CLIP (NEWS ANCHOR): We begin our show with the biggest event our state holds, the fair, yet again. It's so big, every single day, it could be the state's third largest city, which to me, a non-native Minnesotan, is just banana pants. But I digress, Hmong people have been living in Minnesota for a half a century now, and yet out of all the food at the Minnesota State Fair, there's never been Hmong cuisine until now.

Dan Pashman: In the summer of 2022, a new food stall opened at the Minnesota State Fair featuring Hmong food. Hmong is spelled H-M-O-N-G. The H is silent. The Hmong people are an ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, and for reasons we'll get to, the largest concentration of Hmong people in America is in Minnesota. So when this Hmong food stall opened at the state fair, people took notice.

CLIP (NEWS ANCHOR): Business is booming. Since we've been out here, the line has been nonstop, stretching all the way back there.

Dan Pashman: The chef who opened that food stall was Yia Vang.

Yia Vang: One of the things that we were very proud of was our menu, half of it was in Hmong. And we were very intentional about it because one of the things that we loved was watching some of the older generation, Hmong people, coming by and looking at the menu and saying, "Oh, I can read that." They either were the ones teaching the white person standing next to them — goes, like, what's, kua txob? What does that mean?" Well, that's hot peppers. No, wait. Wait, what's purple sticky rice? What do you do with that? Well, you dip into the hot pepper with the meat. And now it's a role reversal, right? Now, we aren't the strange kids anymore. We're actually the experts and all our white brothers and sisters around us, you know, they're the ones coming in wondering: What's the secret?

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Now, it may not surprise you to hear that when I travel, one of my top priorities is figuring out where to eat. So when I was in Minneapolis for my book tour, one place that I kept hearing about that I knew I wanted to try was Union Hmong Kitchen. The chef and owner of Union Hmong Kitchen is Yia Vang, who you just heard from. He started his restaurant as a food trailer back in 2016, and since then he's done catering, he's run stands and sports arenas, he's opened in a food hall. He's also received major attention from places like Bon Appétit and the James Beard Foundation as one of the leading chefs cooking Hmong food in America. Then just last year, he opened his first brick and mortar restaurant, which is where we met up. The place feels like a local hangout and the customers seemed excited to be there.

[BACKGROUND TALKING] 

Yia Vang: Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. 

Dan Pashman: Union Hmong Kitchen is a fast casual restaurant where you order at the counter, then sit down to eat. The decor is industrial cool, concrete floors, high ceilings, exposed ducts. Before I met Yia, I'd never eaten Hmong food before, and I didn't know a whole lot about the Hmong people as I learned when we spoke, the Hmong played an important role for the U.S. in the Vietnam War. They were trained as soldiers by the CIA to support U.S. forces in North Vietnam. Yia's father signed up to become one of those soldiers, because the Hmong were promised that their service would get them to the U.S.

Yia Vang: There was a handshake deal that was made between the Hmong leaders and the U.S. government. Win, lose or draw, no matter what happens, your people can come to America. And the fall of Saigon in '75, the U.S. pulls out of the war and the Hmong people are left behind and there was this great genocide.

Dan Pashman: The U.S. largely abandoned the Hmong and left them surrounded by their enemies. Communist governments in Laos and Vietnam targeted the Hmong people. Their villages were destroyed and tens of thousands were killed. Many fled to Thailand, where they lived in refugee camps.

Yia Vang: The Hmong were stuck in limbo. So the Thai government's like, hey man, you're not our problem. But then it's like you couldn't go back to Laos because you were considered enemy of the state, because you fought for the U.S. In the U.S., they're still trying to figure out like, well, can we take on these people. Right?

Dan Pashman: Yia's parents met in one of those refugee camps in the late '70s and that's where Yia was born. His parents spent a total of 12 years in the camp. And during this time, Lutheran and Catholic church groups in Minnesota and Wisconsin started sponsoring Hmong families to come to the U.S. Yia's family emigrated to the Twin Cities in 1988, when he was four and a half. At first, they lived in East Saint Paul. It was an area with a lot of Hmong refugees and also a lot of poverty and gang violence. Eventually, his family moved to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a rural area populated mostly by Amish and Mennonite farmers, but where some other Hmong families had also moved. His parents felt a lot more comfortable in an agricultural community than a city.

