Hai Hai's Christina Nguyen on finding the confidence to bring her own twist to a Southeast Asian menu
MINNEAPOLIS -- When Christina Nguyen first toured the space that would one day become Hai Hai, she didn't know she wanted to open a Southeast Asian restaurant.
She'd gone to check out the location - the old Deuce Deuce night club in northeast Minneapolis - with the intention of opening a second spot for her already successful Venezuelan restaurant Hola Arepa. But after looking around, she turned to her husband and said "I don't think this is an Hola. I think this is maybe a Southeast Asian restaurant."
"It'd been in the back of my mind forever, but I didn't know it until I saw this space that I wanted to do it, like, right away," Nguyen recalled.
Five years later, the restaurant, which she describes as her "love letter to all things Southeast Asian," has garnered attention both locally and nationally. It's a nod to the food she ate as a child and inspired by the tastes she discovered while traveling through the region later in her life. And it's led to several nominations for the James Beard Award, most recently in the "Best Chef" category for Hai Hai in 2023.
Nguyen's parents both grew up in Saigon, and evacuated in 1975 when the city fell to the communists.
"It was very traumatic: pick up everything you can hold or bring and just leave," Nguyen said. "That's terrifying to think about having to leave your life behind without having any notice at all."
It was the sponsorship of locals that helped Nguyen's mother and her family come to Minnesota. She met Nguyen's father at the University of Minnesota, where they started a band together. Then she worked at 3M for a few years before leaving and starting a print shop on her own.
"I think that having my mom be so entrepreneurial and not afraid to strike out on her own has guided me to want to be an entrepreneur at least it like normalized that for me," Nguyen said. "[It] made me think that 'that's not that scary.'"
Growing up in Minnesota, Nguyen said her childhood wasn't "necessarily normal."
"I did go to a mostly white school, and I was one of the two Asian people other than my brother," she said. "It was a little 'othering' I suppose, when I think back at it. I definitely have that lunch box story that so many of us have. You know I am opening up my lunch and it's SPAM fried rice and it's cold. I just want to buy school lunch like everybody else so they're not going to think I'm a total weirdo."
The inspiration to become a chef came later in life for Nguyen. Her family was known to "cook up a storm" during large gatherings, but it wasn't until she started to travel - first on a three-month solo backpacking trip to Southeast Asia and then on a month-long trip to India - that she decided she wanted to recreate the dishes she was tasting.
Nguyen opened her food truck, Hola Arepa, in 2014. She'd tried arepas elsewhere in the United States and decided to bring them back to the Twin Cities.
"I think a lot of people were curious about my choice - like why as a Vietnamese person wouldn't you just open a Vietnamese food truck," she recalled. "There are so many Vietnamese restaurants and they serve such good food that I knew that it would just - I'd always be compared to those other restaurants."
Unlike many others in her field, Nguyen is a self-taught chef; it took years for her to take ownership over her own cooking.
"When we started with Hola Arepa, everybody just assumed that my husband Birk was the chef since he's like the white male," Nguyen recalled. "And I was like 'wait a minute, he's not a chef, but I'm not a chef either so who's the chef?' and I'm like 'I guess it's me because I'm making the recipes and I'm, you know, teaching people how to make it.'"
As the years passed and Hola Arepa gained popularity, Nguyen started cooking more Southeast Asian food at home. When she toured the old night club on University and 22nd avenues, she decided to commit to opening a Vietnamese eatery.
"I think that growing up Vietnamese American and not being the most Vietnamese person I'm like "'OK, do I have any authorship over like a Vietnamese menu at all?' I'm always cautious to say like this is just my experience as a Vietnamese American, it's not anybody else's," Nguyen said.
Now Hai Hai is a staple of northeast Minneapolis. And inside, it's packed with dozens - perhaps hundreds - of plants. It's known for its vibrant menu and bright cocktails, but the homage to Nguyen's past isn't just in the cooking; she says she still orders her menus from her mother's print shop.
Though her path to becoming a chef wasn't the most conventional, Nguyen stressed that it shows others that it doesn't have to be.
"You know, somehow I weaseled my way into the restaurant industry here and have made some successful restaurants," she said. "I needed to step up and start to take ownership over it, because I didn't want somebody else to."