Hmong cuisine and culture are having a moment in the US. We spoke with the restaurateurs and farmers driving innovation.

• Many Hmong restaurants, farms, and nonprofits have recently opened, combining tradition and innovation.
• It marks a renaissance of sorts for the Hmong community, which has historically been insular.

Yia Vang never wanted to be a chef.

His siblings received postgraduate degrees, while Vang just scraped by in college. A part of him, though, wanted to preserve what his parents did for him by bringing his Hmong heritage to the world through food.

He recalled his father telling him: "I came to this country so you can be free, so you can work in a corner office in a nice, tall building signing people's checks for them and telling them what to do. I don't want you to work in a kitchen where it's hot and it's hard on your body."

But Vang wanted to pursue cooking anyway, and he discovered a way to make his parents proud, while sharing Hmong foodways with the US.

"I wake up every morning getting to work with food in the way that I want to and the way that I love, telling an incredible story, and somehow, by the grace of God, I still can make a little money and provide for myself doing that," Vang told Insider.

Vang, now a James Beard award finalist for Union Hmong Kitchen in Minneapolis, is launching a brick-and-mortar restaurant called Vinai. He also recently appeared on "Iron Chef" and was the first to serve Hmong food at the Minnesota State Fair.

Across the US, many Hmong business owners, chefs, and creatives have recently received national recognition for their work. Leading Hmong chefs are opening restaurants this year. Oakland, California, elected the first Hmong mayor of a major US city. Kao Kalia Yang wrote the libretto to the first main-stage Hmong opera in the US. And after the gymnast Sunisa Lee won silver at the 2020 Summer Olympics, "Hmong" was among the top Google searches.

For many in the community, these feats are grounded in decades of hardship and success. For others, these leading Hmong figures are continuing what the first Hmong Americans did to survive. Now a new generation of restaurateurs and farmers is trying to bring Hmong culture to the masses.

A savvy new generation of Hmong entrepreneurs

The Hmong people have struggled to spread beyond their native community, but a young generation is changing that.

Many older Hmong Americans immigrated to the US as refugees after the Vietnam War and the Laotian Civil War, Lee Pao Xiong, the director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University, St. Paul, said. The Pew Research Center found that in 2019, nearly one in five Hmong Americans lived in poverty, a few percentage points above the national average, and 46% had a high-school education or less.

Much is changing in the community to encourage Hmong entrepreneurship. Though for decades, Xiong said Hmong businesses struggled to market outside the Hmong community. Some businesses would label themselves as "Asian" or "Thai" to attract more customers.

Xiong said the younger generation has been influential in not only starting their own businesses but also helping older Hmong Americans enter larger state and national markets.

"These young people are politically savvy as far as marketing, and social media contributed to the visibility of our cuisines, our culture, and our history, which prompted interest by the majority community," Xiong said.

Many young Hmong entrepreneurs have been branching out into new industries, including tech startups, floral stores, and social-services nonprofits, said Peng Her, the CEO of the Hmong Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, which helps local Hmong residents with economic and professional development.

"These young business owners know how to create a business plan. They know how to market and attract non-Hmong customers, and so that's why they're getting into all these different industries," Her said. "They're not afraid to try new things, whether it's in fashion, in using traditional techniques and designs, incorporating in new styles."

Spreading Hmong cooking across the US

Some chefs have recently been able to pull in new demographics by explaining to diners that "this is what we eat at home; this is what my mom makes," Xiong said.

Vang has grown his brand through his belief that Hmong food is not one cuisine but a philosophy in which "we use our living world around us to create food, and then using that food to invite the world in."

His concept, featuring dishes such as Hmong sausage and fried fish with purple sticky rice, is nothing particularly new, he said. Hmong chefs for decades have opened restaurants and hustled in whatever jobs they can find after coming to Minnesota.

"All the things that the media is saying, like, 'Oh, my gosh, look at this new thing,' for us it's like, 'You guys are 10 years off. We've been doing that all the time,'" Vang said.