Yia Vang: Growing up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was one of the greatest things ever.

Dan Pashman: Yia's parents partner with other members of the Hmong church in the area, and together they rented plots of farmland to grow vegetables. Yia says this was a cultural value instilled in Hmong people, you grow your own food. And in Lancaster they could do that.

Yia Vang: We felt so at home. Like, I grew up on my weekends going to the garden with my family. And when I say garden, I'm talking about like five or six acres, maybe 10 acres ...

Dan Pashman: Wow. 

Yia Vang: And we would go and we harvest all of that. It wasn't about going to the grocery store and getting chicken. It was — we would go to the Amish farmer and we buy 50 heads of chicken and then we slaughter it ourselves and you wrap it up yourselves. And, you know, by the time — I tell people, by the time I was 13 or 14, I was more comfortable holding a boning knife, breaking down sides of a, you know, pig and cow than I was holding a baseball and trying to throw a curveball. 

Dan Pashman: Right.

Yia Vang: Yeah.

Dan Pashman: What kinds of things were you growing on your land?

Yia Vang: So obviously, we have our Hmong mustard greens, which is like, such — like our cash crop, you know? And any kind of vegetables that was out there. I mean, everything — you know, because a lot of these seeds were kind of taken from the homeland and brought over. So anything from bitter melons to different kinds of eggplants, different kinds of beans and peppers and things that we could grow here.

Dan Pashman: And what were some of the Hmong dishes that you grew up eating?

Yia Vang: Yeah. So a lot of our food is based on pork, right? And but not just pork itself, but like, fat. Fat is, like, the ingredient. Growing up in the mountains of Laos, my parents didn't have some kind of, like, raspberry foam they can do with SI bottle, right?

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Yia Vang: So you literally had salt, and if you were one of the very, very lucky family, maybe a little fish sauce, and then you had the natural fat of, you know, the pig that you raised. And so what I really learned about Hmong food is the natural fat of the chicken and the pork is very important. It's a part of the flavoring of the dish. So, for example, one of the most common Hmong dish, and you go to any Hmong household, you talk to any Hmong kid from 0 to 100, they're going to tell you, braise Hmong mustard green with pork fat is one of the most top notch dishes — over some rice and a little bit of, like, Thai chili peppers.

Dan Pashman: Oh my God, it sounds so good. 

Yia Vang: You know? And it is quintessential. It is part of our soul. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Yia Vang: And every kid that grows up — you know that tastes, because they didn't have baby food or a baby formula, like, that's what you eat and it is indented inside of your soul.

Dan Pashman: While Yia grew up with Hmong food and culture at home, he was also assimilating into life in the U.S.

Yia Vang: My father, when we went to school, he said to us, "Learn how to speak their language, learn how to read their books, and learn their culture, because one day, son, you're going to be in it. And I want you to use everything to your advantage." So we would go to the library and we would get books out and he'd make sure they're — like his biggest thing was he didn't want any of his children to have an accent when we spoke. And he was so adamant about it. We would watch public television with him. I grew up, you know, watching like, all the PBS cooking shows. I grew up on Jacques Pepin. That's how I kind of got interested in cooking.

Dan Pashman: Yia's father also took a more direct role in Yia's culinary education. He taught you how to make traditional Hmong sausage with lemongrass, ginger fish sauce, and MSG. They didn't have a sausage stuffer, so they took a two liter Coke bottle and cut the top off and they use that as a funnel to fill the casing with meat. Looking back, Yia sees that these moments with his father were about a lot more than just cooking.

Yia Vang: My friends, my American friend, my white friends, their families and their — like their parents and their grandparents had land that they would will down from family to family. And when you have parents that are refugee that came here with nothing, there's no land my mom and dad can will down to their family. And then when I realized that it's like — it sounds so dumb, but his legacy is captivated in his sausage that he learned as a boy. And he watched his father and their father probably watched his father do it. When I learned how to do it, it was one of those things where I'm like, it's dad's legacy. You know, like, we don't mess with this.

