When clients gave us a gift certificate to Hai Hai I knew we had to wait until they were open for in person dining to experience this award-winning Southeast Asian street food restaurant & bar in Northeast Minneapolis. I knew it was going to be good and deserved a special occasion.
It was on Best New Restaurants lists for Esquire, Eater and Thrillist when it opened in 2018… and their chef was a James Beard Finalist for Best Chef Midwest in 2019 and 2020. Thrillist described it like this…
The quickest way to experience the best that Southeast Asia has to offer is to buy a plane ticket to the Twin Cities and head straight to Hai Hai. There, chefs Christina Nguyen and Birk Grudem have transformed a dilapidated strip club into a high-energy experience for both the eyes and the tongue.
Esquire praised chef Christina Nguyen not for her epicurean pedigree, but for her blend of raw talent and life experience growing up in the Twin Cities Vietnamese community that relocated to the Twin Cities in the 1970s… sharing food at social gatherings, in church basements, and in the Vietnamese restaurant scene.
But don’t come expecting just standards like pho and pad thai. At Hai Hai you will find lesser known regional dishes as well as new dishes created using a Southeast Asian palate. Esquire’s reviewer said “Nguyen’s menu reads like a street-smitten ode to Southeast Asia, a pop song that can brighten up even the murkiest of days in L’Étoile du Nord.”
When friends we hadn’t seen since before Covid disrupted life as we knew it came to town and invited us to join them for Northrup King Nights we invited them to join us at Hai Hai… it was a perfect ‘breakout’ evening!
You will find dishes on the Hai Hai menu you won’t find anywhere else… like her water fern cakes in the middle photo above and described below in an Esquire review. The dish on the right is her “showstopping Balinese chicken thigh under a roof of crispy skin and on a bed of coconut-creamed jasmine rice”.
I still dream of the stacks of water fern cakes, or bánh bèo, a satisfyingly chewy Vietnamese dish made from steaming rice and tapioca flour in small bowls. They arrived topped with a mountainous flourish of mung beans and fried shallots for crunch and nuoc cham for an acidic punch. Nguyen says customers often refer to it as an “open-faced dumpling.” Like regular dumplings, they are equally as addictive.
I am so glad our friend did her research and fern cakes were top on her list to try… they were fabulous! Many thanks to Sacha and John for introducing us to this exceptional restaurant!
Sharlene Hensrud, RE/MAX Results – shensrud@homesmsp.com
