For Diane Moua, her Minneapolis restaurant is about ‘two worlds clashing’

In an overflow room at the back of her restaurant, Diane Moua sits at a table beneath a huge golden frame, and sips an oat milk chai. Inside the frame, displayed dramatically against a black background, is her wedding dress: pleated crepe-like white fabric on one side and a rainbow of color on the other, a rolled up headscarf in the middle, and an elaborate neckpiece of metal chains set delicately on top like piped ropes of frosting on a cake.

Moua got married at 16, still a high schooler in Wisconsin. She was already raising young children as she finished up her studies and went to culinary school for pastry.

The dress holds more than memories of a marriage. (Moua divorced after 18 years.) It represents Hmong girlhood and womanhood, experiences that are baked into the intimate northeast Minneapolis restaurant as much as the butter in Moua’s award-winning pastries.

“This is a tribute back to the Hmong ladies,” said Moua, the owner and chef of Diane’s Place, one of the Minnesota Star Tribune’s 2024 Restaurants of the Year.

In some ways, both the dress and the restaurant are, for her, a coat of armor.

“Being first generation, we were built to be warriors,” she said on a recent morning, the cafe already buzzing with customers. “The fact that we had to learn how to be Americanized and then having to deal with our families — having to be a good daughter, waking up, cooking and cleaning. A lot of this food is what we’ve all learned to do in the kitchen. This restaurant is a tribute to all the females out there that worked so hard to make a stand for themselves.”

Moua’s work took her from home to restaurant and back home again, day after day. She spent two decades in pastry, but picked up savory shifts when she could to ensure she clocked enough hours to earn a living. For 12 years, she worked with Tim McKee, Minnesota’s first James Beard Award-winning chef, at Solera and La Belle Vie. She spent seven years with Gavin Kaysen at Spoon and Stable and Bellecour, and helped launch Bellecour Bakery (now Cooks | Bellecour). Even when she was off-duty, she was in the kitchen. “It’s like, ‘Where’s the rice, where’s the food?’” she recalled.

If it all sounds like too much, it was.

“Oh, I cried so many times. So many times,” she said. “It was like, get things done at home, rush to work, do a good job and leave. You’re trying to climb this world,” — the restaurant world — “and climb this world of being a mom and stuff.

“There were times I kept questioning myself: ‘Am I living two lives?’”

But the adrenaline rush of the professional kitchen kept her coming back for more. It took time, but her family got it, eventually.

“In the beginning, my parents were like, ‘So you’re doing cakes for a living?’ They didn’t understand it until I was nominated for the James Beard, and I took them [to the awards ceremony]. And they’re like, ‘This is a whole thing.’”

When COVID hit, Moua’s hours shrunk. Finally, she had some time to think about what she wanted from her career.

“I’ve always been surrounded by great chefs, and it’s like, I know how to make things,” she said. She thought back to the kitchen — not the ones in fancy restaurants, but the Hmong kitchen she was raised in. The place from which she nourished her family, communed with her elders, and learned how to make the dishes of her community.

“We don’t have a country, but there are certain dishes that are ours,” Moua said.

She is now making those dishes at Diane’s Place, which she opened this past spring as a breakfast and lunch cafe, and more recently added dinner, slowly revealing her capabilities to a city that knew her best through her exceptional pastries.

Hmong pulled pork is one of the dishes on the dinner menu that is most special to her. She’s eaten it in countless Hmong homes, but had never encountered it on a restaurant menu.

Customers who try it for the first time gain a peek into Hmong kitchens and are introduced, in a way, to the girls and women keeping them running. Others know the dish well, but here, they get to see it in an entirely new light, in the context of fine dining.

“All the ladies that come in, they’re like, ‘We’re so happy to be here,’ and I’m like, ‘Ladies, this is for all of us,’” Moua said. “You know, you can’t get that sisterhood anywhere else. Like, you go to a funeral and you don’t know anybody? Just go in the kitchen, and they’re like, ‘Hey, chop these onions, wash this, do this.’ That’s how you make friends.”

At Diane’s Place, where her children, now 24 and 19, work with her, we all get to become Moua’s friend for a delicious moment.

“All I’m doing,” she said, “is basically, my two worlds clashing.”

Diane’s Place, 117 14th Av. NE., Mpls., 612-489-8012, dianesplacemn.com. Open for brunch Thu.-Tue. 8 a.m.-2:30 p.m., for dinner Thu.-Sun. 5-10 p.m.