Dan Pashman: The Hmong community in Lancaster County was small and tight knit. Yia refers to the other men in the group as his uncles, even though they aren't blood relatives. As a boy, he'd watched his father and these uncles work the grill at community gatherings, cooking up that Hmong sausage, pork chops, and other meats. Eventually, the men decided Yia had spent enough time watching.

Yia Vang: The moment they kind of hand you the little tong and they're like, "Hey, like, watch this area." You're like, "Oh, I trained my whole life for this.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Yia Vang: You know? This is like King Arthur. The sword is out of the stone.

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Yia Vang: And they hand it to you and you can't mess this up. And it was cool to walk into the house, and you smell like barbecue and grill. Just like the dudes, right?

Dan Pashman: While everyone in Yia's family took part in these special meals, Yia felt especially drawn to the tradition and ritual of it all.

Yia Vang: My siblings are incredibly smart. They're all have postgraduate degrees. They're super smart. I just never was a book kid. I'm a ambulatory learner. I need to touch it with my hand to learn. It made a lot of sense where my dad would put a whole hog on the — you know, on a table, and he'd show me. Okay, here are the tendons. This is where you cut it. This is how you do it. And I could do that as a 15, 16-year-old kid. But if you told me to, you know, read Moby Dick and write a book report about it and be like .... I don't know, some whales and guy hunting.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] I'd rather go make the sausage.

Yia Vang: Yeah, yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Right. 

Yia Vang: Absolutely.

Dan Pashman: Yia went to college at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse, and after graduating in 2010, he moved to the Twin Cities, where he hadn't lived since he was five. He found cooking jobs in corporate catering and food service companies. Then in the summer of 2014 ... 

Yia Vang: I ended up working for this really, really big church, right? And I was a church lunch lady. It's like a 4000-person church, and your job was to come in and open up the kitchen — which, by the way, this kitchen was like one of the most baller kitchen ever. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] And then you would come in and make sure that, like, all the hot dishes were warmed up.

Dan Pashman: I'm imagining a lot of casseroles.

Yia Vang: Oh, absolutely.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

Yia Vang: Bro, this church is like over 100-years-old. And, they had this big missions night where they were working with these are missionaries from Myanmar. And it was so funny because the missions director was like, "But we were thinking we were going to order from Olive Garden," and and it's like 250 people were going to order from Olive Garden, and "If you can help just coordinate that like ..." I was like, "Okay, cool. Or I have an idea. I'm kind of familiar with those flavors. Is it okay if I just try to do some of these dishes?" So I just like went all out. I took a whole catfish, stuffed it with aromatics like lemongrass, ginger, garlic, score it wrapped in and in baked it off in banana leaves. And again, this is a predominantly white church ... 

Dan Pashman: And you're making this catfish with lemongrass and wrapped in banana leaves ...

Yia Vang: Yeah yeah. Yup. And then it was like these curry dishes and everything. And I did this little sample for the missions director ... 

Dan Pashman: The church missions director was the only other Asian person at this church. He was a Taiwanese American named Ming Jin Tong. He tried some of the samples he had cooked.

Yia Vang: He ran down to the kitchen and goes, "You!" and he points to me, I'm like, "What? What's up?" And he's like, "Dude, did you do this?", and I'm like, yeah. He goes, "Because I've been waiting for you." [LAUGHS] And I'm like, what are you talking about?

[LAUGHING] 

Yia Vang: And he goes, "Do you understand how long I've been waiting for you?" I'm like, what? And he's like, "Let's be friends," And literally from then on, and that was like 12 years ago, like, we became, like, good friends until today.

Dan Pashman: Yia and Ming Jin Tong, who goes by Tong, started thinking about other ways to use food to foster community in the church, especially among young people. They heard about an idea that was already well known in restaurant circles — the pop-up. For Yia, this was a revelation. 

Yia Vang: And I was like, "What? Like, you can just like pop-up?"

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Right. 

Yia Vang: And then you're like, closed down?

