Meet the Women Behind Minneapolis’s Food Revolution

A feast at Chef Christina Nguyens Hai Hai
A feast at Chef Christina Nguyen’s Hai HaiPhoto: Matt Lien Photography / Courtesy of Hai Hai

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site.

Minneapolis might not be the first city that comes to mind for a food tour. An out-of-state visitor might imagine its cuisine to be dominated by Jell-O salad and hotdish, with spices ranging from salt to pepper. And then there’s that weather.

While it is cold much of the year, Minneapolis has become a destination in large part because of its food—food that reflects changing demographics in the state, which has seen its populations of color increase faster than anywhere else in the rest of the country since 2010. It also gets points for gender equality: Minneapolis was named the fourth-best city for women entrepreneurs in a 2017 study, and is both the second-best city in the nation for working women and for cities where women out-earn their male counterparts.

It’s no surprise, then, that three of the five finalists for the 2018 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest were from Minneapolis. It’s equally unsurprising that all three of them are women, that two of these chefs are children of immigrants or are immigrants themselves, and that one of them won the whole damn thing, though she herself will tell you that she was honestly shocked to hear her name called.

These are their stories.

Ann Kim, Young Joni

Chef Ann Kim of Young JoniPhoto: Eliesa Johnson / Courtesy of Young Joni

The Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley is bustling today, but four decades ago it was still sleepy. It was also largely homogenous; there was little diversity, neither cultural nor culinary. “If we wanted Korean food, we had to make it,” says Ann Kim, who moved to Apple Valley from South Korea at age four with her parents, grandmother, and sister in 1977.

Make it they did, fermenting their own soybeans for doenjang (soybean paste) and gojuchang, and foraging in state parks for plants Kim’s mother recognized from South Korea, which would be picked and preserved for the winter months. It was practical; creative. But to Kim, it was another thing entirely: embarrassing.

“Growing up in a pretty white community, all you want to do is assimilate,” she says. “You don't want to be different. You don't want to be eating foods that are funky and stinky, and so as a child, it was mortifying for me. But because of growing up with that, I am the chef that I am today.”

To be clear, Kim didn’t always want to be a chef. For college, she headed east to New York City, to Columbia University, where she began acting before eventually moving back to the Twin Cities. But after eight years as a professional actor, Kim was tiring of its unpredictability, and how little control she had over her career in contrast with directors—directors who were evaluating whether she was tall enough, Asian enough, not Asian enough.

In 2007, Kim’s then-boyfriend, Conrad Leifur, suggested she pursue her passion and open a restaurant. Kim had an idea that wouldn’t go away—to bring New York-style pizza to Minneapolis. She began studying baking, and went to San Francisco to apprentice for a week with Tony Gemignani, a 13-time world pizza champion. Then, in 2009, after maxing out their credit cards and investing their savings, Kim and Leifur opened Pizzeria Lola. Two years later came slice shop Hello Pizza.

Young JoniPhoto: Eliesa Johnson / Courtesy of Young Joni

In 2016, Leifur and Kim opened Young Joni in Northeast Minneapolis, named after family: Young, Kim’s mother's name, and Joni, Leifur's mother’s name. It was their most ambitious project yet, with dishes like Korean BBQ pizza, pork belly ssäm, chicory Caesar salad, and a church basement cookie and bar plate. Fittingly, it was this restaurant that won Kim the 2019 James Beard Award—something she says was not just recognition for her, but for her whole team, whom she regards as part of a cast.

“I always say that I gave up one stage for another,” she says. “And the restaurant business is like producing a show every single day. It's the dining room set, it's the lights dimmed, it's cooking stations lined, being ready to open the door for a dining audience. It doesn't matter if the dishwasher decides not to show—you improvise and figure it out. It's the same thing if an actor forgets a line. You make it happen. You tell the story.”

Jamie Malone, Grand Café

Chef Jamie Malone of Grand CaféPhoto: Isabel Subtil / Courtesy of Grand Café

Teenage rebellion looks a little different for everyone. For Jamie Malone, one of the ways it manifested was in theft: not of clothes or cars, but of a French cookbook, which she first encountered in a high school home economics class in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, and later took home. It was the first time she realized she wanted to get involved with food. “I became obsessed,” she says.

On weekends, Malone would ride her bike downtown to farmers markets. Along the way, she’d listen to The Splendid Table, and once she arrived, she’d challenge herself to buy something similar to what the hosts were talking about, and create from there. This continued, weekend after weekend.

