Hai Hai Brings Southeast Asian Street Food to Minneapolis

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Portrait by Eliesa Johnson

Chef Christina Nguyen at Hai Hai

Chef Christina Nguyen 

Like every other realm in American life, the food world has been torn by culture wars lately. Is this young New York chef, not Mexican, allowed to lead such a successful Mexican restaurant empire? Does this young Portland chef, not Thai, serve worthwhile interpretations of modern Thai?

Even in a cozy armchair these judgments aren’t easily decided. Who is allowed to cook what? Do you need German blood to try your hand at a strudel? Or do you merely need German blood to sell strudel, or open a strudel mart? Will Danish blood suffice?

None of these hypotheticals could possibly be right. Yet, if our leading Mexican chefs don’t possess actual Mexican heritage, how can that be right? Worse, is this how we find what’s right? By feel?

Meanwhile, out of the armchairs and into the kitchen, the new restaurant Hai Hai, in Northeast Minneapolis, feels entirely right. The food feels right. Start with the chips-and-dips platter: two Thai dipping sauces, one a hot and bright green roast chili dip, the other a salty deep whomp of pork, both accompanied by billowing sails of rice chips. The turmeric-tinted Vietnamese crepes, filled with a smart vegetarian shiitake mushroom umami concoction or a sweet and mild shrimp and pork blend? Those feel as right as warming up after a cold walk outside.

The name feels right, hai being Vietnamese for “two.” The place replaced the strip club properly called the 22nd Avenue Station, but known as the Double Deuce. Hai Hai—ha ha! The turquoise walls and exposed lathe, the bamboo-cage lights, baskets of spider plants and palm trees, and the slam-packed bar: Those feel right, too. Improvisatory, loose, cool. It’s vaguely somewhere Starsky or Hutch might have brought a hot date in 1979, or vaguely something three weeks into the future.

Hai Hai represents the second restaurant from the Hola Arepa team, married chef Christina Nguyen and erstwhile bartender Birk Stefan Grudem. That Hola Arepa story is worth recapping briefly. It started in 2011 with a food truck, when legal food trucks were brand-new around here. The couple had been inspired by their travels through South America to do their own fusion version of Venezuelan arepas. Delight ensued! In 2014, they parked the truck and rented a real south Minneapolis brick-and-mortar restaurant, where they quickly developed a faithful crowd for dishes like a spicy pork served inside a creamy corn cake, alongside the best South American cocktails in town.

This latest hop from South America to Vietnam finds Nguyen stepping into her own history. Born in 1984, Nguyen grew up in Minnesota as part of the Vietnamese community that fled Saigon in 1975, eating water fern cakes in Minneapolis church basements, and going to St. Paul pho restaurants on the weekends. On the weekends in high school, she helped out at her mom’s printing business, which specialized in Vietnamese restaurant menus. Knowing the local Vietnamese restaurant scene so intimately, Nguyen suspects now, may have helped steer her toward opening a Venezuelan restaurant first.

“You don’t think it’s exotic or fascinating,” Nguyen says of her home cuisine. “You think there are 500 places that serve delicious banh mi or pho. What do I have to contribute?”

Then, as an adult, she started visiting Southeast Asia. “The first time I went I was 18 years old, backpacking,” Nguyen tells me. “My family was like, ‘Are you sure you want to go there? It’s not that cool. We left for a reason.’ But going was a really amazing experience. You grow up eating this food, and when you see it in its country of origin, you have this weird nostalgic feeling for a place you’ve never been. And it feels like home.”

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Photo by Eliesa Johnson

Hai Hai interior

Nguyen ended up going back several more times, once on a three-month journey with Grudem, with stops in Bali, Thailand, and Singapore, as well as Vietnam. The idea of Hai Hai sprung from these travels.

Every plate from the Hai Hai kitchen now shows a chef with an intimate understanding of Vietnamese food following flights of inspiration to create exhilarating combinations never seen in town before. Consider Hai Hai’s spring rolls. Made crispy with a stripe of crunchy egg roll skin, they’re packed with five herbs, shrimp, and sweet Vietnamese sausage, and come with an original warm and funky umami dipping sauce, in a world with few original spring roll sauces. Bright, fresh, funky, deep—these are really exciting, truly delicious spring rolls.

The banana blossom salad proves equally captivating. For this one, Nguyen pulls apart the giant blossoms full of baby bananas so that the springy, crunchy bract becomes the core of a salad full of big, bright pomelo chunks, a garden’s worth of herbs, pretty discs of bright pink watermelon radish, crunchy flourishes of pickled onion, and fried garlic and shallots. An intense but graceful nuoc cham sauce pulls together this vibrant and very contemporary salad.

Anyone eating out in Minneapolis the last five years knows that one of our signature ingredients in artisanal, chef-driven restaurants seems to have become the bright “beauty heart” or watermelon radish, and to see it leading this new life as a star in a banana blossom salad is somehow emotionally gratifying: It’s clearly a Minneapolis thing, a song we know, now sung by a new voice.

I adored Hai Hai’s water fern cakes, which don’t contain water ferns. “I think they call them that because it’s an Anglified way of saying it looks like a pretty lily pad,” guesses Nguyen. “It sounds nicer than saying ‘another steamed rice cake.’”

Far from another steamed rice cake, Hai Hai’s come topped with savory ground pork, sweet snips of mung bean paste, and shallots, croutons, little circles of Thai chili, shallot oil, scallion oil—and the ingredients keep going. Starting with the comforting base of the rice cake, each bite presents a journey of contrasting flavors—and then it’s gone.

“I grew up mainly eating those in church basements,” Nguyen tells me. “My relatives would load up a steamer with 30 at a time, and you just think it’s comfort food. When I was in Vietnam there was this street vendor and she was selling them in little dishes the way we have them at the restaurant, and it was amazing.”

The greatest joy of Hai Hai comes from seeing Nguyen engage in these personal ways with a cuisine the Twin Cities has been blessed to have in abundance. Nguyen says she and Grudem plan to change the menu seasonally, and bring in other dishes rarely seen around here, like Vietnamese snails, an updated brunch congee, and other takes on her favorites, including beef larb.

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Photo by Matt Lien

banana blossom salad at hai hai

I can’t wait. Hai Hai doesn’t merely show Nguyen stepping into her greater powers as a chef; it provides valuable facts on the ground in the culture wars. It seems to me that here we have a clear example of the work done from inside a culture, and that done from outside. Outside perspectives can be valuable, like the ones Nguyen arrived at while cooking Venezuelan food. At the same time, inside perspectives are necessarily more nuanced, and can lead to a more profound eloquence.

“It took me a lot of years to think I had something to offer to the Southeast Asian scene here,” Nguyen says. “I like traditional food of course; my grandma’s sugarcane shrimp are on the menu. But I remember when we opened Hola, I didn’t know if I had anything to contribute. Now it feels like I do.”