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Right. Right.

Yia Vang: And then you send out emails and you pop-up again?

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] Right.

Yia Vang: Tong already had connections to the younger generation as the church's outreach pastor, and several of them offered up their backyards for food events. So once a month, Yia and Tong would go into a different backyard and pop-up.

Yia Vang: One night would be like a phở night. One night, it'd be like a fried chicken night. One night it would just be a, like, a steak night and it'd be like five bucks. You come in, it's just five bucks. And we would do that and it would just get all these people from the community coming together.

Dan Pashman: By the end of the summer of 2016, Yia knew he wanted to cook professionally in restaurants. To do that, he had to get more work in restaurants. He took jobs at high end places across Minneapolis, gaining more experience. But as he approached his 30th birthday, he began having a bit of an identity crisis. He didn't feel connected to the food he was cooking. He was working at restaurants that his family would never set foot in. By this point, Yia and Tong were good friends, and one night they were hanging out, talking about the future. They didn't know exactly what they wanted to do, but they coalesced around a mantra inspired by those church dinners.

Yia Vang: We just said, food plus people equals community. That's all we said. Food plus people equals community. And Union Hmong Kitchen was born on that table.

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Dan Pashman: Yia left his restaurant job and started Union Hmong Kitchen out of the back of his beat up Toyota Rav-4, with a small charcoal grill and a 10 x 10 pop-up tent cooking the foods he grew up with. From there, he moved on to a food trailer outside of a brewery in northeast Minneapolis. He started getting better known around town, and so did his food.

MUSIC

Yia Vang: You know, we get to introduce Hmong food, right? So what's the best way of introducing Hmong food? We always say, Hmong food is kind of like meats and threes, right? So you have your protein, you have your rice, you have your vegetable, and then you have your hot sauce. 

Dan Pashman: Hmong food share some ingredients and dishes in common with Vietnamese and Thai food, things like lemongrass chicken and blistered green beans. This made the menu feel more familiar to people. But Yia, also make sure that the food he served honored the history of the Hmong people, including his dad's own recipe for Hmong sausage.

Yia Vang: Dad's Hmong sausage — some people would say, "Oh well, that that spice level is way too high." Well, let me explain to you why we have that heat level on there. Because the Thai chili on there actually works as a way of preserving and fermenting the meat. You know why? There isn't refrigeration in the mountains of Laos, you know, in the huts. You had to use the heat from the chilies. And what it did was it helped cure the sausage. That's why. And do you know why we have the heat on there? Because you want to be able to eat it with the sticky rice. And that heat actually is mellowed out by the sticky rice. If something is way too, like, big and umami and it's like, oh man, this is so like rich for me — grab a little bit of sticky rice. That's why it's there for that.

Dan Pashman: And so the Hmong sausage that you're serving here is the same recipe that your father made and showed you how to make when you were a kid.

Yia Vang: Absolutely. Even to the like, the coarse grinding of it. You know, I think a lot of times that when people think of sausage, they think of Eastern European, while it's emulsified more like a, you know, like a hot dog or a bratwurst, while ours is more coarse. So you — and it has to be like that. It's a higher fat content. Right? Because the way that they roast it, the way they grill it, is it's slowly roasting in the grill. That's why teaching our cooks how to reverse engineer the way that they think when grilling a sausage, because you need that time, you need that low heat to actually render down that fat. Because the most important part of that Hmong sausage is that pork flavor. Because when you match that with the sweetness of the sticky rice and you hit that right into the kua txob or that hot sauce ... Bro, that is that ultimate flavor bomb in your mouth. 

Dan Pashman: Oh my god. I am starving. 

[LAUGHING] 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Coming up, I get served one of the most prodigious platters of food that I have ever laid eyes on. But first, Yia tells me about doubling down on his mission to focus on Hmong food after his father suffers a life threatening accident. Stick around.

