In 2023, Diane Moua leaped from everything she professionally knew and was renowned in the food industry. Five James Beard semifinalist nominations and two finalist nominations for her pastries, but COVID changed the trajectory of her career, making her question, “Where do you go after you’ve worked at such a great restaurant like Spoon and Stable, Demi, and Bellecour? Where do you go?” She said during COVID, “I would just cook at home because I work so much that I miss comfort food. I didn’t see my parents a lot, so I cook[ed] a lot of my own food, and it just brings me so much joy.” These comfort foods from her parents were of Hmong heritage, so much of the food was “chicken with lemongrass and pork with mustard green,” according to Moua.
All of this culminated in the inception of her restaurant, Diane’s Place, a restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis open for breakfast and lunch, established in 2023. It is inspired by her Hmong parents living on a farm in Junction City, a village with a population of 415 people in the middle of central Wisconsin. Her early experiences of cooking was pressured by the short notice of guests arriving at her house and her dad saying, “‘You better find something,’… Opening the freezer, seeing what we have in the freezer, and putting something together. At that point, I knew I hated that. I hated having to figure out what to cook.”
Moua recalls being the first Asian family in Junction City and the racism that came with that, saying, “I had a really good friend when I was in elementary, and I remember the bus picked us up, and I got on the bus, and she said.. ‘what’d you have for dinner?’ I said, ‘chicken and rice?’ And she said, ‘Oh, did you have dogs and cat?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’At that point, I didn’t realize that was a thing… but it didn’t click to me because I’ve never heard that Asians eat dogs and cats.” Despite the blatant racism of her childhood, she continued on. Even when faced with racism in the food industry, she says, “I didn’t let it affect me. If anything, like my dad always taught us, just prove them wrong.”
Many Hmong people tell her that the community does not have a dish as the community exists in the diaspora, but to this, she retorts, “We have pork and mustard green, we have chicken and herbs, and it’s like that is our dish. That’s what I crave. That’s home. That’s comfort to me… It doesn’t have to be like you have to braise this chicken for three hours or five hours… It’s what you grew up eating.”
It is not just race struggles that she has had to persevere, but also her status as a single female as, in the community, some ask her about her husband’s support, and it shocks them when she tells them, “I did it all by myself.” She hopes to teach, “You can do this; it’s not a guy or girl thing; it’s being able to follow your dreams.” This restaurant has served as a self-reclamation, as “To me, this restaurant is going back to my roots. Not being embarrassed anymore of the food I eat.”
xThe food at Diane’s Place is a must-try for anyone and everyone able to move the three and a half miles from the Upper School to the restaurant. I ordered four dishes that Moua suggested: the Hmong Sausage, Chicken Noodle Soup, Spam and Nori Croissant, and the Sweet Pork Bowl. I started with the Sweet Pork Bowl. From the chewy but incredibly flavored pork belly and the brown sugar-marinated egg that hugged the tongue to the more bitter taste of the mustard greens, this dish was incredibly well-balanced in terms of flavor. Moua stated that when she was crafting this dish, “The sweet pork bowl was too sweet for me. So, I decided to pair it up with some pickled mustard green. And that cuts all the sweetness.” Many people, including me, would think that this move is one of a visionary, as it balances the dish to be absolutely delightful and diverse, but to her, she believes it’s simply “adding two components that you see at mom’s household, you know?” Simply put, this dish was the comfort food I had never known I was missing. It was by all means traditional, but nonetheless phenomenal as it set the tone for the meal being that of a childhood home.
After taking several enjoyable bites of the comforting Sweet Pork Bowl, I decided I must move on to the Spam and Nori Croissant. Moua grew up on WIC (a program like SNAP, but targeted at women and children), and as she describes, “We grew up eating it [spam] because my parents worked a lot. We would come home, and we would just throw it in the microwave or sear it off. And I hated it as a teenager because we grew up eating it. As an adult, I hated it. But I went to Hawaii maybe four or five years ago, and Hawaii has a ton of spam. Go gas station spam. You go to a restaurant, and they have spam.” After this experience in Hawaii, she describes, “I… fell in love with it again. So when we opened up, I was like… we should have spam on [the menu] because I grew up eating spam.” Her upbringing and Junction City added the spam to this dish, but what added the croissant? It was her continuous experiences and expertise in the pastry industry, where she is renowned for being one of the best pastry chefs in the nation.
As the Spectrum editorial staff can attest, her croissants are a delicacy and a work of magic. The croissant, spam, aioli, and an additional sunny-side-up egg combined for a truly unique, salty, juicy sandwich that I could not stop eating. After the meal was over and my stomach was stuffed, I kept sneaking bites of this sandwich because it was truly delectable. These conflicting senses of dining and background in the spam and croissant were able to work together harmoniously to bring a jubilant sensation to my mouth. This dish served as a microcosm of the uniqueness of her journey with pride and representation of both her childhood and how she has grown with pastries.
Once I tore myself away from the croissant, I set my sights on the Chicken Noodle Soup. This soup puts your mother’s chicken noodle soup to shame (including my own mother. Sorry, Mom). The rice noodles in the soup were absolutely fantastic and lent a gelatinous texture to the soup. The soft-boiled egg was an incredible touch, adding richness and depth to the dish. But, standing as the co-leads to this play were the chicken and the broth. The chicken was another level of juicy and tender. The broth was soft-spoken yet articulate as it whispered its delightful taste to me. It was not the complexities of taste that made this dish incredible, but rather the comfort and warm happiness that it brought me. When I am sick in the future, I no longer want any chicken noodle soup other than the soup from Diane’s Place.
Finally, the Hmong sausage. The sausage itself was stellar, and it was clearly discernible that she had put much time and effort into crafting the sausage. But, lurking off to the side was the most interesting part of this dish in a hot sauce. She was initially told to take the hot sauce off the menu as some of the customers were unable to tolerate the spice, but she decided instead to stick to the roots of her food, saying, “I’m not gonna dumb something down because you can’t have it. You go to any Hmong house right now, you go have dinner, they’re gonna have this hot sauce. This hot sauce for everything.” As she detailed, a compromise that she was willing to make was that she would “make a sauce that’s not spicy for people who can’t have spicy sauce because I know that everybody tolerates it differently. But I’m not gonna lower something down because of somebody’s tolerance. And you know what’s so funny? We give people the choice of sweet and sour or hot sauce. We go through more hot sauce than sweet and sour. Makes me really happy.” Both of the sauces were there on my plate, and both of them were excellent additions to the dish, but the hot sauce served as a symbol of culture that is uncompromisable. When I mistakenly added too much of the hot sauce to one bite, it did indeed make me feel like the roof of my mouth was on fire, but when used appropriately, it added great flavor to the dish. The hot sauce, in coordination with the sausage, sticky rice, and fried egg, culminated in this delicious mix of traditional and proud foods.
Overall, Diane’s Place is the best Hmong restaurant that I have been to in the Twin Cities. It intricately ties together both her Hmong upbringing in Central Wisconsin and her pastry chef skills to create some incredibly unique and traditional delicious dishes that I implore you to try. This restaurant has clearly accomplished Moua’s goal of “Not being embarrassed anymore of the food I eat” and additionally has gone beyond creating fantastic and inspiring foods.