Some entrepreneurs, including Diane Moua, who worked as an executive pastry chef at numerous Twin Cities restaurants, have looked to preserve history and tradition while thinking about the next generation. Moua decided in fall to pursue opening her first restaurant, an Asian bistro incorporating Hmong foodways and ingredients from her parents' garden. Moua, who has hosted numerous pop-ups, said she pulls from the philosophy of her parents, who owned a farm and never took anything for granted; her father would eat apples to the core to not waste, she said.

An emphasis on fresh, Hmong-produced ingredients was a pull for Mai Vang, who moved to Siskiyou County in far-north California and opened one of the area's first Hmong-owned restaurants in late 2021. The county, she said, attracted thousands of Hmong Americans for agricultural opportunities, particularly marijuana farming.

She moved from New York and opened MaiYaj Asian Bistro in Montague with her partner, who sold Hmong sauces. The couple, whose restaurant is in a building that used to serve local ranchers, decided to call the eatery an "Asian bistro" to appeal to those unfamiliar with Hmong cuisine.

"We thought opening up a restaurant serving Hmong food would be a good way to connect with the people here because at that point when we first opened, there was a lot of controversy about who are Hmong people, why are they here, because these areas are a little bit more rural," she said.

La Vang-Herr also opened her Hmong business in an area with few Hmong residents. In 2017, she started La's food cart, alongside her artisan-products brand and farm, in Oregon after 18 years in nonprofit management. She opened her business after noticing an upscale restaurant use the name "Hmong" in a dish. She disagreed with the way the ingredients were used.

"If anybody's going to screw up Hmong food, it probably should be me," Vang-Herr said. "I wanted to make sure that I have a voice in that whatever it is, Hmong-related."

Mortchee's, a Hmong eatery in a former Wausau, Wisconsin, ice-cream stand, has also been a lifeline for the local Hmong community since opening earlier this year. About 90% of its catering business comes from Hmong families hosting events for the community's roughly 7,000 Hmong residents, Sa Sor Lee, the owner, said.

Some locals have supported the business without even intending to. A handful stumbled upon it expecting to get ice cream, instead leaving with Hmong sausage and papaya salad.

"There's a lot of people who know about the Hmong people, but there's still a lot of people out there that don't know us," Lee said. "Having small, growing businesses shows that we can do things like other people do and then keep improving ourselves."

Farming-industry influence

The Hmong community has a major influence on the agricultural landscape. More than 50% of growers at the Twin Cities' metro markets are Hmong, and Hmong farmers are responsible for a decent portion of the nation's strawberries and poultry.

The Hmong American Farmers Association has helped give farmers the space and opportunities to grow and sell their produce through its Food Hub, recently launching a community-supported agricultural model.

Such initiatives have helped some of the over 200 vendors at Hmongtown Marketplace in St. Paul, opened by Toua Xiong in 2004.

"We have never had to advertise one single time over the last 19 years to get a tenant: That's how strong we are," Xiong said. "We are 100% full, and we've had more and more people now asking for spaces."

Pheng Her, who owns the recently opened farm Guerrilla Pastures on the outskirts of the Twin Cities, agreed the future would be fruitful for Hmong farmers. He wanted to take Hmong agricultural traditions and apply them to regenerative farming, selling various beeswax products, which he said was unprecedented among Hmong farmers.

"We're in this unique spot right now where we're still very new to the country. We're still learning and adapting to Western culture, and so we still seek refuge and comfort in being around people that speak our language and look more like us," Her, who left his job in nonprofit management to pursue farming, said.

He still works overnight shifts as a mechanic, though he hopes to teach those in north Minneapolis, many of whom live in food deserts, about sustainable agricultural practices.

"The Hmong community is growing in population, we're slowly entering the middle class, we have more and more expendable income, and we want to support looking for more people of color or other Hmong businesses," he said.