaurants initially catered to the Chinese community. Indeed, “the dominant culinary style of the time was derived from French/European fine dining, consisting of hearty dishes and using dairy products, as opposed to the Cantonese style served at the time.” Chinese cuisine grew in popularity throughout the 20th century, and many traditional dishes were modified to suit the American palate. For example, egg rolls, invented in the 1930s in New York, became an American version of the traditional spring roll. The same is true for General Tso’s chicken, a sweeter variation of a Huna chicken dish. In the late 1960s, changing attitudes toward Chinese cuisine and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act ushered in a new wave of Chinese immigration to the United States. In addition, the number of Chinese chefs nationwide has increased and new regional cooking styles have been introduced.
Much like Chinese cuisine, Japanese cuisine has seen a resurgence in popularity due to the “Americanization” of certain dishes. However, this was not the case with Korean cuisine, which was marketed only to the Korean community. Korean cuisine first came to the United States in the 1970s, following a wave of emigration from South Korea to the United States.
“Food was used as a way to nourish the community with something that reminded them of their homeland,” PA Food explains. “From the 1970s to the 2000s, Korean cuisine had flown under the radar because it remained resolutely traditional and outside the reach of mainstream American culinary culture.” That changed in the late 1990s when Korean-American fusion, embraced by chefs like Roi Choi, became a highly sought-after cuisine.
In recent years, Thai cuisine has become a part of American culinary culture thanks to Thai restaurateurs introducing new spices and cooking techniques. The same is true for Malaysian cuisine.
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Despite the proliferation of Asian restaurants in the United States, the cuisine itself was excluded from mainstream culinary awards for years. The first James Beard Awards were presented on May 6, 1991, and no Asian restaurants or chefs made the honoree list. Two years later, famed Japanese-American chef Roy Yamaguchi won the award for “Best Chef: Pacific Northwest” for his work at Roy’s. He was the only Asian chef on the honoree list that year.
The James Beard Foundation has been criticized for disproportionately honoring white chefs in the past. Last fall, the foundation said it would make significant changes to its awards process in an effort to “increase gender, racial and ethnic representation in the governance and outcomes of the awards,” according to a statement obtained by Food & Wine.
At this year’s awards ceremony, Nguyen was joined by several Asian chefs on the winners list, including chefs Masako Morishita of Perry’s, Atsuko Fujimoto of Norimoto Bakery, Lord Maynard Llera of Kuya Lord and Hajime Sato of Sozai, to name a few.
At Hai Hai, Nguyen said she wants diners to “feel happy, connected and good.”
“We try to make customers feel like they’re somewhere else, like they’re being transported,” she said. “I want people to be excited to learn more about the different foods and cultures that our menu represents.”
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