Yia Vang and Diane Moua have created a moment in the Twin Cities for the emergence of a cuisine virtually unknown outside its ...

Yia Vang: I think if you look at all these Pan-Asian restaurants, a lot of them were Hmong-owned, but they had to do the Chinese or the Thai or the Vietnamese.Because if you said Hmong food ...

Hmong food is finally getting the attention it deserves. From family kitchens to food fairs in Minneapolis, discover how a ...

Yia Vang, Hmong Chef: So this is the rice and here's our big rice steamer, that is hot. To be completely honest, I never wanted to do this. I tried my hardest to get out of it.

Cheng: At Vinai, chef Yia Vang rewrites the Hmong American playbook. The Minneapolis restaurant is a window to the chef’s past as it charts the cuisine’s future. By Jon Cheng.

When chef Yia Vang was a kid, anytime his large family gathered for the holidays, his extended relatives went to work making the most labour-intensive Hmong dishes. That usually meant the girls ...

Yia Vang: The storyteller of Hmong food. Vang’s cooking is a “love letter” to his parents, a heartfelt expression of gratitude for their sacrifices, he told me.

Yia Vang. TV personality, and highly decorated chef Yia Vang is the owner/chef of the James Beard-nominated restaurant Union Hmong Kitchen in Minneapolis.

Yia Vang: Hmong people were part of the conflict in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War in northern Laos. Our people were hired out as paramilitary troops for the U.S. government.

There was a line of maybe 100 people waiting to order at the Union Hmong Kitchen when I got there, and it was only about 10:30 a.m. It was no surprise that Union Hmong Kitchen was so popular.

For chef Yia Vang, live-fire cooking isn’t a trend. “This is actually a part of who I am,” he says. “This is how our people cooked hundreds of years ago.

Chef Yia Vang runs Union Hmong Kitchen in Graze Provisions + Libations food hall in Minneapolis. Vang’s goal is to make Hmong food more approachable for American diners while also paying homage ...