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+++BREAK+++ 

 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, do a food dispute or you need some expert advice? Well, listen to this. For our next call-in show, we are bringing in some heavy hitters, very special experts — my family. Yes, that's right. Janie and the kids will be joining me to weigh in on your food fights and hot takes and to answer any questions you may have for them. So I want to hear your disputes, hot takes and questions. Send us a voice memo to hello@sporkful.com. Please do send a voice memo. A lot of you are emailing us and then we write and say, "Hey, can you send a voice memo?", and then we're not hearing back. So please, we need the voice memos. All right? Make sure you say your name, where you're from, and then tell us the issue. Send all those voice memos to us at hello@sporkful.com. Thanks. Can't wait to hear from you. 

Dan Pashman: All right, back to Union Hmong Kitchen in Minneapolis and my conversation with Yia Vang. There was a lot more that I wanted to talk about with Yia, but at this point, he'd been telling me so much about Hmong food, I needed a place my dinner order. I was starting to feel faint. So he paused our chat and I went up to the counter where the menu was on the billboard.

Yia Vang: So our meal was called the Zoo Siab Meal. Zoo Siab means happy. So there's another company that has happy, so ... 

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] 

Yia Vang: So we have our Zoo Siab Meal. So you start out your your main, you know, choose your protein, choose your side, and then it comes along with sticky rice and hot sauce.

Dan Pashman: There weren't so many options, but every single one of them sounded incredible. I was having trouble deciding. Yia saw me struggling and took charge the order.

Yia Vang: Can we just get kind of like a platter of the belly, the sausage, and the like and then, like, just do all the sides, right?

Person 1: All the side. 

Yia Vang: Do all the sides. A half order of the spare ribs. And then did you want a fish in there, too?

Dan Pashman: I mean, that sounds like a lot already ... 

Yia Vang: Yeah. Let's throw a fish on there .... 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHING] 

Yia Vang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool and get that all set up looking all real nice and sexy and beautiful, and then just bring it up to the back.

Dan Pashman: Amazing. All right. I'm excited. Thank you.

Yia Vang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Dan Pashman: All right. 

Yia Vang: And then let's get that on the fly ... 

Dan Pashman: Union Hmong Kitchen has been open for less than a year, but it kind of has the feeling of a long standing neighborhood spot. I saw three generation families eating alongside millennial groups of friends. But Yia's past from a food trailer outside a brewery to this was not a straight line. In 2017, a year after starting that trailer, he got some news that changed the course of his life and career.

Yia Vang: I remember my mom calling me hysterically because she doesn't speak English, so all she got was like a random phone call.

Dan Pashman: Someone from the church had called his mom to say that Yia's dad was in the hospital after slipping off a ladder at work. He had fractured his skull.

Yia Vang: My dad's my hero, right? Yeah, you could tell, my dad's my hero — toughest guy I know. I've never seen him hurt. Like, how do you fight a war, survive, come to America, and then you slip on a stupid ladder at work? Do know what I'm saying? And I remember going there to visit my father, and I was going in, the doctor said, "Hey dude, you go in, we want to make sure that he is — his brain's working. So you got to ask him if he remembers you." I go in, my dad's all groggy, he's all drugged up. He's got his head all wrapped up. I never see my dad at this weak state and I held his hand and I said, "Dad, do you know who I am?", He kind of opens his eyes and he can barely squeeze my hand. He goes, "I think you're my son," and that's all he said to me. And I remember leaving, driving back, it was like three hours because this Wisconsin, I'm living up in Minneapolis here — three hours and I'm in silence. And I thought to myself, "Hey, if dad dies in this hospital and this dark room in this hospital in central Wisconsin, nobody's going to know his story."

MUSIC

Yia Vang: And we could tell these great stories about him after, but I want him to hear how great of a man he is now.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Yia's father spent two months in the ICU. When he was discharged, he had to relearn how to walk and talk. It took him nearly a year to recover. Yia spent a lot of that time reevaluating his own work, asking himself how he could share the Hmong story and the story of his parents more widely. His initial idea wasn't Union Monk Kitchen, where we were talking. In 2020, Yia began planning a restaurant called Vinai. That's the name of the refugee camp where his parents met and where he was born. Union Hmong Kitchen is a fast casual place, where you order at a counter, but Vinai will be more of an experience.