After high school, Malone would follow something of a self-set pattern: work for a few months, save up money, and then take weeks off to travel the world. Eventually, she enrolled in culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu and received her degree. In 2006, she began working with Tim McKee at La Belle Vie, the pinnacle of fine dining in the Twin Cities until it closed in 2015. Five years later, Malone took the position of chef at Sea Change, a move that would gain her national attention: She was named one of Food & Wine’s “Best New Chefs” in 2013, and a semifinalist for the James Beard Award Foundation’s “Rising Star Chef” in 2013 and “Best Chef Midwest” for 2014.

Grand Café’s poached eggPhoto: Melissa Berg / Courtesy of Grand Café

In 2017, Malone moved on to revamp Grand Café, which had existed since 2003 as a solid neighborhood mainstay in South Minneapolis. (Malone even remembers coming here on a date and being charmed by the bistro, but wishing the food were better.) Malone’s version of the Grand Café quickly gained national attention, thanks to dishes like her twist on the Paris-Brest, made savory instead of sweet with black honey and chicken liver mousse. The interiors are transportive, with a 1951 Baker Boy oven from the building’s days as a bakery, and hand-painted palm-frond wallpaper from Paris. Taken together, the restaurant is a portrait of Malone: of dishes she likes to eat, curating emotions she likes to feel.

Years after she picked up that French cookbook, slightly unsure of how to break into the industry, Malone has a message for everyone who is feeling how she once felt.

“I wish people knew that if you just went to a kitchen and started working hard, you’re going to move forward,” she says. “No one’s going to pass up your hard work. It’s going to be recognized. You’re going to be taught, you’re going to be taken in. So just get in a good kitchen, and work as hard as you can.”

Christina Nguyen, Hai Hai

Chef Christina Nguyen of Hai HaiPhoto: Matt Lien Photography / Courtesy of Hai Hai

For many of us, Sundays represent the slow, sad slide into Monday. But for Christina Nguyen, growing up, Sundays meant something else entirely: steaming bowls of pho eaten after church at a hole-in-the-wall spot in St. Paul.

But bowl after bowl of pho couldn’t get Nguyen to Vietnam, the place she always wanted to go. Nguyen’s parents had fled the country separately in the 1970s, and later met at the University of Minnesota. Once ensconced in Minneapolis, they didn’t understand why their daughter would want to leave and travel to Vietnam on her own. Still, she went.

“I didn’t have family there, so I got to experience it on my own terms,” Nguyen says. “There was a lot of culture shock, but it was also very comfortable. Even though I was in a foreign place that I had never been to, there was nostalgia. I felt like I belonged there, in a way.”

Upon her return to the U.S., those feelings didn’t immediately translate to anything remotely related to Vietnam; instead, in 2011, Nguyen and her then-boyfriend Birk Grudem started their Hola Arepa food truck, centered around the arepa, the cornmeal-cake sandwiches native to South America. The operation was a hit, and went brick-and-mortar in 2015.

But things have a way of coming back to you, and in 2017, Nguyen and Grudem opened the Vietnamese-inspired Hai Hai, its name a play on the strip club it replaced, which was colloquially known as the Double Deuce (hai in Vietnamese means two). Hai Hai was almost immediately a success: Esquire named it one of the 20 Best New Restaurants in 2018, giving Nguyen the “Rising Star of the Year” award; traveling Eater critic Bill Addison declared it one of his best meals last year.

Hai HaiPhoto: Matt Lien Photography / Courtesy of Hai Hai

And though Vietnamese inspirations abound in the restaurant’s aesthetic and flavor, you won’t find any pho here: Nguyen intentionally filled the menu with ingredients many people might not recognize, like water fern cakes (banh beo) and banana blossom salad (goi bap chuoi). Nor does the menu stick within Vietnamese borders; instead, it plucks inspiration from across Southeast Asia, with dishes like Balinese chicken thigh (Indonesia) and pork ribs adobo (the Philippines).  

Hundreds of days since that first trip to Vietnam, Nguyen says she’s proudest of what she’s accomplished with Grudem, now her husband—that they built the restaurants from pretty much nothing, and developed something that’s wholly theirs. Her semifinalist status at the James Beard Awards was just a bonus.

“When I found out that Ann, Jamie, and I were all on the finalist list for Best Chef: Midwest, it was a really cool moment. I felt a little overcome,” says Nguyen. “I’m not an emotional person. But I got a little choked up. I feel like those lists every year are kind of the same people, and for three women from Minneapolis to be nominated just felt huge.”