Chef Christina Nguyen kickstarted her restaurant career in 2011 when she and her husband Birk Grudem opened Hola Arepa, a food truck serving platters of Venezuelan street food. Three years later, the pair opened its brick-and-mortar location in South Minneapolis and, in 2018, added Southeast Asian restaurant Hai Hai to their résumé.
Hai Hai marks Nguyen’s first foray into Asian cuisine. The daughter of immigrants who fled Saigon during the Vietnam War, Nguyen is a self-taught chef who grew up eating many of the dishes she now shares with local patrons. There are water fern cakes (Bánh bèo), steamed rice cakes topped with mung bean, shrimp floss and fried shallots that are served alongside nước chấm, a dipping sauce made with fish sauce. There’s Mì Quảng, a turmeric rice noodle soup embellished with chili jam, herbs, banana blossom, peanuts and sesame-shrimp crisps. And there’s Vietnamese crepe (Bánh xèo), a childhood favorite of Nguyen’s that features a crispy turmeric and coconut milk rice flour base stuffed with either pork belly & shrimp or Shiitake mushrooms & spring pea puree.