Yia Vang: Well, we'll sit you down. We'll host you, and we'll make sure that when you come through and you have some of these dishes, we're going to have substance, we're going to have stories behind them.

Dan Pashman: Vinai will be filled with plants as a nod to Yia's mom and handcrafted woodworkings, because his father worked as a carpenter. And the middle of Vinai will be lined with cinderblocks because when Yia learned to grill as a kid, his father built their grill out of cinderblocks. And his parents are going to be involved in the restaurant. Shortly after his father recovered from his accident, Yia's parents moved back to Minneapolis to be closer to family. And just like they did in Pennsylvania, his parents teamed up with members of their new church to rent out plots of land to grow vegetables. The plan is for them to supply the produce for Vinai from their land. But Vinai has faced some setbacks. Yia and his business partner first announced the restaurant in February of 2020, a month before the whole country went into lockdown. That opening got pushed back twice and eventually they had to bail on that location. Yia got rejected by multiple banks and stopped taking a salary for four years. For a while, he was living in his brother's house to save on rent. In the meantime, he had opened Union Mount Kitchen and it seemed to be a success, but he continued to try to make Vinai a reality. So I asked him:

Dan Pashman: What's driving you to do it?

Yia Vang: To do Vinai? 

Dan Pashman: To do Vinai. With covid, like, I don't know that it would have been a failure to say, you know what — like covid did change so much in the restaurant industry.

Yia Vang: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: To say, you know what? It's not going to work out. But you have Union Hmong Kitchen. You can open another Union Hmong Kitchen. You can keep growing this. So why was it so important to you to start this other restaurant?

Yia Vang: Yeah. I don't think I've told the story to anybody. And I keep it in my heart. My father's is this war hero. I've learned these stories from — about my father, from my mother. My doesn't talk about it. I would go to places where when I mention my father's name, where I'm his son, men would look at me with respect. I remember one gentleman came up to me, elder gentleman, said, "You know, I'm in this country because your dad saved my life. You see that? That's my son. Those are my grandkids. They don't exist without your father. And the way he saved me." So my dad is his war hero, right? And he could have stayed in Thailand, live a great life. My grandmother, before — she passed away — told me that, "Your father had a great opportunity to be among some of those war leaders." And I didn't know this until a few years ago. My mom said — the night before we came to this country, he said to my mom, "I can't wait to go to a country where my sons and daughter can write their own destiny," like ... He chose us and he wouldn't quit. And he didn't quit. And after his accident, he still wanted to get back and work, and he just won't quit. 

Yia Vang: He always said, [SPEAKING HMONG]. I'm dumb. Don't be like me. But what I like to say to him is, I am you. I'm too dumb to know how to quit. Just like you, I'm not going to quit on this. Man, we have to frickin go out there and go talk to another bank and raise another 150,000. I'll do it. If I have to go out there and grovel to people and say, hey, we need this money because we can build something great here, I'll do it. Eating this food, there's just something different, right? Because there's a soul element to it. There's a story behind it. And we get to do that with Vinai on a grander level, where people can come and sit and come rest, get restored and eat food — food that mom and dad taught me how to make when I was a kid — food that growing up, most white kids made fun of us for having — food that most people will look at us and say, "Oh, that's like poor people food." But now, food writers from around the country write about it. Not because of Yia or the chefs here. No, because of mom and dad and their sacrifices. And this is why I freaking love doing this.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: Last September, Yia announced that Vinai had secured a location in northeast Minneapolis. The plan is now to open this summer. Also this summer, for the third straight year, Union Hmong Kitchen will have its stall at the Minnesota State Fair. Yia's old friend Tong is now the restaurant's director of State Fair operations.

Yia Vang: My buddies who live in L.A., they're like, "Oh yeah, we get county fairs," I'm like, no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, bro ... 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] It's not the Minnesota State Fair. 

Yia Vang: No, no, no. It's not the Minnesota State Fair. 

Dan Pashman: Yeah. 

Yia Vang: And to explain to them that in 12 days we have over a million people go through there. And out of those million, a bunch of them come through the stall. And for some of them, this the first time, even seeing the word Hmong. It's the first time ... 

