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Inside Diane’s Place, a Landmark New Restaurant for Hmong American Cuisine
At Diane Moua’s Minneapolis restaurant, the Beard-nominated pastry chef delves into the savory world
Pastry chef Diane Moua’s new Hmong American restaurant, Diane’s Place, is finally open in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s a big moment for a few reasons, the first being that Moua, who has spent decades at the apex of the Twin Cities’ pastry scene, is now leading all realms of the kitchen, serving bright papaya tamarind salads and slow-simmered noodle soups alongside her pastries. But it’s also a watershed for Minnesota, another restaurant cementing the Cities as the capital of Hmong American cuisine, home to coarse-ground Hmong sausage, pickled mustard greens, and sweet pork Danishes with salted-cured egg yolk.
Moua is no stranger to restaurant openings — she’s a veteran of La Belle Vie, Solera, Spoon and Stable, and Bellecour, where she became known for her dexterity, her speed, and her subtly sweet pastry style, earning two James Beard nominations for Outstanding Pastry Chef. Small echoes of her past appear at Diane’s Place: Spoon & Stable’s iconic honey and cream cake is rendered as a shot with Red Locks whiskey, and many of the cocktails have intricate pastry garnishes. (The “She-Eye,” she says, is a little inside joke for the Hmong girls who love their Sex on the Beaches — it comes with a whorl of white chocolate.) “There’s a little bit of my world in all the dishes,” Moua says.
But opening Diane’s place, Moua says, has been a whole different beast. “Usually when I’ve opened a restaurant, I’m like an eighth of the restaurant,” Moua says. “Now I’m the owner, the chef, the pastry chef. I had the team come in, and I was losing my shit because it was like ‘Chef, chef, chef, chef!’” To train her staff, she built a staggered schedule: lamination team at 5 a.m., pastry team at 10 a.m., savory team at 1 p.m. In the evening she’d do computer work. “I think back on it and it’s fun, but in the moment it’s very stressful.”
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