Dan Pashman: Yia and I continue talking. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere.

Yia Vang: Oh, dude, you know what? This is what the kids did. They just put it on — yep. 

Dan Pashman: Ohhhh. 

Yia Vang: They just did it.

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Yia Vang: There you go, bro. They just did it.

Dan Pashman: At this moment, our server brought out the single largest platter of food I have ever had placed in front of me.

Yia Vang: We got a whole branzino with our, crab and shrimp paste sauce here. We got our sticky ribs, we got crispy pork, taro chips, Hmong sausage, and then our kua txob all over there, some pickles, ferments, limes ... 

Dan Pashman: Yia explains that the best strategy is to build your bites however you like. So choose your own adventure kind of meal. You combine meat or fish or veggie with some rice and a little ball in your hand, and then dip it into one of the condiments. The star condiment, for sure, was the green hot sauce. It was super savory, herbaceous, and a little thick like a paste, so when you dip rice into it, you can really pick it up with bits of herbs in it. And the hot sauce comes from peppers that Yia's mom grows in her plot of land nearby. I pick up a bit of rice and then ... 

Dan Pashman: Yeah, let's start with them. I mean, we got to start with dad's Hmong sausage here. 

Yia Vang: Yeah. So you can totally do it with that sauce there, the kua txob. 

Dan Pashman: Dip it in the hot sauce. 

Yia Vang: Yeah, 

Dan Pashman: All right, I'm going hot sauce. Oh, see, I'm too aggressive of a dipper. I lost my sticky rice in the dip.

Yia Vang: Ahh. See? Yeah, that's that's a rookie move. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Yia Vang: Yeah. Less is more. You know? 

Dan Pashman: All right, all right.

Yia Vang: And then you just go at it and just — yeah, it's like communion. 

Dan Pashman: Mm-hmm. 

Yia Vang: [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Mmm. 

Yia Vang: Yeah, right? So the fat of the pork ... 

Dan Pashman: Oh my God, it's so good.

Yia Vang: Yeah. 

Dan Pashman: Right. It's so meaty and porky. But that hot sauce is phenomenal.

Yia Vang: Oh, thank you. Yep. That's like a very common Hmong hot sauce. One of the first things I learned how to cook — mom taught us how to make that. Yeah.

Dan Pashman: All right.

Yia Vang: That makes sense? 

Dan Pashman: In any case, I'm taking my next bit of of sticky rice ... 

Yia Vang: Yup. 

Dan Pashman: And I'm going to go over this crispy pork belly with this crackly skin ... 

Yia Vang: Yeah. There you go.

Dan Pashman: And then I'm going to go to that chili crisp.

Yia Vang: That rice ... That rice, it's like the little sweetness of there it. And people are always like, "You know, how come you guys don't flavor your rice?" I'm like, that's not the point. The flavoring comes from everything else around it. You know, that's why it makes real sense when mom says Hmong food is about balance. Like, are you going to tell me that the sticky rice is more important than that fish? Absolutely not. Are you gonna tell me that that fish is more point that rice? No. They need each other. And that's how the world works. [BRING] — the more you know. 

Dan Pashman: I should be asking another question but I'm too busy eating. I may need more napkins. 

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Dan Pashman: That's Yia Vang. If you're in the Twin Cities or at the state fair this summer, make sure you stop by Union Hmong Kitchen. And if you want to keep tabs on when Vinai is opening, follow Yia on Instagram @YiaVang70. 

Dan Pashman: Next week on the show, I talk with the one and only Molly Baz. Molly developed a huge fan base hosting videos at the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen YouTube channel and has parlayed that stardom to create a whole food and lifestyle universe for her followers. We talk about how you build a personal brand while being true to yourself and she breaks down how she develops a recipe. That's next week. While you're waiting for that one, I hope you'll check out our last two episodes, which feature the very best moments from my 10-city book tour. It was great to see so many of you come out to these events, but I don't think anyone came out to all of them. So listen to this series. You'll feel like you're there. Both those episodes are up now. 

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